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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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What are “American values”? And where do they come from? Like why would those be “American” values, over anything else?
Calling the values that are supposedly held by Americans "American values" would be accurate even if they were the exact same values held by the people of Belgium. They would also be "Belgian values" if that were the case.
I doubt anyone here would suggest that "American values" were exclusively American.
So really just any values an American happens to believe in then?
No, the collected body of them. Hence the plural.
Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness
Go read the preamble to the constitution. It's quite different from what the "We the people..." 1776 people think it says. It's basically what the right would call socialism, taking care of one another when possible.
The first amendment protects the separation of church and state, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.
The second amendment protects your right to form a militia if none exist. Which always reminds me of the Black Panthers protecting black voters while armed.
There's a lot of technical amendments too. But what really gives me American pride is all of those who have continued to push for those rights to be upheld.
That’s your modern interpretation of those “rights” and document. The people who wrote that were mostly slave owners, who believed only land owning men should have any democratic rights. Black people were not even considered humans. Indigenous people were treated as pests. I mean…
That is true. While the proclaimed rights and values held true, America has failed to uphold those values from the very beginning.
However, there have also been people from the very beginning who have fought for those values. Columbus was seen as savage by his fellows, slavery has never had unanimously accepted, indigenous people weren't seen as pests to all.
Even the land owning part was contentious, which is why they left it up to the states to determine.
"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are specifically listed an unalienable rights in America's Declaration of Independence and could be seen as the origin for many other "American values".
The phrase itself is quite similar to John Locke's "life, liberty, and estate” from Two Treatises of Government written nearly a century earlier. You can look to Voltaire, Hume, or really any other Enlightenment period philosopher or writer of the time to see that the founding fathers were a product of that time, and that the ideas of the century or so leading up to American independence are enshrined as values or rights in Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.