For Context: I’m Chinese American, and I do not feel “ashamed” for my heritage, neither do I feel “ashamed” for being a US Citizen.
The CCP is not my fault. I do not feel any shame of saying I’m from China.
Similarly, the trump admin is not my fault, I voted Harris. I do not feel any shame for being American.
So what is the thought process of people feeling shame/guilt?
Because it collectively is our fault.
You don’t have to be at fault to be ashamed.
It’s not shame so much as deep embarrassment for the current state of our country. We look like fucking morons on the world stage. Thankfully we will move on from this stage in our history, but the stain may remain for decades to come.
Thankfully we will move on from this stage in our history
Any idea when? I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead before I see it.
We look like fucking morons on the world stage.
The only sort of solace to this, is that many other countries are clearly following the same path, so its not something inherent to just the US. Idiots are everywhere, and they vote.
Everyone is pointing to the US, but the same initial precursors are happening under their own nose.
Canada has voted against the populist right for the last decade. And each time the Conservative party chooses some one more right wing. And each time they get a bit closer to winning.
Trump galvanized people last time, scared them away from the right. This time he seems to be inspiring the right wing politicians, and people live it.
I don’t know if we can hold out much longer.
i hate when people shit on the US but don’t acknowledge any sort of solutions to put in their own country to avoid this situation
The easiest solutions to the US problem are already solved in most other western countries. That’s why the US is the first (and at this time, the only one) that turned fascist.
Legal guns are uniquely a US problem. Having a system that only allows 2 political parties is a uniquely US problem. Limitless (in the billions!) political donations is a uniquely US problem. Relying on the stock market for retirement is a uniquely US problem.
I’m not saying that the rest of the western countries turning fascist is impossible, but it’s much harder. Most fascists are contained to their fascist political party. So until there aren’t enough fascist individuals, they can be mostly ignored. Of course, once they are enough fascists, the fascist party will inevitably win, and there’s nothing that can stop them at that point.
A multi party system over time (decades or centuries even) turns to 2 parties, then turns to one. Corruption only speeds this up.
Ranked choice voting (shout-out !fairvote@lemmy.ca) is a pretty good solution
I agree on the guns tho
That only happens in the US because of first past the post system. In European countries new parties with significant vote share are created all the time.
In fact, in my country the opposite of what you say happened. First we had a dictatorship with a single party. Then democracy came and we had a 2 party system. No we have 4 major parties, in addition to some minor ones.
While agreeing for the most part, it’s painfully clear as someone in the EU how politics in the US empower far right rethorics everywhere else. While politicians in my country have condemned the actions of the US, the political landscape has shifted dramatically.
Everyone is pointing at the US because their politics trickles down into ours, not the other way around.
False equivalency.
How is it a false equivalency? It’s the same exact people astroturfing the movements in those places too. It’s literally the same phenomenon
Oh look a Canadian that can’t see their own descent into the far right fascist rabbit hole on the horizon. Somehow even watching the US, you seem to still be headed that direction as if it couldn’t possibly happen in Canada. Because… reasons?
I don’t know about others but I imagine for a lot its just guilt by association. I’ve definitely been feeling it for a while.
I also think a lot of people feel bad about their tax money going into the pockets of so many evil people for so many evil purposes. One of the reasons I personally stopped paying taxes. I wish my fellow Americans would join me on that end, but it isnt easy.
in my own case, it’s that I’ve (not intentionally but still) benefited from a system that subjugated others (natives, people of all colors, and women) to secure the national infrastructure I’ve directly profited from. Everything from education, clean water and housing, to medical care often shockingly focused on what ails and heals white males. And the sickening knowledge that the same ones who want to deport taxpaying workers who rarely benefit from the enormous amounts of money our country throws around are the same as me, living on land stolen from the people who lived here, who we basically exterminated. Finally, we use the trappings of a pseudo-democracy to declare all men are equal, but really, they mean wealthy heteronormative white men, because otherwise you’re the other and disenfranchisement should be expected.
