alt Hacker NewsThe US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding; but that moral platform differs significantly from our own today. The adjective "moral" does not mean "in good standing with what I believe is proper morality", it means "of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior".
I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.
Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
> The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding;
I guess you are referring to the principle of "no taxation without representation." Fair enough, but I don't find that consistent with twoodfin's comment, to which I am indirectly replying, that "America was a radical moral project when it was founded."
> Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
That is certainly how they wrote about it, but the point that suzzer99 and I are making is that they did not walk the walk. It's one thing to write fancy documents about all men being created equal, and it's quite another to actually emancipate the slaves or stop genociding the natives.
> The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate
I have a lot of lefty friends, and I don't know anyone who thinks anything remotely similar to that. Criticizing the ethical failings of a country in the hopes of improving it does not amount to a statement if illegitimacy. And I'm pretty sure that elected leftist politicians don't consider the government that they form to be illegitimate.