Some Democrats and Socialists are desperate to disparage President Donald Trump -- so they will denigrate the United States, just to disparage the president. Listen to what Andrew Cuomo said during his Democratic campaign rally: https://ytcropper.com/cropped/bJ5b75cd4d3406e
America is a great country. Different people may have perspective on what is great. Meagain, this is a trick question. What time period are you referring to, as America the Great? This is not a trick question, is Great Britain a greater country than America?
Phdtobe, the United States has many milestones to choose from: 1776 - Independence Day, the birth of the nation. 1788 - The Constitution was ratified and governance under it began a year later. 1791 - First four amendments were ratified, with more to come in the unfolding history of the U.S. (such as the 13th Amendment in 1865). 1973 - Row v. Wade authorized legalized feticide, resulting in over 45 million American deaths (American feticide is politically and legally modeled after the legalized Nazi death camps from 1940-1945). 2017 - Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the president of the U.S. Phdtobe, which milestone are you referring to? Your trick question will be answered if you answer this question: Do you love your child any less when he makes a mistake and you are forced to correct his error? When the U.S. fought against England, it was ruled by a tyrannical king who established oppressive sanctions against the English colonists in the American colonies. At that time, England was greater economically and militarily, but the distance between England and North America allowed the American revolt to succeed. To be fair, Great Britain was founded in 1922 and its governance was changed to be more representative. To narrow down your question, are you discussing greatness in terms of: GDP (economics)? Governance (form of government)? Morality? Spiritually? (England has it's own state sanctioned denomination) All of the above and more in a qualitative analysis? Phdtobe, can you please narrow the scope of your question?
I guess you see how difficult it is to provide a coherent answer to America the Great. I may have have different reasons why I think America is great, and how Great Britain is as equally great.
Andrew Cuomo is directly contradicting his own father, the late Mario Cuomo. Mario was a democratic party stalwart back in the day, a lion of the welfare state, but still patriotic for all that. Mario would speak repeatedly of what a great country America was, arguing that his proposed policies would make it even greater. Again, this is precisely the kind of blunder that works in the Republicans' favor, the kind of free advertising that couldn't be purchased by a deep-pockets PAC at any price. Besides Andrew, Mario's other son is Chris Cuomo of CNN. Andrew's remark (which I'd wager he would love to take back) suggests that he may have drunk a little too deeply from the spirit of the 1960's, in which (driven in some large part by Marxism) being anti-American became a virtue. America stood for capitalism, racism and imperialism, and the wonderful Kingdom promised by "progress" couldn't come to be until America got out of the way, until it either disappeared or was was transformed into something it had never been, until all of its historic crimes were erased and atoned for.
It is not un-patriotic to criticize American policies, the economy, hell, even our society. It is not un-patriotic to say we aren't the best. Nor is it un-patriotic to say that America, while pretty good in many ways, isn't really "great." It's a perfectly valid criticism. And in other countries, it's perfectly fine to say "Yeah, this is where our country is falling short." in the U.S., however, people throw a shit fit if you even imply that America is anything less than perfect or that it warrants any sort of structural change. What are we the greatest at, exactly? Literacy? Not really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate While not reported in the above chart, our rate is somewhere around 80-90%. Croatia, Italy and North Korea all beat us on literacy. But we must be amazing on infant mortality, right? All that capitalism gives us the best healthcare in the world, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates Well, we beat out Chile, Turkey and Mexico, I guess that's something. How about math? Are we kicking ass on math? https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html Nope. We're great in two areas, primarily, GDP and military strength. Hey, that's good for what it is. But when we do the "rah-rah! America!" stuff we ignore the areas for improvement. Want to make America "great" like it was in the post-WW2 era? Well, for starters, we'd need to institute some living wages, reduce our healthcare costs (likely by curbing health insurance) and focus on building and repairing infrastructure. Military parades, trade wars and angry tweets don't do anything. It's emotional masturbation.
