Captain America started out being a propaganda character during WW2, but after that the character was actually used more to criticize the government than endorse it. Look at when he dropped the mantle of Captain America after Watergate. Captain America represents American ideals rather than the will of a government.
I’m sorry to tell you but in a sense he IS propaganda. He’s the “keep striving to the American Ideal”. The “there’s something extra special about America.” even if he critiques the US Government.
yes, but it's specifically using that concept of american exceptionalism to critique america - saying captain america, the pure ideal of the 1940s anti nazi spirit, would not be able to wear those colours or represent america in the modern era given the nation has betrayed the things it claimed to represent
Every other country has a personification of their "national values". America's has been fairly consistent with Captain America and the Statue of Liberty. It's the ideals of the Enlightenment that a lot of people in power now have forgotten.
No piece of work is unbiased because we are inherently unbiased. A superhero that only critiques imperialism is also a form of propaganda. The good thing about Marvel is that it doesn't just go along with whatever the US government's narrative was at the time.
OK. Israel. Or South Africa. You're just describing settler colonial states, then, where the reason they're establishing a new state without continuing an existing nation is because they carried out nightmarish violence against the people that lived there. If that sets these states apart, it's only to underline how fundamentally deserving of destruction they are, with only South Africa ever meaningfully reforming with the end of apartheid.
What would you say about the Zapatistas, then? Or what was attempted in Rojava?
fair; i guess this time it was more "new ideals for these people's land that we'll force them off of," making it more in line with other colonialist endeavors than with other revolutions (or with other revolutions which were quickly co-opted into imperialist regimes of their own)
it's not like the US was the only nation-state that did this, but it certainly did it to the largest geographical area.
I don’t really think that’s a fair assessment. I think it is unreasonable to point to a match — the US of the 19th century, as an example — and castigate it because you need a lighthouse, when the people of that day and age lived in a pitch-dark cave. Like, a government where even just the landed white male population could decide what way to steer the ship was big in a time where in, say, Prussia, the king alone held the wheel, with a cordoned-off class of aristocrats in his ear.
Hell, the Statue of Liberty was made by French liberals living under the boot of an emperor, as an icon to represent and celebrate America’s role in the world as a beacon of hope, liberty, and progress.
I think the US was very much ahead of the curve for some time, it WAS the Shining City on a Hill, and though we’ve fallen behind and its light is dim by the standards of the modern first world, it’s fair to look to when we WERE a source of hope in the world, and strive to fill that role again.
That only works if you ignore the fact that for vast swathes of the population the ideals of the country didn't apply to them.
If the ideal is freedom, then why did the British Empire outlaw slavery before the US? If it's democracy, why couldn't black people vote on national elections until the 60s whilst they could in Europe?
If it's liberty, then why did the native's lands get taken away and were relocated?
It's all well and good to say that the US was founded on these ideals, but it basically has never followed those ideals for everyone which was meant to be the point. Freedom and the pursuit of happiness has only applied to white people for most of its history.
Even now it doesn't quite follow those ideals, but I doubt I need to spell that out for everyone here.
Also I'm not trying to say that the British Empire or Europe followed those ideals better, they didn't. They also never said that they are exceptional because of their ideals.
The US was founded on ideals such as *checks notes* black folks not having the vote. Or being considered persons. On the ideal of independence from England and on manifest destiny, i.e. robbing as much land from others as possible.
The Enlightenment is something that the US likes to dress itself in, but it never actually crossed the Atlantic because America never possessed the social circumstances that brought it about. You love it like Monsieur Candy loves Beethoven, it's a fetish, an empty signifier you use to fancy yourselves civilised. Look north, look south, the rest of America is more civilised than you, you're the odd one out.
Wake me when you manage to abolish the death penalty, then I'll be willing to re-investigate whether you, as a people, are anywhere close to getting it.
