Ronald Steenblik

Well, there you go.

Seems to me you’re arguing for argument’s sake.

Meanwhile, I have other things I have to get to. Sorry.

The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction weren’t redos? If that’s your argument, I think a lot of historians would beg to differ.

The claim made by Biden, the @lincolnproject.us and others isn’t that the USA was founded on principles that had never previously formed the organizational & legal basis for a country but that it is “the ONLY nation in the world built on an idea”, which I would have thought obviously wrong.

The modern nation of Viet Nam, after having been occupied by the Japanese and the French, and half of it by U.S. military forces, was founded on Communist principles, or at least as interpreted by Ho Chi Minh. (The claim of being founded on an idea doesn’t imply that the idea is sound.)

Did Switzerland disappear?! I somehow missed that.

Et alors? What’s your point?

Many 19th-century religious and other internal self-selecting communities in the United States (Shakers, the Oneida Community) were founded on a set of ideas, but one can’t extrapolate from those to the whole country.

I’d call those more reasons than lofty ideas in the sense of principles. Those are similar to the reasons why many people still emigrate to the USA … or Australia, or Canada, or Chile, or EU Member States, or, or, or …

Indeed. And keeping with the theme. This is what’s currently going down across the pond.

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I could go on. Need I?

The Swiss Federation was formed initially (13th c.) for common defense, but later as new cantons adhered, it championed freedom of religion, and what we’d now call subsidiarity. Its citizens’ notions of themselves transcend religion, language, and ethnicity. Rather, they are “a nation of volition".

No. The French Republic was founded on the idea of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, and despite enduring periods of autocratic rule and foreign occupation uses that as its national motto.

I’d perhaps leave out the countries (especially monarchies) that have existed for centuries and whose populations have been largely dominated by people whose lineage traces back hundreds if not thousands of years. Nothing wrong with that, but hard to argue that they were founded on “an idea”.

Indeed, as Dorf writes: “for much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and, following World War II, its satellite states in eastern Europe, as well as China, Cuba, and various other communist countries, were based on a set of ideas — albeit bad ideas: … .”

The delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which went on to draft the Declaration of Independence, were generally well-read and worldly. They were aware of the Corsican Republic and it leader, Pasquale Paoli (after which a town in eastern PA is named) and also of the Republic’s Constitution.

The Corsican Republic created representative government, an administration and a justice system, and founded an army. Unfortunately, the Republic was short-lived — not because of its own failings but because Corsica’s much more powerful neighbor, France, invaded and took over the island in 1769.

Corsican Republic - Wikipedia

The founding fathers even had a prior example to which they could point: the Corsican Republic, which proclaimed itself independent from Genoa in 1755, wrote its own Constitution, the text of which included various Enlightenment principles, including female suffrage.

They all wanted liberty from the colonial power that was repressing their freedoms. And they set an example for many other countries to follow in booting out that power (with the help of France). But that the country was founded on the idea of liberty or self governance is hardly unique.

Bear in mind that the delegates to the Second Continental Congress were sweeping the elephant in the room — slavery — under the rug, so that the Northerners (a minority of whom owned slaves) and Southerns could agree on language that at least applied to all of them, personally.

… they wrote a rousing, high-minded document, proclaiming that “all men are created equal” — an argument already passionately argued by the English philosopher, John Locke, in his second treatise on government written 87 years earlier.

The different colonies even disagreed initially whether to declare independence from Britain. When they finally agreed that they should, and their representatives signed the Declaration of Independence (heavily influenced by white landowners from Virginia, then the most populous state), …

Cover of Colin Woodward’s book (2022 edition), “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”.

Second, as @colinwoodard.bsky.social devotes a whole book to, the original European settlers each had very different attitudes towards the rights of indigenous peoples, slaves the settlers brought with them, freedom of religion, the roles of women, etc.

And those indigenous peoples had governing systems of their own, some of which influenced the USA’s founding fathers profoundly.

I won’t attempt to summarize Dorf’s arguments here, but underscore several points.

First is the obvious but important point: the states that now make up the USA were already occupied by native North Americans when Spanish, French, Dutch, and finally British settlers started moving in.

Fortunately, I’m not alone. I went looking to see if anyone else has pushed back on this founding myth, and I came across this excellent piece by @dorfonlaw.bsky.social from February 2023, written after President Biden’s State of the Union Address during which the POTUS repeated the myth.

As an American living abroad and having learned some history of Venice, the French Revolution, the Corsican Republic, and the Swiss Federation, I’ve found myself often yelling at my phone when listening to podcasters repeat the mantra that “the USA is the only nation in the world built on an idea.”

Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker Track fossil-fuel subsidies with the IISD-OECD interactive Global Database. Play with graphics and data to visualise subsidies by country, by fuel and by type of subsidy. Download data in line with th...

The Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker (🔗). It combines complimentary estimates from the OECD (my old job), the IEA, and the IMF’s estimates of consumer price subsidies for countries not covered by the IEA’s estimates of consumer price subsidies (a small share of the total).

The AMA leadership has been creepily conservative all my life. They're one of the reasons the United States still has an expensive privatized healthcare system and their arrogance drives people into the arms of quacks.

My family had a small penny-farthing growing up.

I value my bones too much to get up on one of those big ‘uns, and I used to parachute jump!