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.
Is this deliberate intellectual dishonesty? How is Australia not having a section named "Bill of Rights" even relevant? What's actually relevant once again are the human rights which are protected and how well they are protected. Those are the foundation: the principles.
And why focus on the Constitution over the Declaration?
Again, those are the foundation. Those are the core principles: rights enshrined in the constitution.
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.
The Founding Fathers stated the principles. It's up to us, now, to live up to them, better and better. Unfairly attacking the Founding Fathers doesn't really further that. That's just fodder for propaganda, for those who have an axe to grind against the United States. Only a fair and rational reading of history will get us closer to the truth.
The important part are the principles themselves.
It is a very common criticism of the Australian constitution that it lacks anything comparable to a "Bill of Rights". It is not just that it doesn't have a section by that title, it is that the content is largely missing. The Australian constitution is largely lacking protections for individual rights.
Australia had a referendum in 1988 to add a Bill of Rights to its constitution. It failed by a 69-31 margin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Australian_referendum#Rig...
It's a very common criticism of the US Constitution, that there isn't a direct enshrinement of "innocent until proven guilty." Again, that's not what matters.
Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian? Again, it's the principles in practice. If you answer yes, you've lost your argument. If you answer no, I should think you're lying.
Constitutionally entrenched rights are quite limited. There is the implied right of political communication, which is a lot less expansive than the US first amendment – it only covers political speech, non-political speech is not protected. Also, as the word "implied" specifies, it is not something explicit in the constitutional text, it is something the High Court has read into the constitution through its case law
There is a prohibition on establishment of religion or religious discrimination by the federal government (section 116). There is a right to jury trials in federal cases on indictment (section 80).
That's basically it, most of the provisions in the 2nd through 10th, and 13th through 15th amendments have no analogue in Australian constitutional law.
A coworker of mine once referred to Australia as "that policed state." I guess that's why.
something the High Court has read into the constitution through its case law
Have you just given a complete accounting of that? Are you saying that no principles from the Magna Carta come down to you through Australia's legal heritage in the commonwealth?
Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian? Do you, or do you not enjoy the benefits of rule of law? Do you have protected property rights? Can you reliably conduct business? Do you or do you not have rights?
You try and weasel out of this, with your use of the qualifiers "establishment" and "entrenched."
Well, if your position is that you don't actually have rights, that the government can take those things away from you on a whim, then you've lost your argument, because that, right there, is what is so great about the US Constitution. There are certain things the government is not allowed to do to us, which guarantees our freedom. Is it perfect? No, but it gives us a fighting chance.
On the other hand, if the case law basically amounts to your having rights, then your argument in the thread above also falls apart, because then Australia has the same things in principle that the US Constitution has.
So which is it? (Hey, I'll also accept a nuanced alternative between!)
I would feel sorry for you, if in principle, you do not have actual rights, and the government could play whatever games it wanted with you. That's basically the situation in China. (My wife is from Fujian, so I have a pretty nuanced view of the Chinese system.) And yeah, the US isn't perfect.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
But here, we at least have a fighting chance. Just by existing in that state, the United States keeps the world as a whole from sliding further towards tyranny. IMHO.
(Another point of history: When Hitler took power in Weimar Germany, the Nazis already had most of the legal framework for totalitarian rule in the laws as written. As it was, all of the laws touching on human rights had an out for the government, in case of emergencies. I hope you Australians aren't in that situation. It's not as if we in the US are completely free from shenanigans like that, as the Korematsu ruling illustrates. Though some of the current justices have said they'd do something about it, if they got the chance.)
It isn't a black-and-white thing "you have rights or you don't".
Constitutions serve several purposes – to lay out the basic structure of the national government (the executive, legislature, judiciary, etc); in a federation, to establish the division of powers between the federation and its constituents (states/provinces/etc); to establish procedures for amending the constitution; and to protect individual rights.
Different constitutions differ on how much they have to say about that last topic. Some constitutions say a lot, others little. The American constitution originally had little to say on that topic, but then the Bill of Rights and Reconstruction amendments added a lot. The Australian constitution is somewhere between the two: it has a bit more to say than the original (pre-Bill of Rights) US constitution had to say, but a lot less than the current US constitution has. Protection of individual rights is not an either-or, it is a matter of degrees, and the Australian constitution provides significantly less of a degree of it than the US constitution does.
It is however possible to have rights in practice without them being guaranteed constitutionally. In Australia, there is no constitutional right to freedom of non-political speech, but in practice the law allows a wide freedom for that–but not unlimited, and narrower than US law does. Part of it not being a constitutionally entrenched right, is that Parliament could change the law tomorrow to significantly narrow it, and one would have no recourse against such a law through the courts.
You seem to view constitutional law as being all about individual rights, when there is a lot of constitutional law which has nothing directly to do with that topic.