re: What’s an American history hot take you’ve got?

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This was their land and we flat took it from them violently.

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Quite literally every square inch of inhabited land on the planet has been taken through violence from whoever had it before. As for land we took from the Indians, they’d taken it from whatever tribe had it before we arrived.

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Oh boy. There's a lot of them.

Let me just give the biggest and most comprehensive one:

America is a leftist Protestant experiment and our entire history is about being liberal (in the sense of shirking what has worked for long periods of time in favor of something radically new).

In other words, leftist egalitarian abolitionist America is the real America. The current day "conservative" 1776 Americans derive their entire worldview from liberal revolutionaries who were willing to spill blood and burn down traditions/society for a radically new set of beliefs.

When your Fox News conservatives say that "those beliefs were right!" they make the exact same argument as victorious Russian Soviets in 1920. It was right because you won. Of course, American capitalism has "won" the recent history debate. And by recent I mean fewer than 100 years since 1945. But our current state is the blink of an eye in human history and it is far too early to judge its success. In fact, most conservatives will admit that our society is fraying and degrading in very important ways. The government instituted by the American founders appears to be a government suited to a very particular type of independent, literate, and adventurous people.

There are many poignant English critiques about why the American Revolution was hypocritical and disingenuous. But you will never, ever hear those arguments unless you seek them out. George Sydney Fisher's The True History of the American Revolution is a great starting point.

It really makes you wonder about what the world would look like with the combination of English empire and American power.

TL,DR: the American revolutionary story you grew up with has a lot of extremely leftist values and you never get to hear the opposing arguments.

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When was this social fabric intact, and what constituted it? Was it produced by the leftist American experiment, inherited from the traditional society that experiment supposedly destroyed, or preserved despite it? Is the present degradation caused by abandoning the founding principles or by fulfilling them?

And your appeal to conservatives admitting society is “fraying” is where the wheels really come off your argument. Fraying from what? The word necessarily describes deterioration from an earlier, more coherent condition. But wait. You just denied America any authentic conservative inheritance from which to fray, describing our entire history as a leftist project of discarding traditions for radical innovation. You cannot erase the previous fabric and then appeal to its deterioration. Well, you did, so I guess you can. But you cannot make it logical.

If the lost fabric was the constitutional and cultural order that developed after 1776, then modern conservatives are doing exactly what conservatives do: preserving an inherited national tradition. Its revolutionary origin 250 years ago does not keep it permanently revolutionary. Every tradition was new at some point. Treating a belief’s revolutionary origin as permanently determining its political character is laughable. Once a revolutionary settlement becomes the established order inherited by later generations, preserving that order is, by definition, conservative. Otherwise, no society created through revolution, reform or upheaval could ever develop a conservative tradition, regardless of how long its institutions endured.

I assume/hope you see the obvious fallacy here?

If the fraying is instead the result of America continuing its liberal and egalitarian trajectory, conservatives are not “admitting” your argument. They are condemning the consequences of the project you define as the real America. In fact, your premise goes further: if leftist egalitarianism is the only authentic American tradition, as you posit, then conservatives are not merely mistaken about America; they are opposed to America at their core. You have just ceded the definition of Americanism exclusively to the left and made liberalism the only authentic American position. By your own argument and definitions, conservatism itself is un-American.

You also define America by one standard and judge it by another. America is “really” leftist when you assign its historical identity, but its present condition is judged according to conservative standards. If overturning tradition for greater freedom and equality is America’s historical purpose, then changes conservatives call fraying would more accurately be described as your “real America” fulfilling itself. To call them degradation, you must first introduce conservative values worth preserving after already denyied that those same values have an authentic place in the American system.

Finally, your witnesses become reliable only when convenient. Today’s “conservatives” are supposedly confused when they praise the inherited order, perceptive when they notice deterioration, then confused again when they attribute that deterioration to abandoning the inherited order (Google "special pleading fallacy").

I kept rereading your post, assuming I had missed a step. Turns out I had. The missing step is any logical argument connecting your claims.

My first question remains: fraying from what?

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At the height of slavery, according to the census that everyone filled out ( mail was fricking exciting) only 2% of Americans owned slaves. 1-1.5% of free blacks owned slaves.

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Basically saying what I said in a post above

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During the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil received roughly 4.8 to 5.5 million enslaved Africans, while the United States received about 388,000. Brazil imported more than 10 times the number of direct captives from Africa compared to the U.S

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Perspective

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The English trading company was only about 1/10th the the size of the Dutch Trading company (which is still the biggest and wealthiest business in the history of the world in current dollars). While we know of all the spices and goods they shipped to Europe, those ships did not sail empty when sailing the other way. They were the biggest slavers in the history of the world if memory of my studies as a youth are correct.


That my friend, is the rest of the story.

6 million Jews weren’t killed in ww2, just Jewish propaganda so they can run wild now.

And yes some died but so did every other ethnicity.

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I could get into the depths of the logic of the statement which i also disagree with but I'm not super interested in an internet argument where neither of us will change each other's minds.


Translation: “I have no counter argument”

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Little late little buddy. We discussed/debated the whole thing after that comment. Good job

The total population of Jewish people on earth was barely that. Look at the math, it doesn’t make sense. Did a lot die? I’m sure they did but a lot of everyone else too. What makes them special?

Sure, but It was still expensive to ship bulk product across the ocean back then. The north eventually would've won a lot of those contracts. Plus, the war destroyed a lot of the south's resources, burned countless farms and cities, and dismantled their business structure by eliminating the free labor. Is there evidence that northern factories significantly benefitted from the war?