Why does the United States have so few internal faultlines?

Awakening eras, crisis eras, crisis wars, generational financial crashes, as applied to historical and current events
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jmm1184
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Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2010 11:02 pm

Why does the United States have so few internal faultlines?

Post by jmm1184 »

Something I have been reflecting on is exactly why the United States has been so successful and relatively stable throughout its history compared to most other nations, tribes, and empires. I found that much of it has to do with unique circumstances regarding its crisis wars, which account for the surprisingly few number of internal faultlines.

To clarify, the United States today has no generational fault lines that will lead to a crisis war within the nation, except PERHAPS the latino-white faultine in the southwest United States, and that would only be due to spillover from a Mexican crisis war.

Reasons for no faultlines within the United States
1. WWII - the most recent crisis war mobilized every citizen, no matter their previous nationality if they were immigrants, and no matter their race, to join together to defeat Japan and Germany. The victory in the war gave the United States an enormous amount of confidence and pride in itself and its abilities to defeat any potential enemies. While the Vietnam War wielded a major blow to this confidence, the continuing legacy of WWII is a shared American identity that is based not around your religion or ethnicity, but around allegiance to the shared ideals and culture of the United States. Even though American culture has fragmented since WWII, as is expected during an unraveling era, national tragedies such as 9/11 remind us that when the going gets tough, Americans will put aside their differences and unite in the face of a common enemy. Moreover, while there are significant regional differences in culture, all Americans still tune into a national media culture largely based in California and New York, and this also acts as a unifying and homogenizing factor.

2. Immigration and public education - during the turn of the century, millions of foreign immigrants entered the United States and became citizens. Such a large, peaceful migration of people into a country is very rare, and it could have led to ethnic enclaves carving out territories within American and fragmenting it. But instead, while immigrants were never forced to completely leave their old culture behind, during the turn of the century it was expected that they and especially their children would give their primary allegiance to American ideals, and the public school systems in American cities such as New York were a place were children of various nationalities were given the same education and taught the same American ideals. This then produced what is called the "greatest generation" that fought WWII, and by 1941 most ethnic tensions, such as against Italians, the Irish, and others, were increasingly seen as bigoted - replaced by an understanding that "we are all Americans."

3. The American Civil War - This war squashed forever any future possibilities of the individual states forming confederations and breaking away from the Union, and the result was a much more unified and centralized nation, thought at enormous cost. The South's ability to wage war as well as its economic power was completely dismantled, so that it would never be able resist the north again. Moreover, the western frontier acted as a safety valve for discontented southerners as well as northerners to make a new life in the West instead of causing trouble back home. Finally, as a unified American began to be involve itself in world affairs, the nation slowly began to unite around a common foreign policy and national vision of what America is, so that by 1941 the south was ready to unite with the north against Japan and Germany.

4. The Revolutionary War, a unique case for an internal crisis war - one of the unique things about the American experience is that we never had lasting bitter consequences from our only internal crisis civil war - the revolutionary war. This is because those on the loyalist side moved to Canada after the war instead of remaining in the US to be persecuted and later cause instability and re-fighting of the revolutionary war. Interestingly though, I suspect this further defined the different identities between Canada and the United States, and thus contributed to ensuring there would be two Anglo-nations on the north American continent instead of one.

5. The Native Americans - this is the darkest reason for a lack of internal fault-lines. Through disease and war, the populations of the native americans were almost completely destroyed, which meant that after losing their crisis wars with the whites, there was no possibility of them even remaining a significant minority that could eventually wield significant power. Instead, at only roughly 1% of the population, they are sadly the most powerless group in all of the Americas. Yet this also meant that the United States did not have competing national cultures to contend with, as is the case in many nations divided between ethnic groups of similar size but mutual hatred.

6. Finally, the size of the United States means that it can mobilize and exploit vast stores of resources, and it is combined with a stable democratic system and the rule of law that has made us the number one economy since the late 1800s. Very few nations can muster the same manpower, economic, and cultural resources of the United States, simply by virtue of its size and cultural unity.

Therefore, American is not "great" simply because it is American, but because it has experienced a rare set of unique historical circumstances that set it apart from most other nations.

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