That’s-just-the-way-it-is? only if you accept it.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions and behavior and being ashamed of who you are/where you were born.
One is a valid criticism of the ruling class ignoring the people’s desire for peace and social responsibility. The other is a mental health issue much like some people who are ashamed of the race or gender they were born as.
I get attacked by people unable to separate this conflation because I encourage people resistant to our government to pick up the goddamn American flag and wave it. To have some measure of pride in the institution we live in so others take it seriously when we demand improvement.
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions
That’s not really “shame”, not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.
I think it becomes shame because we recognize we’ve benefited from the system that has shit all over so many. Even indirectly, it’s hard to think about all the ways I’ve benefited from - just to say one thing - all the cheap open land (places like texas, nebraska, oklahoma, OR & WA) we got after putting the natives in concentration camps and murdering most of them.
Like, I try to enjoy a national park but then realize: this was someone’s home. Many peoples, in fact. We took it, put up gates, and charge people to harass the animals. And that’s the places we’ve saved from industrial pollution and factory farming.
I genuinely feel like a lot of people don’t think very much about their feelings or where they come from, and end up with really mixed-up or inconsistent values.
If you ask a lot of Americans why they feel the way they do about their country, negative or positive, they often become irritated or upset because most people just tie a lot of associations and emotions to other concepts and words. Which is fine, that’s how brains work. But I think if you’re involved in a democracy you should have some level of actual thought towards how you feel, what you want from your country and who should be representing those values. I can’t get people on either side of the political spectrum to care about any of that shit… which is why China will probably have the solar system in a generation.
China will probably have the solar system in a generation
OMG I just had a thought.
Remember what happened when Great Britain expanded and colonized stuff? 13 colonies?Independence?
OMG wouldn’t it be cool if China did that to like Mars, then the Martian colonists be like, “no fuck you CCP”, then:
Declaration of Independence
United Provinces of Mars
Constitution (hopefully a smarter constitution)
Martian Revolution
Becomes a Solar Superpower
Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the solar system.
Time is a circle lmao.
Literally just The Expanse timeline, but without blue goo and Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the UN. LOL
FOR MARS!
火星联合众国
Look, whatever you have to do to keep Elon out of the place, I am fully supportive.
Seriously though, I was watching a documentary on the International Space Station a few days ago and listening to how this major network was hyping up such a “huge American engineering challenge” and “doing the impossible as the world watched on” and I couldn’t help but grumble “China has made three stations in half the time and those are just practice for an actual series of much bigger projects.” Literally, America gets almost NO news on progress and achievements outside of the USA.
This is kind of the plot of Armored Core if you also made it a cyberpunk corporate dystopia.
I grew up in Indonesia, my sister is from Java, my brother is from Singapore. I’m natively from California, and I’m a huge white boy. I am ashamed that the country of the free, the country of the brave who had bounteous arms to welcome the downtrodden and abused of the world is no longer that place. Instead it’s the land of the secret police, tbe land of a pedophile traitor president who can’t stand any kind of criticism because he’s a fucking coward who dodged military service.
I feel deeply embarrassed about being from the US. It’s like hanging out with a group of friends out of necessity, later realizing they were all assholes, and trying to come to terms with the fact you spent so many years with them. I live outside the US now and I’m even more embarrassed to be from there. Every time there’s some culture shock my takeaway is either “wow how did I normalize this broken aspect of the US” or “I wish I was from somewhere that didn’t do those things to that person’s country”.
I also feel embarrassed and guilty over getting out of the US. I worked in tech and now I’m living off tech savings to start a life outside the US. I left my friends behind many of them are struggling financially, I left my community behind many of which are actively homeless, I chose to leave. Sure I’m leaving in part because my trans ass is on the chopping block but I see a lot of trans people fight harder instead of flee. I fought for so many years though and I couldn’t keep doing it so I left. The US did this to my community, made me confront choices I never wanted to make, I’m disgusted by having paid taxes to the war machine, and I justify working in tech as a way out of there but really I feel guilty over choosing to buy into that side of the US too so I could secure personal safety.
guilty over getting out of the US
Please don’t feel guilty for leaving somewhere you don’t like. That is your right. Stay safe, friend.
