Can you give some specific examples?
That seems like an over correction to me and I think that it shows in the push to tear down monuments of great people in American history who were largely products of their time.
For example, it's hard to overstate how important it was that George Washington gave up the presidency. He set the stage for the peaceful transition of power in the US and even the world. But he also was a rich guy who owned slaves.
It's not nuance that's missing, it's the concept of duality.
The fact that this sort of dreck isn't widely debunked and ridiculed whenever it appears is kind of mind boggling. Yes, some very bad things happened. But by the same token, the founding fathers weren't B-movie villains doing bad things for the evulz!
I mean, all of that is true.
Nobody thinks that the founding fathers were B movie villains, only that they were overwhelmingly a set of people looking to maintain and increase their power leveraging their ability to own people like cattle, and steal land from the people who were already here as an economic concentrate and multiplier.
Treating them as infallible gods who were uncompromisingly dedicated to the public good holds our country back from what it could be.
I'd recommend An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard as a introduction into how the constitution was designed to reinforce the power structures holding up the people who wrote it.
For the US as a whole? No way! If it were true, the economic might of the South would have overwhelmed the North. The opposite was true. Slavery held the South back, economically. You've been fed some propaganda lies, there!
You can't even get slaves to reliably do high value-add work which requires attention to detail, even on pain of death. It turns out that to do this sustainably, you pay them bomuses. This was especially the case in the US South. Certainly the Germans found this out as well, in the 1940's. (Through failure, in that case.)
(Skeptical? Read yourself some books by distinguished African American economist Thomas Sowell, then get back to me. He used to be a Marxist, then became disillusioned and started debunking their lies and deceptions. Think about it, if slavery were some miraculous universal engine of productivity, wouldn't startups be doing it?)
Treating them as infallible gods who were uncompromisingly dedicated to the public good holds our country back from what it could be.
Sure. However, throwing out certain principles which make our society great will hold us back and throw us further backwards as well. Instead of being told the truth about how civics really works in the US, students are being propagandized against this.
Australians never had to fight for their freedom from the British, we were given it. In fact, the British Empire offered the self-governing dominions – of which Australia was one – effective independence in 1931 (by the Statute of Westminster), and it took Australia 11 years to actually accept that offer, which just goes to show how eager Australia was to be independent.
You read the US Declaration of Independence, and you'd think that life in Canada and Australia and New Zealand must be absolutely horrible, and yet the actual experience of that life is that it compares favourably overall to life in the US. You can point to some things those countries maybe do worse than the US does, but you can equally point to other things those countries arguably do better. (And a lot of that comparison comes down to personal value judgements about how much priority you put on various pros and cons.)
Some of the complaints in the US Declaration of Independence are really quite pathetic. They complained about cultural rights for French Canadians ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province" is complaining about the British allowing French Canadians to keep the French legal system, which they viewed as important in preserving their culture). They complained about the British government imposing limits on European settlement in Native American lands. Some of their examples of "tyranny" were arguably good things.
Of course, the British were bad, in a lot of ways – colonisation, slavery, genocide, theft of land from indigenous peoples – but can you really argue that in those ways the Americans turned out better? If you want to look at slavery in particular, the British Empire officially abolished slavery in 1833, it took the US another 32 years (and a terrible war) to reach the same outcome. I think it is likely that if the American Revolution had never happened (or had been a failure), the abolition of slavery would have reached the American South earlier. So was the American Revolution then really about freedom?
If Americans are finally realising that much of their national mythology is unbelievable, is that a bad thing? I wouldn't say that Australia has no national mythology, but I feel like it is a lot thinner than America's, and maybe that's not a bad thing? Maybe the thinning out of American national mythology is something to be welcomed?
Straw-manning. The important parts are in the US Constitution and comprise the important core principles, particularly the Bill of Rights. Australia is pretty decent, because Australia is pretty comparable in that regard. The rest is a boondoggle, and frankly not worth responding to.
Maybe the thinning out of American national mythology is something to be welcomed?
Not if it's a veiled attack on the principles. I'm not against lampooning the Founding Fathers. However, let's keep an accurate account of how they furthered certain universal principles. Let's not throw them away, and somehow declare the US is filth from top to bottom. It's clearly not. It's clearly got a lot going for it, just like Australia.
Australia's constitution doesn't have a Bill of Rights.
And why focus on the Constitution over the Declaration? The Constitution wasn't even adopted until 7 years after the Revolutionary War was over.
> Not if it's a veiled attack on the principles.
Which principles?
In many cases, those who criticise America's founding fathers do so, not because they reject worthy principles, but because they see the contribution that those men made to those principles as being overstated.
Because the Constitution — in initial form, the second adopted plan of government — represents more than the freestanding propaganda of the DoI, but real experience-based thinking about how to balance principles in tension with each other in practical government.
Both constitutions contain racially discriminatory clauses, although in both cases they are either repealed, spent, or disregarded in practice. At least in Australia's case there is talk about removing the last of those. To fully remove those clauses from the US Constitution would require moving away from the "stick-amendments-on-the-end" model to actually changing the original text.
And that odd approach of sticking the amendments on the end instead of changing the actual text is probably one of the most distinctive aspects of the US constitution today. It achieves nothing except making the document harder to follow. Can you imagine how difficult it would be if other legislation was maintained in that fashion?
I think the decision in the US constitution to replace the Westminster parliamentary system with a presidential system was a step backward. Donald Trump is a good example of what a presidential system can lead to. Parliamentary systems like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand avoid that because you can't become the leader of the country without a majority support from legislators, which makes it much harder for fringe/out-there characters like Trump (or Jair Bolsonaro).
It is nothing about being a monarchy vs a republic. You can have a parliamentary republic in which you have a non-political president appointing a political prime minister who commands support from a majority of the national legislature – that's exactly the system used in Ireland, Germany and Israel, among other countries. It is also what was proposed in the failed 1999 Australian republic referendum, and I'm sure eventually Australia will become a republic and it will be a parliamentary republic not a presidential one–the failure was largely due to a dispute about how to elect the President, but I think everyone wanted a non-political President appointing a Prime Minister, not an American-style political President–the dispute was just about whether to have that President elected by Parliament, as in Germany and Israel, or elected by the general public, as in Ireland.
(Israel did briefly experiment with something closer to the American system, in 1996–2003, with direct election of the PM, but the experiment was abandoned and is generally considered a failure.)
How does that even matter? That's like complaining that a log-structured file contains the old value. What, are you going to complain that blockchains have old transactions in them? This is the same false propaganda-logic people use to justify destroying statues.
What are the technical benefits of the "stick-the-amendments-on-the-end" model used by the US constitution, as opposed to the "change-the-original-text" model used by most other contemporary constitutions (including even many US state constitutions)? I can't see any.
What really matters is who protects human rights better, and who is better at the rule of law and individual freedom. From what I can see, and from what you yourself have said above, there's not that much difference.
Again, it's the principles that matter. The principles in action, more specifically.