> Dark Liberals agree that democratic institutions, free speech, a free press, human rights, tolerance for differences, and a cultural melting pot are all essential parts of maintaining a free society
Honest question - is the "cultural melting pot" thing considered a liberal ideology in the USA, now? It was my impression that nowadays its considered an offensive bad thing, not "a strength of the USA".
Yes. I would be curious to hear what formed your impression that it is now considered an offensive bad thing. I have some ideas of course, but none are reflective of the reality of the worldviews of most city or even suburb-dwelling US people. If anything, the cultural melting pot thing has never been stronger.
> Yes. I would be curious to hear what formed your impression that it is now considered an offensive bad thing.
I don't know, TBH. I think friends from US told me to be careful, that it's now politically incorrect to mention it, especially to express support for it/imply that it's a good thing? I don't live there so I wouldn't know for sure, especially given that when I interact with US colleagues I generally try to steer away from more potentially "touchy" subjects. I did notice myself that it's best to avoid some subjects in the US corporate world, since you never know what may be offensive. Or well, I don't, perhaps it's a me-problem.
(it's probably also that I don't understand all the local implications and sensibilities. Like, for me "melting pot" means the ability to take immigrants from all over the world, and turn them into "americans" with roughly the same culture & set of values. That, for me is unequivocally a _good_ thing, I think it's generally recognized that conflict at values-level is the most difficult one to resolve/ it's basically unresolvable. You can't have a nation working together if large parts of it have different set of values, that's just a recipe for internal divisions and long-term problems. Or anyway, that's my general line of thinking, that's why I personally have always felt that the "melting pot" was one of the best things US did, and did better than e.g. France or other nations. But I do recognize that there might be other problems associated with that, in the minds of US citizens; and being subjected to the "melting pot" can't be easy/pleasant for everyone, it's in the end about modifying/tweaking your identity so that's gotta be a hard process)
Thanks for the reply. I think I mostly follow your elaboration.
Topics like DEI have definitely become a much more touchy subject in the last 2 years or so, and that they are not discussed as much in "official" channels as they previously were, but that the practices are mostly still there and are generally still considered a positive thing to most people.
It might just be semantics, but I do think your definition of melting pot is slightly off, in that in the US, there is no real consensus of what "the same culture & set of values' actually means. The US is still a very young country. The only "native" culture here was colonized and mostly erased by white settlers. The population of people here can largely be defined by different waves of historical immigration from other parts of the world. Culture and values here are more of two-way street, where they tend to be mixed and matched in the "melting pot" type environments that have popped up all over the country. Now with that being said, most recently we have found ourselves in a situation where an extremely vocal (and quite incoherent IMHO) minority of people against rising waves of multiculturalism have come into power and started controlling the narrative, but I would say that they are not representative of most US citizens, and that the only reason why this has happened is because 90 million people were too apathetic and mentally lazy to defend against it when given the opportunity. I'm still struggling to understand what that says about the US as a people, but I really don't think that as many of us are as wrapped up in identity politics as it might seem like we are from the outside.
Oh come on. The amerindian/indigenous culture has (almost) _nothing_ to do with US culture, which is very much a thing. In fact, it's so much a thing that US almost had a "cultural victory". Part of the cold war victory was US cultural victory, because people all over the world aspired to the american dream. Hollywood movies are some of the most watched entertainment worldwide. English is the world's lingua franca because of the US, not UK (well, UK, but indirectly via US). All the american problems and internal conflicts will spill over to the world - or at least western world - sooner or later (it's unbelievable how much university environment in say, Germany is influenced by what is happening in the US universities; identity politics recently became a thing in Romania, when it seemed to be completely gone and irrelevant).
Don't kid yourself, USA absolutely has a very strong and well defined (and influential) culture. Not in that each citizen is the same, but that there are clear patterns, societal norms, generally-shared values etc. I'll take just one example: there are a lot of Indians in the US, AFAIK. They _largely_ don't have arranged marriages in US (definitely not 90% of the US citizens of Indian heritage!).
I think in some particularly race concious circles it can be seen as eliding the US's historical and modern problems with bigotry. I don't think it would genuinely provoke anyone but I wouldn't be surprised if someone took it as an opportunity to lecture.
I don’t get the melting pot trope. America is basically identical everywhere. From education to healthcare, sports to entertainment, adverts to politicians.
You may wish to look up what "Fordism" is, the history behind it, and of course the many sociological critiques of t. That will likely give enough context to explain where that trope came from (and also why it's more of a thing in the US than anywhere else)
I think that's just the Overton window having shifted over time.
I believe the "cultural melting pot" used to be perceived as more politically neutral in the 1990s but it always came with a lot of asterisks. There's even that famous Superman poster about diversity from 1949[0] - despite the obvious incongruity with the Japanese internment camps and overall anti-Asian sentiments (although the Magnuson Act in 1943 had at least partially repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act by then because China became an ally to the US during WW2), racist sentiments towards Hispanic/Latin Americans and of course the ongoing racial segregation at the time.
I don't think we'll see "wokeness" be rolled back all the way to perceiving Irish immigrants as subhuman again, but most of these cultural points exist on a sliding scale rather than being fixed in time permanently.
Case in point, that infamous 1981 Atwater interview about the Southern Strategy[1], which was a Republican strategy built primarily on appealing to racist sentiments in the Southern US states.
We're not quite at the point where it's acceptable to explicitly target segments of the population by name so you'll instead hear politicians talk about "illegals" when talking about an overall reduction in immigration (including "legal" migration) and "criminals" when talking about the need for deportations (without trials or convictions) because to those who agree it is clear that these are shorthands the same way "welfare queens" and "urban crime" were shorthands in the Southern Strategy, whereas for those who disagree you can always fall back to the literal definition to defend your politics.
As an aside, I think this is one of two big problems with the article's appeal to theory of mind - the other being that most people don't have a coherent political framework and thus hold mutually contradictory political positions in different contexts: politicians and pundits can and do lie. While nearly every human assumes they are the good guy of their narrative and wants to do the right thing relative to their views of good and bad, sometimes that can include just blatantly lying. And sometimes people whose job it is to talk politics not only lie, they assume everyone else alongside of them is also lying, not presenting their own deeply held convictions.
I'm sure this isn't the case but sometimes it feels like debate culture plays into this because the way competitive debates are held removes any sense of actual conviction from the points being argued by focussing entirely on the technique, not truth value or ideological consistency or moral frameworks. You could personally oppose the death penalty but still find yourself having to argue for it if that's the position you're assigned - and sure, in theory this can help better understanding the other side but at the same time it feels like this arbitrariness and moral flexibility also rewards a level of detachment from the concrete issues that seems deeply troubling.
Honest question - is the "cultural melting pot" thing considered a liberal ideology in the USA, now? It was my impression that nowadays its considered an offensive bad thing, not "a strength of the USA".