The nonsense message of American democracy is another one that's always bothered me, so it's enlightening to see how these are connected.
FWIW, despite all the propaganda and even our school history books, democracy never was a core value of America. There is virtually nothing democratic about the design of the federal government, and even those aspects that are democratic were nothing new at the time the Constitution was written. America was not a bold experiment in democracy. That was old hat: the Dutch were already doing it, and heck, the Greeks did it a couple thousand years earlier. What was a bold experiment, seemingly entirely forgotten in today's discourse on Capitol Hill, was a limited government that wielded only a small set of powers that were explicitly ceded to it by the people.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it "nonsense", but it definitely wasn't emphasized prior to WWI. I'd have to do some more digging through history to see what issues were driving the nation prior to that. I do think that freedom and liberty were there. Initially it was just getting things off the ground and fighting off the Brits (1776, 1812), then westward expansion, then early industrialization, then slavery, them more industrialization.
By the time of WWI there'd been some big questions raised over equity and equality (railroads, robber barrons, oil trusts), and national cohesion was somewhat at stake, more so with the Great Depression and WWII.
My study of all of this is still pretty thin, but it's a fascinating period.
The nonsense message of American democracy is another one that's always bothered me, so it's enlightening to see how these are connected.
FWIW, despite all the propaganda and even our school history books, democracy never was a core value of America. There is virtually nothing democratic about the design of the federal government, and even those aspects that are democratic were nothing new at the time the Constitution was written. America was not a bold experiment in democracy. That was old hat: the Dutch were already doing it, and heck, the Greeks did it a couple thousand years earlier. What was a bold experiment, seemingly entirely forgotten in today's discourse on Capitol Hill, was a limited government that wielded only a small set of powers that were explicitly ceded to it by the people.