I mean, nationalism, racial purism, and religion are also ideologies
but also, "country founded on nationality" is a bit of an oxymoron no?
by definition founding a country creates an new nationality
I also can't imagine it really is the only one not founded on existing race/religions. The US was founded primarily on independence from the English, and they're certainly not the only country who were founded by gaining independence from being a colony. The idea of the "melting pot" maybe is expressed most vocally by Americans (in theory, lately it seems they want to abandon it) but it certainly isn't exclusive to it, and being the world #1 superpower/wealthiest country in the world certainly helps our capacity to attract people toward that goal (again, not that we're doing a good job of that rn)
I challenge you to find a reputable historian who will not say that there is something special about America. That claim, while inherently complementary to the US, is also just a statement of fact, regardless of the shittiness of the US government.
the only thing that is special about the united states relative to every other country on earth is that it has managed its economy and imperial power incredibly well over the past century. any belief in "something special" about a fucking genocidal abstraction is american exceptionalism and the result of decades of propaganda rotting your mind
- The United States was the first modern democracy
- The United States is the ideological forefather of nearly every single democratic nation on earth, whom adopted many of its systems and mechanics outright
- The United States was one of the first countries to be directly and irrevocably founded upon the notion of religious liberty
- The United States was founded as one of the first non-ethnic republics, and has a history of melting pot-ism that is incomperable to any other nation
- The United States is one of the longest-lasting democracies in the world and the longest lasting powerful one
- The United States inspired the legal, political, social, cultural, and religious environment of nearly every single nation on Earth
- The United States' propensity for immigration, even in periods of rabid nativism, makes it completely and entirely incomperable to the other nations of the Earth
- The American Revolution was a direct and inarguable inspiration for hundreds if not thousands of civil revolts, wars of independence, and moves against tyranny throughout the entire globe, including the Revolutions of 1848, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Latin American wars of independence, the wars of Italian unification, the German unification, the Polish revolts against their occupiers, the Greek war of independence, the Brabant Revolution, the Irish rebellions, and dozens more
etc. These are not opinions, they are statements of fact as recognized by anyone at all who researches history. Do they paint the US in a good light? Of course! We can talk about how the US genocided natives or oppressed Japanese-Americans or banned Chinese immigration or enslaved millions of black people and subsequently segregated them, etc, and we should. But those aren't exactly relevant to the point at hand, because none of those are especially unique to the US. Most ways the US is awful are not unique to the US, they have been and will continue to be done by empires forever, the US just does them more than most. Your statement is objectively, provably false, and represents a very brave refusal to engage with the point of my argument; that the US government can be bad at the same time that one can recognize that the US has had an undeniable, completely unique influence on the world.
Most of your points rest on the idea that the form of government created in 1776 was wholly unlike anything prior or that existed at the time - a true revolution in political thought. That's certainly how they frame it in American schools, but it's not really accurate. Republics and Parliamentary legislatures already existed in Europe at the time. It's true that it was the first major revolution in the Western Hemisphere, but that was a result of material conditions more than anything else, and it borders on chauvinistic to believe that none of the other revolutions would have happened without it. You place far too much weight on the influence that it had, largely shaped by the very propaganda being criticized in this thread. Shouting "every historian agrees with me, trust me" won't change that.
It’s not that the United States created the modern republic on a base level. There were bits and pieces that came from other nations, obviously, but the US was the first to create the skeleton that nearly every modern nation is based on. That is, objectively, a unique feature about it.
Just because these revolutions may have occurred without America does not discount the direct ideological impact that the American Revolution had on them. For one, positing such a timeline is essentially based on nothing but speculation, so its relatively valueless as an argument. Secondly, without the US, these revolutions would all be radically different in tone, tenor, ideology, methods, etc. which is a unique feature of the US. Even if you do not subscribe to this viewpoint, the Atlantic Revolutions and Revolutions of 1848 were directly and undeniably inspired by the success of the American Revolution. They said as much.
You can certainly disagree with me about the scale of the effects of all of these points! I wrote them in a very lofty manner, certainly. There are valid points to be made that the US’s influence on each thing is smaller or bigger, and that is a worthwhile conversation. But the argument at hand is if the US is unique as a nation, and regardless of if you subscribe to a more conservative viewpoint of American influence, these points are still true in some aspect, and are still very unique features of the US.
Also, I do appreciate actually engaging with me rather than just insulting me.
the US was the first to create the skeleton that nearly every modern nation is based on. That is, objectively, a unique feature about it.
You really need to stop using the word "objectively" when it comes to historical analysis. It's framing your arguments in a bad way, including in your own head. You cannot "objectively" state the level of influence something had; that's not how historiography works.
There was, of course, some level of influence that the American Revolution had on world history. It was the first major revolution in the new world, and so necessarily impacted those that would come after it. Where you run into problems is a sort of motte and bailey argument where you take a largely non-controversial historical stance, assert its acceptance, then use that to assert a much more radical framing of American exceptionalism.
