The more I think about national comparisons the more it seems that homogeneous, conformist societies are the winners. The Scandanavian countries provide further examples. America seemed to do a lot better under the primacy of American Nationalism, which was sort of conformist (“no matter where we come from, we are all one people with common values”) but we’ve deprecated that in favor of race/gender/etc identity squabbling.
Ultimately, it seems way easier to make policies that protect everyone when we think they will benefit “us” rather than “them”, and the policies work better when they can make certain cultural assumptions (when the expectation is that people conform to society rather than society conforming to every individual) rather than striving to cover every single variation of human.
This isn’t to say conformity is better, only that it has certain advantages that people massively attribute to the policies it begets (the idea that America could be the harmonious utopia we imagine Scandanavian countries to be if only we imported their policies).
In the unlikely event that this isn’t a trolling comment, my “American Nationalism” above refers to the post-Civil-Rights-era idea that we should prioritize our American identity over our racial or ethnic identities (ergo I’m talking about the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century).
By claiming that such an ideology existed or that it had some benefits, I’m not implying that it was ubiquitous, uniformly distributed, or otherwise perfect.
My point was "identity squabbling" predates any universal American national identity, so it wouldn't be a deprecation of the said American nationalism, but a reversion to the pre-independence/antebellum/civil-war/reconstruction/pre-civil-rights-movement race- and gender-identity norm.
Ultimately, it seems way easier to make policies that protect everyone when we think they will benefit “us” rather than “them”, and the policies work better when they can make certain cultural assumptions (when the expectation is that people conform to society rather than society conforming to every individual) rather than striving to cover every single variation of human.
This isn’t to say conformity is better, only that it has certain advantages that people massively attribute to the policies it begets (the idea that America could be the harmonious utopia we imagine Scandanavian countries to be if only we imported their policies).