Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
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The US is an achievement based culture. It always has been. It's an artifact of having an open frontier for 200+ years (circa 1650 - 1890). If you failed, you simply moved out to the edge and started over.
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This leads to a view of government as referee. Government should try to see the "rules of the game" are enforced evenly, and let the best man win. Of course, in areas that are many generations away from the "frontier ethos", there has been a slow change to a more European government world view, as more and more people try to "lock in" their social position and reduce social mobility. This has led to continual friction inside the US itself between the followers of the old "frontier ethos" and the newer (to the US) "social lock-in ethos".
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Interesting that no one has yet commented on RSE's government as referee observation. He's absolutely nailed an important part of the American attitude towards government, IMHO. Another part of the American attitude on government -- that permeates the writings of our Founding Fathers, by the way -- is that government is a necessary evil. We need it both to secure "certain inalienable rights" (to quote one of those FFs) and also to be the hopefully-impartial-referee that RSE described. But there's a strong strain of American thought that views government beyond a certain minimum level as a
problem, not a
solution. (
I would argue that this meme is not nearly strong enough in contemporary America.
Your mileage may vary.) I suspect that most of our European members don't see things that way. Am I right?
Xenophon
(Who was radicalized by extensive readings from the FFs during high-school. Those guys were fire-eating revolutionaries! We tend to forget that these days...)