It just feels difficult to have meaningful conversations on here sometimes. Like yes I dislike America, but I don't need to act like nothing good has ever come out of it. Maybe China is better than America, but I don't want Xi nuking American cities. I don't think war is suddenly cool and good because Ukraine has some nazis in it. Not everyone I disagree with is some bumbling mass of idiocy, a lot of times we just differ on certain core values.
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So what you're saying is that any good thing that has come from america exists in spite of America and not because of it
To be fair, America's oldest cities do have some amazingly beautiful cathedrals, parks, and museums that have not (yet) been torn out for chain restaurant strip malls
Unspoiled natural beauty is the best thing about America. Had some out of county folks stay with us and they were fascinated by the variety of birds and thought squirrels were super cute and interesting. 🐿️
As jank-ass as America is a country, truly the best thing they ever did was declare vast swathes of the country as national parks which would not be developed. They haven't been too good at not leasing over chunks of that unspoiled land to oil interests as neoliberalism has proceeded but still. Most other countries just don't have that much national park acreage unless the land is literally impossible to develop (thinking of Arctic Circle land here).
I have bad news for you
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I already feel like that in my own city - I walk around and see all this beautiful architecture and infrastructure and social investment from 80-100 years ago and it's like, damn, the 1930s is really the last time we did anything other than build disposable buildings for chain restaurants and spend the profits on war. Everything since then rests, unsustainably, on the back of that era.
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That's the part I feel most acutely aware of haha, every time I'm in a tunnel I'm like "wow they dug this without computers I sure hope someone from some criminally underfunded agency has looked at it since then and someone is listening to their recommendations :oh-shit: "
Which would be something that isn't America. I don't think it's unreasonable to define America by its ruling class. Its history was certainly shaped by it as well as the culture. The dominating contradiction of America has been that of the ruling class vs the poor. If the ruling class ceases to exist, or is driven out of power, then you have created something that is no longer America. It may be called America and be labeled as such on map, but it won't be the same country.
You might as well say that Imperial China had good things like creating Mao. You can say that, it just doesn't make sense, or is at least a specious statement. You're trying to attribute good to something that wholly opposes what is good, because the good exists in opposition to the bad. You can just say it's bad and move on. If you need further convincing, do this with slavery. The great thing about America is the Civil Rights movement. Sure but it wouldn't have existed had America not been horrible. And the problems it sought to solve were never truly solved. So why hold that up as an example of America being good?
Why do we need to be proud to be Americans? Why do we need patriotic socialism? I know why it exists, I'm asking why it needs to exist in the movement. After 9/11 there is no sense in trying to capture a leftist sense of patriotism in America. Context matters. We're in a different environment than we were back then. One where patriotism has been completely appropriated and owned by liberals/reactionaries. We simply can't carve out any of that space because the space itself is reactionary. Patriotism is not caring for your fellow citizens. At least not in the US as it exists. If we create socialism then we can talk about patriotism because it would be a different country. You can have patriotism for something that isn't America, but you shouldn't have patriotism for America.