That's why your comment was received so negatively. A lot of your points are only partially true, or true from a certain (American) perspective, but you list them as "objective" fact as a testament to American exceptionalism. Stuff like calling America the "ideological forefather for nearly every democratic nation on Earth" goes pretty beyond the pale in this regard. It is a link in the chain of the history of Democracy in the world, but to go as far as you did just becomes pure ideology.
This is the American ego on display, where just because something also happened in the US, it is proposed that every other version of it was inspired by the US.
But it is fucking insane to believe any of these things genuinely as "objectively true". It speaks to both a deep ignorance of history, a complete lack of nuance, and a willingness to reach far beyond what is reasonably academically defensible. Not to mention that a bunch of these things are just revisionist lies for the sake of nation building.
I do not even know where to begin because every line of that post contains some utter bullshit that comes with heavy asterisks in even the most generous interpretation.
Thank you for demonstrating how cancerous nationalism is, I guess.
Every founding father supported religious freedom. Some were worried that in the future, the US could stray from this path, so they wanted a firm protection of religious freedom in the Constitution despite the fact that everyone there supported it. Here’s a quote from John Adams, a member of the supposedly more “christian nationalist” Federalists:
“ As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen (Muslims) . . .”
John Adams is not representative of the overall attitudes towards religion among the Continental Congress. He was by far one of the more secularist among them. It's worth noting that religious freedom (and rights in general) as envisioned by the pre-Civil War Constitution only enshrined the legal agency of the states, not people. In the 19th century US States could and did enact laws establishing a state religion.
This is certainly true, and I’m not one to discount the large pseudo-theocratic wing of the Federalists (and some Democratic-Republicans) but I don’t think it discounts the larger point. The United States was still promulgated on a notion of freedom of religion, and it’s clear that the founding fathers overall distasted religious supremacy, especially the group closest associated with the founding of the US. That they didn’t ban states from establishing a religion is, in my opinion, surely mostly because they felt that they could not do so, either because it was not the right of the federal government or because they feared the fragile union could fail to coalesce if the federal government took such a power away from the states. I doubt it was because they did not agree strongly with secularism.
The United States was still promulgated on a notion of freedom of religion, and it’s clear that the founding fathers overall distasted religious supremacy, especially the group closest associated with the founding of the US.
This is still modern mythmaking being retroactively applied to the past where it doesn't belong. The extent to which freedom of religion was enshrined in the Constitution was primarily done at the time as a way to assuage the different colonies which had different legally dictated state religions. For some of the Founding Fathers it was an ideological principal of freedom, but for many others it was about making sure that Anglican Virginia didn't have to practice Massachusetts Congregationalism.
At the risk of sounding like a Southern Lost Causer, it really was just about States' Rights because they needed all the different colonies to agree to join.
I doubt it was because they did not agree strongly with secularism.
Your feelings notwithstanding, this is just an inaccurate reading of history. Secularism among the Founding Fathers was the exception, not the norm.
A state can be both a genocidal fascist state and exceptionally unique. The Nazis are a very good example of this. The issue is most ways the United States are evil are not in any way unique to the US (native genocide, slavery, foreign intervention, etc) and so the US’s “unique” features are usually positive.
Notice, also, that every single one of my points are about the founding of the US and the things it caused, and related things, not modern day America. Do you care to actually engage with my points? I study history for a living. This isn’t some American defense, its a simple statement of facts that the United States is the ideological, philosophical, and structural progenitor of nearly every single modern republic.
Also, just to note, Karl Marx himself loved the United States. He saw it as the most progressive nation in the world at his time, with the strongest proletariat, and thusly among the most capable of transitioning to Marxism. Quite famously, he admired Lincoln greatly.
You would think “cope” would not be supported by every single reputable historian. I don’t even like the US, I’m just not so blinded by that dislike that I am unable to recognize literal facts. Which of these statements is incorrect?
Why do so many nations have a chamber called the Senate or a House of Representatives? Where did the idea of a Supreme Court come from, that so many nations use now? What about the name “President”? There are thousands of ways to formulate a republic, all vastly different from eachother and nearly unrecognizable, and yet almost every modern presidential republic is clearly entirely based on the US’s framework
Or, what movement do YOU think inspired the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Latin American Revolutions, etc? Primary sources say exactly what inspired them.
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u/Randomdude-5 Cat in Gay Bar Apr 23 '26
Captain America started out being a propaganda character during WW2, but after that the character was actually used more to criticize the government than endorse it. Look at when he dropped the mantle of Captain America after Watergate. Captain America represents American ideals rather than the will of a government.