Living in the USA myself, I feel shame at how I normalized and rationalized the horrible aspects of this country. I’d already been a minimalist and was anti-consumerism from before I was an adult; but I had downplayed the severity of our systemic violence until it hit me personally. Above all I wish I was doing more to fight this system, like the people you described.
For as long as I am alive I will stay in the USA. I’m not going to give up on holding out here, as miserable as I’ve felt this last year. I’d like to believe something I do may someday inspire others who are braver and have more resources to do something more concrete.
Don’t feel guilty for seeing the signs and getting out whilst you still can. Millions of people throughout history haven’t been as fortunate.
Once Trump and Project 2025 is done with immigrants you can bet your arse the pendulum will swing onto LGBQT people in earnest
Not the pendulum. The gunfire.
We were raised with “pride,” not necessarily racially or ethnocentric, but a broader sense that transcended such boundaries. I grew up in the 80s-90s in the midwest, and we were taught America was a “melting pot” of cultures, ideas, and races, and that we should look forward to a time when whites are not the majority because the lines will fall away, the average color will be brown as we all mix over the next generations, giving us less reason to fight. And we should look forward to it, because that’s been our story so far - broken, impoverished immigrants came here looking for opportunity, and found it through hard work and smart thinking, and then became a part of our shared tapestry. We were taught to be proud of this, that we were stewards of this tradition in the best, most advanced country in the world.
And now, well. The basest instincts of people have been brought to the surface and America now stands as an openly white nationalist, isolationist, fascist-tinged autocracy where the ideals I grew up with seem long antiquated.
So yeah hard not to feel ashamed of what’s happened to our shared identity in just a few decades.
Ain’t that the truth. We were supposed to be better than this and we were supposed to be improving
Speaking only for myself: because the American government has, for 250 years, claimed to act on behalf of the American people. When it was liberating concentration camps and sending people to the moon, that was something to be proud of.* When it was upholding slavery and winking at Jim Crow laws, it wasn’t.
It’s a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and so he purports to speak and act on my behalf. That’s deeply embarrassing and shameful, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently to prevent it.
* (Yes, I know that even those “good” examples are complicated. I’m just forming an example here)
I don’t have pride in my government or its actions.
It was actively causing a lot of harm for most of its existence and is now turbo charging its ability to enshittify the world.
The LEAST I can do is make it clear we’re not all in support of this shit.
Love the country and people though. Lots of cool forests to roam and lots of people who don’t suck.
Anyone who has been embarrassed by a family member knows.
Well this last election really broke me from thinking of myself as an American. I just happen to live here.
Because the truth is our democracy is managed by oligarch propaganda. And our votes mean very little outside of local elections.
A vote for Trump and a vote for Harris were both going to continue the harms of the MIC and the fossil fuel industry. Yes, Trump is an accelerant. And I voted not to add gasoline.
But the fire was going to burn one way or the other.
Anyway, I think folks that feel ashamed still believe that their voice matters. Which is by design of the political and business class.
I feel similarly and to expand a bit its more the fact that second time around electing this fool proves that that majority of Americans are either horrible people or useful idiots which is incredibly depressing to know with certainty. For me, first time around was a fluke, second time is reality. I’m exploring citizenship elsewhere as a backup plan.
With all of the attempts to dismantle voting booths and artificially mess with the results every freaking election, why even bother voting anymore?
It’s like we tell the naysayers about voting as to why voting at all in America is pointless. But they still cling to some hope that they’re heard. Well guess what? When a candidate can still win by Electoral College despite the popular majority, that alone tells you how little your little voices mean. When an election can be won by stupid points.