Even in the late 18th century, European intellectuals recognized the importance of the American revolution. The American Constitution has been the model for subsequent constitutions in many other nations. American ideals of liberty have been adopted (at least in name if not substance) by much of the planet. Compare it with the French revolution, which led to the Terror, to the rise of Napoleon and to what probably should be called the First World War, since the British and the French were engaged around the globe. The US is still on its first Constitution and its First Republic. During the 19th century the US assumed kind of a low profile on the world stage as it struggled with the blight of slavery, filled itself with new factories, railroads and cities, and tamed and settled a country of continental dimensions. In the 20th century the US became the world's foremost industrial power, its foremost military power (those two are closely linked) and its foremost intellectual and cultural power. In the second half of the 20th century people began looking to the United States in much the way that they had once looked to Europe, not only for geopolitical leadership, but for leadership in science, the arts and the rest of intellectual life as well. Today there's a widespread sense that leadership is fading, as the US deindustrializes, as it turns away from its own legacy of classical liberalism towards intellectual totalitarianism and divisive identity politics. No. It's approximated America's love of liberty, but with its monarch, its established churches, its aristocracies (both hereditary and Oxbridge) and its fondness for socialism, never quite to the same degree. The UK was the world's greatest military and industrial power throughout the 19th century. Even when I was a child, everybody considered ideas that came out of London as important. The BBC had worldwide authority. The view then was that while the US and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, the UK was clearly #3, a superpower temporarily a bit down on its luck. The map was still covered with the British pink and we all expected that Britain would be back. But today? It's no longer a geopolitical player. It's no longer an industrial power. Nobody looks to Britain for leadership in anything. The coolest things it has left are Oxford and Cambridge, but that's mostly because of their history and their beautiful buildings. Britain's grown kind of... irrelevant. It reminds me of what Austria was in the old Hapsburg days, and what it is now.
What truly makes America great is Americans (to be clear - immigrants are American). One of the best things about Americans is courage to question and improve their country.
As we can see, great is more complex than the love of country, or the best country in the world to live. Almost everyone loves his her country, even when they are exiled, or refugees. There are now some objective measures on best country to live. Great is a difficult one. Does Italy lose it greatness, it once the ruled the known world? We are conversing in English, no love for my colonial master, but they put their stamp on current civilization. The American Dream that is a great concept -real or not - the circumstances of your birth does not necessarily have to determine your destiny.
“Beware the tendency to identify too strongly with groups of people with whom you have only tenuous associations. Do not make an idol of your nation, your culture, your race, or your extended family. None of these are virtuous through-and-through or sufficiently pure to warrant worship.” William Ferraiolo, pg. 24,Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness. I think it was Seneca who made fun of the person who bragged about his fine looking horse. Paraphrasing Seneca, it is the horse that is beautiful you ugly twit.
Of course. I don't think that anyone ever suggested that it wasn't. I'm sure that many citizens of tiny Lichtenstein love their little country and can justify doing so. But their love for their country doesn't make it one of the world's great nations. It certainly seems to have lost its greatness when the focus of the Roman empire moved to the Greek speaking east and when the western Roman empire collapsed. That collapse had world-historical consequences that we still call the "dark ages". It reshaped the entire course of history. And Italy enjoyed a different kind of greatness at the end of the high medieval period and in the renaissance, when its ascendant city states like Florence were the artistic and intellectual leaders of all of western Eurasia. That greatness faded after the voyages of discovery when the focus turned from the Mediterranean (increasingly commanded by the Turks) to the Atlantic, as patterns of trade, wealth and patronage shifted to ascending countries like Portugal and Spain, followed by France, England and the Netherlands. Greatness isn't just military strength, it isn't just economic wealth. It's leadership in areas that matter to all of humanity. It's the ability to shape the future. So who do we want doing that? The United States? If so, then the US needs to remain great. Europe? If so, then Europe needs to find some way of regaining its past greatness. Russia? Russia doesn't have the economy, power or intellectual productivity to shape the world in its image. Or China? (And its all-powerful Party?) The Chinese leadership certainly believe that they embody the Future. But is that really a future that the rest of us want?
Heirophant's answer is a big dose of reality. Greatness is sovereign leadership, which is the ability to favorably influence others. The United States has played that global leadership role since WWI.
