No.489240
I think this is a very interesting discussion in my opinion. I'm skeptical of the ACP for other reasons, but I think that they're right about this one in a general sense.
To start off, I think Americans are essentially an orphaned people. Irish Americans are not Irish, English Americans are not English, and black Americans are obviously very far removed from the African continent culturally. European colonists killed the vast majority of the original inhabitants, relegating some who remained to ethnic reservations and driving others south into present-day Mexico. What those Europeans stole was a great, massive, huge amount of extremely diverse and extremely beautiful land, taking with it part of the culture which was fused into folk traditions of Europe, and mixed with elements left over from Africa. This is where American folk culture comes from.
This process was undeniably a catastrophic crime, and the surviving descendants of victims of the American Indian genocide and the African slave trade are owed reconciliation and justice, especially with relation to land and land rights. Indians and black Americans are the only two groups in the continental US who are owed this, because the crimes against them were far greater and lasted much longer than those perpetrated against others.
With that said, we aren't about to un-genocide the Indians. All we need to do on this front is stop actively violating treaties with them. For black people, some system of land reparations (like Lincoln planned to do before he was assassinated) could be done without much loss, and would provide more real long term value than monetary reparations would, and this would purely be done as repayment for the original dispossession & enslavement, and, implicitly, as repayment for housing discrimination during the long segregation era which ended within living memory.
Regardless of whether we take this approach, it can't be denied that this land is a vast, beautiful, and bountiful place. Our culture is by no means perfect, but most of us are not intimately connected with any other culture. We often are fond of what we learn about old world culture, old traditions, old mythology, old religion, but it is not what most of us are well-acquainted with. The United States of America has molded from different clays a great syncretic culture of marches, cakewalks, blues, jazz, urban poetry, bluegrass, showtunes, superstition, rationalism, esotericism, deism, puritanism, and all manner of ever-evolving things borne of fugitives, former slaves, exiles, aristocrats, and ne'er-do-wells.
I think that it's a very fascinating culture in many ways, and I think that this is a very beautiful land. So the greatest and most consistent crime today, with regards to the historic crime, is that so many millions of people died and we still allow our fellow workers to go homeless. Millions were murdered and dispossessed for the sake of vacant lots and for the sake of landlords who kill and dispossess still more today. I think that this needs to change, and that there is no room for "leaders" who will not do whatever is necessary to change it.
I used to think that Balkanization might be good on some level, but I don't favor it now. I think I used to have a more nihilistic outlook in this sense, plus I associated Balkanization with, you know, dance clubs with good EDM… but honestly, if the US Balkanized today, we still wouldn't get raves back, our drugs would be worse, and we'd mostly just have shitty trap music at clubs which would still be overpriced somehow. Anyway, the wars would also be bad. No governor who would have real ambitions for secession is going to be anything but the most despotic fucking prick you can think of, and a lot of them would do it whether or not doing so was economically viable. In my view it's imperative that the US stay in one piece, I think that kneejerk impulses to dissolve the union outright are misguided.
My end solution for America is one country with a strong national guard and no involvement in any foreign conflicts in any capacity. It's not unlikely that in this scenario the US will have to stave off coup attempts by disgruntled mercenaries like Erik Prince, and we'll need to maintain military capacity to fight that off. We should reindustrialize, do land reform (specifically targeting unoccupied/unused speculative properties), do major jobs programs related to public services and not just military/police shit, nationalize transit, and use our bountiful land and wealth and talent to become a great country which celebrates our historic plural nationalism, allowing for diversity while also providing benefits to empower workers from all backgrounds. If we prevent our current government from instigating WWIII, we could retire to being a nice Nordic-style economy, and people here would think that's pretty cucked but it would still be a major improvement over what we've got now which is a deranged empire run by the evilest bastards on the face of the Earth.