[rbetts]

So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.

[rayiner]

You’re retconning history from a mid-20th century civil rights lens. That lens focuses on increasing access to a civilizational order that has already been built. Its about expanding access to what white males already had. But it’s an inadequate lens for understanding how that order was built in the first place.

The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc.

England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa.

This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.

[rbetts]

Perhaps we agree that sustaining fair societies is a continual march of institutional and cultural building - not something imposed by a document or stamped by 1800's England. I would never argue that US-Iraq style nation building would succeed, for example. In fact, it is a counter example of violence being sufficient to get from 0 to 1. The US applied extreme violence over a population and failed to establish a persistent democratic order. The basis of civilization, as I read history, is more a consequence of surplus than violence.

I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0.

Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.