Flashpost: America's Unstable Bargin

Last week, I saw an interview with Chinese analyst, Victor Gao who said: "China has been here for 5,000 years. Most of the time there has been no United States and we survived."

I have been thinking about this statement non-stop since I heard it and in true fashion, thinking about the historical implications. I think we Americans, often forget not only how young America is (250 years in 2026), but also how novel American democratic structure was in its inception.

I do not mean this in a Manifest Destiny way, but simply in the domino effect that the creation of America via a written constitution with an explicit Bill of Rights had on the rest of the world. It really is fascinating just how quickly America rose to be a global superpower.

Yet, I am also struck by the turmoil that has existed within America's ideological structure since its beginning. Very famously, Historian Edmund Morgan calls the rise of American Freedom with American Slavery - "America's greatest paradox." Personally, I do not use the word "paradox" because I think it belittles the role that slavery played in making ideas of American freedom possible - but that is another post for another time.

Paradox or not, it seems that America has never been able to disentangle this relationship between freedom/liberty and racism, to its peril. Think about it, the fact that we have only been a country for 250 years, but we have already had essentially two cultural wars rooted in eradicating white supremacy [the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement], literally every 100 years - suggests that perhaps America's original unstable bargain, can never be stabilized.

I still hold hope that America more than survives the current moment, but evolves into something better - but it is likely that evolution will never happen if we cannot find a way to input our ideals into practice in a way that is not exclusive.