I pull this off of CNN instead of using Wiki. CNN is still in my bad book. Military cauualties in WW2 Other Military Casualties by Country 1939-1945 (selected): Australia: 23,365 dead; 39,803 wounded Austria: 380,000 dead; 350,117 wounded Belgium: 7,760 dead; 14,500 wounded Bulgaria: 10,000 dead; 21,878 wounded Canada: 37,476 dead; 53,174 wounded China: 2,200,000 dead; 1,762,000 wounded France: 210,671 dead; 390,000 wounded Germany: 3,500,000 dead; 7,250,000 wounded Great Britain: 329,208 dead; 348,403 wounded Hungary: 140,000 dead; 89,313 wounded Italy: 77,494 dead; 120,000 wounded Japan: 1,219,000 dead; 295,247 wounded Poland: 320,000 dead; 530,000 wounded Romania: 300,000 dead; wounded unknown Soviet Union: 7,500,000 dead; 5,000,000 wounded United States: 405,399 dead; 670,846 wounded
You are also forgetting two great institutions after WW2, NATO, and the UN. The UN has lost its way, but whose fault is this?
Kofi Annan, maybe best known UN head, just passed on. https://ca.yahoo.com/news/former-un-secretary-general-kofi-annan-dies-age-095624813.html
NATO is basically another name for the United States. In 2017, the U.S. accounted for 51.1 percent of NATO's combined GDP and 71.7 percent of its combined defense expenditure. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/03/nato-spending-2017.html The EU acts like it's some grand 'fuck you' to the United States (and to Trump) when they talk about an EU military command. (NATO with the US excluded! That will show that horrible Trump! Spit in his eye, we will!) Of course, Trump is the one who wants Europe to get off its collective butt and start being great again. But it's hard to see how an EU command could ever amount to anything unless the Europeans put more effort into their own defense: "Germany's military is virtually undeployable and security experts say it is too weak to meet its obligations to its allies, as it prepares to assume command of NATO's crisis response force next year... Among the failures: none of Germany's submarines is operational, only four of its 128 Eurofighter jets are combat-ready and the army is short dozens of tanks and armored vehicles needed for NATO missions... In early 2019, Germany is slated to lead NATO's Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, a 5,000-strong unit designed to deploy within days to potential hotspots in Eastern Europe. German defense ministry documents, obtained by the German Die Welt newspaper, revealed that the brigade slated to deploy on the NATO mission only has nine of the 44 Leopard 2 tanks and three of the 14 Marder armored personnel carriers that are required." https://www.stripes.com/news/as-germany-prepares-for-nato-crisis-response-role-its-military-readiness-is-abysmal-1.527253 The Germans, the economic engine of the EU, can get away with this kind of irresponsible behavior because they feel like they don't face any credible conventional external military threat. Russia is the only country that might arguably fit the specification (it's a shadow of what it was in the Soviet/Warsaw Pact days), but to get to Germany it would have to go through Poland, which would draw in the United States who would effectively be fighting to protect Germany as well as Poland. So Germany can sit back in the confidence that if shit hits the fan, the Americans will always be there. So they can divert much of their government funding to their welfare state. Trump's tried to shake up that complacency, reminding people that NATO is a mutual defense alliance and that the US won't feel obligated to meet its treaty commitments if its "allies" don't meet theirs. But that just generates anguished wailing in the press about how he's destroying the "postwar order" or something. (Whatever that phrase means... the Cold War that necessitated the old order was over 28 years ago.) Maybe it's time for the US to deemphasize NATO, telling Europe that they need to take the lead in their own defense, while the US turns its attentions to the Pacific and to the inexorable rise of China. Tell Europe that we will provide some assistance if they need it, but we won't take up a load that they should be bearing for themselves. Collectively, the EU has a GDP as large as the US. They have high technology and advanced industry. It's not like they can't do it. It's more that they won't.
What is it that makes America great? Military might? Soviet Union has that. Or the strength of its principles? Then maybe it's time to rethink electing a leader who tells a lie once in approximately 4 minutes.
