Conversation

The closest thing to a homegrown religion in America is the belief that “you’re just as good as anyone else, and nobody’s any better than you.” And no it’s not redundant. The two clauses are distinct dogmas. It’s the standard by which “justice” itself is judged.
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A product of the post-Revolutionary era 1787-1824 that set the stage for Jacksonian democracy. Socially it was an ascendancy of Scots-Irish yeomen artisans, small farmers and “independent” men. Property qualifications for vote fell away, north abolished slavery, 1812 war fever
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I guessed as much. The interesting thing is that I see versions of that idea in black culture too. It's a minority tradition (Luke Cage? James Baldwin...?). A tendency to judge structural iniquities by a gold standard of the *average* human rather than the *exceptional* human
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Theres cultural interplay between yeomen and free blacks in the 19th C that planter elites were keen to stop both antebellum with laws against whites fraternizing with slaves and postbellum with Jim Crow. Huge elite fear of Farmer’s Alliance unifying poor whites and blacks
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Lot of Scots-Irish values of bootstrapping, personal independence, pride in skills that began as ethnic identity became a generic lower middle class and working class American ethos rolled later into American Dream beliefs
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As a religion it's got a weird mix of strengths and weaknesses. Compared to say Jewish or Asian immigrant cultures (which shares the pride in skills, bootstrapping, self reliance, but not egalitarianism or personal independence) it seems to build weaker, shallower institutions.
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I think to the extent institutions need to be able to reproduce themselves via stable power structures and retention of members (by curbing independence to leave/apostasy), it's weak. It produces good feedstock for other institutions via partial rejection of the values+migration
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Scots-Irish had a weird mix of individualism and clan mentality - originally from the borderlands then a militant Presbyterian Protestant minority at odds with both Catholic peasants and English Anglican absentee landlords. Many came as indentured servants, convicts or squatters
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