For all the complex and serious problems the US has, I think it's still generally a stable and safe place with plenty of opportunity and nice people. I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies. Few people seem to risk their lives to defect from the US. And they wouldn't even have to because the US lets you leave!
> I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies.
...but almost every developed country with greater social safety nets and less inequality performs above the US on all measures of “safety,” whether you’re talking about actual violence or more abstract things like infant mortality. How do you square that material reality with the current state of the US?
I think in general moving towards allowing people to achieve equality themselves is good. I think going hell-bent on more-of-less-equal starts to bring out the monsters in people.
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but the US fails wildly on this metric as well. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics are widespread, the two party systems limits democratic choice to very narrow, right-leaning bounds, far less than that available in other representative democracies. Protests from the left are almost uniformly met with violence. By what measure in the US is one allowed to “achieve equality”? Even if we consider the advancement of civil rights, the average material conditions for the poor and most minority groups have been on the decline for decades. Likewise, the number of incarcerated people in the US far surpasses explicitly authoritarian regimes like China.