China has been China-ing for a while, we get it. America’s actions are relatively fresh, and a majority of us DID choose him. While I’ll immediately reassure people that I didn’t vote for him, the fact that I have to separate myself from what’s going on comes from a sense of shame over that.
That said, if I met a Russian I wouldn’t necessarily hold the invasion of Ukraine against them… But I might have to ask if they really support that shit.
America’s actions are relatively fresh,
At the risk of being annoying as shit, that is not true. The only fresh part is that Europeans and/or white people are feeling a small part of the heat too.
was just going to say this. anyone who thinks this is new didn’t pay attention in history class, or that history class conveniently glossed over or romanticized our many, many atrocities.
American education has always been a complete shitshow. Recently I realized that I never actually knew anything about the war of 1812 because the extent of what was taught to us in fucking NY was like a single page in a textbook. Unless you took AP you didn’t learn shit.
I’ve learned more about it now, I’m just pissed that my education didn’t actually cover jack shit.
It’s by design
I don’t think public education is meant to make people informed, one of it’s goals is mass indoctrination. It’s the same in almost every country. I’m fortunate to be one of the people that recognize that. Me being in two spheres of influence make it so easy to identify what propaganda looks like, I seen it on both sides, two different countries, how media, like tv shows, portrays things.
They want obedient people to keep the cogs of the machine running. They want nationalism and absolute obedience to the state, the government.
In the US, at least, there are a lot of reliable sources on internet, and also public libraries… but of course, poor people don’t have time to educate themselves, just as its designed. The lower class, different countries, similar story.
Is there a sub-collegiate history class that doesn’t?
China has been eliminating poverty for quite some time. In fact, over the last 70 years, China accounts for 80% or more of the entire global poverty alleviation gains. The US has created more poverty in that same time.
But also, the US has been racist, violent, colonialist, jingoistic, misogynistic, and white supremacist since it’s founding. You know those propaganda images DHS posts on Twitter? Those are from the US’s time of westward expansion. This isn’t new. What’s new is that we have given up on trying to hide it, which is something we did for for the last 70 years. But even in the 40s we had concretation camps, we had open racism in all of politics, we had the second largest Nazi group in the world.
And after WW2? Operation Paperclip? Operation Gladio? The US openly staffed NATO with Nazi officers. The US openly advocated for Nazi politicians to lead West Germany. There were literal Nazis running West German after the war.
And then of course the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Irag wars. The Afghanistan war. The embargo against Cuba. The coup in Iran.
This is what the US is. Nixon banned heroin explicitly to imprison black people. We have slave labor producing billions of dollars in value annually. And we punish our prison slaves who don’t work by giving them solitary. All of that is massive gross human rights violations, things we’ve pretended to invade other countries for.
This is who we are. It’s not new.
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Ok, a majority of voters, not a majority of us, but as another commenter said if you sat this one out you basically helped the winner and I’m absolutely going to blame you for it
Ok, a majority of voters
Plurality of voters, didn’t get more than 50% of all votes
Considering voter turnout is ridiculously low in America the majority of us did not choose Trump. Just less than half of those that voted did which is 32% of the population. Also, Trump was not exactly the start of American decline, it is more like he is a symptom of it. A reaction to it if you would. American has been a violent an oppressive nation that we should be ashamed of for roughly 250 years. Trump is just very good at making that obvious.
Not voting is a vote for the winner by default. I highly doubt that every single person that didn’t vote did so due to being unable to.
Every comment like this pretends that our elections are based off the popular vote, and not the electoral college.
But over a year later, liberals still blame non-voters instead of their party for running unpopular candidates.
And voter turnout was good in swing states btw. Granted, I think Trump cheated.
a majority of us DID choose him
77m voted for Trump which is 32% of the voting age population.
As a percentage of the overall population it is ~23%.
Because I look at my country and what it’s done and feel insufficient for my failure to keep it from doing stupid and evil things.
Also the European and Canadian frustration with America and Americans is understandable, but it has an impact especially when you still think highly of those places and their people.
