Abandon the Constitution

[ArfinGreebly]

All countries are similarly young - nationalism itself is a fairly recent invention.

I say, young man, wot?

Germany, France, Spain, Italy, England, Sweden, Austria, Russia . . . all countries with several times the years of the US . . . those are "similarly" young?

In geologic time, maybe.

In terms of modern civilization, not so much.

US is less than 300 years old.

All the ones I mentioned above have easily a thousand years of modern and pre-modern history behind them.  I don't get where this "similarly" comes from.

It may be true that nationalism is historically "recent" but European countries have been having nation-on-nation wars since around 1,000 AD, give or take a couple of hundred years.

They refer to themselves -- often smugly -- as the "old world."

In a hundred thousand years of human history, fraught with dynasties of this and that kind, a mere thousand years isn't a lot.

Unless, of course, your country didn't officially get off the ground until the mid-late 1700s.


Yet in spite of this, we're that "young upstart nation" with a crusty and crumbling Constitution document that's too old to be of any real value.

[Balog]

Nationalism is just a variant of tribalism, which is as old as humanity.

[De Selby]

Those European names you listed weren't "countries" in the sense we mean them until relatively recent times - some of them well after the US became a nation.  

Modern national identities (with defined borders, language, culture) didn't exist in Europe until around the same time the US was born.

[De Selby]

Nationalism is just a variant of tribalism, which is as old as humanity.

That may be true, but folks had a very different way of seeing their tribes before nationalism.

[Balog]

Some of the trappings were different, but essentially the same.

[ArfinGreebly]

I do believe there's a bit of "missing the point" going on.

We have a culture born of an agreement to stand together on a set of principles.  It's about 300 years old.

The cultures from which our progenitors fled stand on no such foundation and, regardless of the naming of nations and the boundaries drawn by assorted kings and armies, those cultures are of long duration, in "modern" terms.

I'd have to go back and check the maps to see when Germany was called something else, when Austria was a chunk of Prussia, and when France was Gaul.  Kings come and go, but the cultures abide.

Sweden, as we know it today, didn't really get going until 1500 or so, but the culture is anchored well before that.

Switzerland reconstituted itself, actually using our Constitution in large measure, some time after we became the named nation we are today.  The Swiss, however, didn't just toss hundreds of years of culture when they did that.

USA?  Massive cultural churn, a fusion if you will, and a nation born -- deliberately -- of principle, rather than the marriage of royal houses of competing cultures.

That's very much a new deal in this "civilization" thing.

[Balog]

At this point I'm giving monarchy another look. Wish I could go back to George III's tax rates.

[longeyes]

The welfare state is just a modern variant on tribalism--only with all the disadvantages and none of the advantages.  It makes a mockery of the ancient dictum that "we are all in this together"--where did I hear that before?--and makes abundantly obvious that indeed, in a riven and balkanized nation, WE ARE NOT.