What are some good books that theorize America...

Interesting, I've only read selections (and it was years ago) and remember thinking what I said above. It might be worth reading the whole thing, but I'm not particularly interested in politics and government.

Joachim Fernau's "Halleluja", i don't know if it's been translated from german.

The New American Militarism is a good read if you want to learn more about the evolution of America's obsession with war. I think culture has changed somewhat since the book was written, though.

The Oxford History of the United States has macro insights as well as the narrative. It might help for this.

I'm probably going with this one, thanks. Anyone object to it?

>As Wood reveals, while the founders hoped to create a virtuous republic of yeoman farmers and uninterested leaders, they instead gave birth to a sprawling, licentious, and materialistic popular democracy.

fucken lol

Albion's Seed

What is the role of the absolutely fucking ENDLESS natural resources afforded to the Americans never mentioned in the US's early success? That's not to downplay the true achievements of the revolutionaries and early Americans, but unless they were run by literal children it would've been exceedingly hard to fuck up the nation-building project (hell, they actually did with the Civil War.)

Ignore all this shit. Read:
>Cecil Chesterton History of the United States
>The Rise of American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard
>Lincoln: The Man by Edgar Lee Masters

America, Jean Baudrillard.

This question you're asking though comes off as pretty infantile though, so if you were asking what does The United States stand for then you will probably flounder among critics and hacks until you move on to a topic which will help you come to a more nuanced position that stretches beyond just: "Is the U.S. in the bounds of my conception of ideal?".

If you want to understand the U.S. you should try to begin with getting a more fundamental grip on Western Ontology, Epistemology, and Semiotics too wouldn't hurt. Google can probably help you find authors that will take you somewhere here.

Personally, it's my opinion that you should read authors that will help you understand the component parts of America (see: above) and then you can go forward and come to a conclusion yourself. This is obviously going to be time exhausting but if you were trying to get into reading real material it's to be expected.

Good luck, user.

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Ignore this, Baudrillard was an hysterical French clown. Unless you want comedy don’t bother

Good argument.

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Ironically, I just read Baudrillard's America, and that prompted me to post this thread. The horrified, literally-shaking-in-my-boots perspective of a French intellectual was fascinating, but the feeling that he a homesick alien from outer space touring America in a UFO is inescapable. Valuable, with many statements of truth, but to be taken with a grain of salt, as any extraterrestrial analysis should be.

Hm. Been some time since I've read it but this isn't what I got from it at all; for one thing B rather likes America (it is not at all a 'comedic' book- more than a few of his books are rather serious, e.g. System of Objects), his feel for the wide open spaces out west, an obvious general vacuousness but also a reserve and enigmaticness of the people that this landscape reflects, vast spaces spanned by intimate-seeming telecommunications devices, a great feel for the Reagan '80's (much of which still applies). Just as one's friends see one far better than one does oneself, so sympathetic foreigners see what nationals themselves are simply unable to catch being too caught up in the culture itself.
Tocqueville fwiw not only consists of a travelogue through the states but the whole second part consists of essays pretty much concerned with topics of American character. Of course it has its socio-political aspects (and dealings with government) but it contains far more than what OP supposes- truly a great book, and with an odd prophetic feel.

Stop using the term Judeo Christian it's simply bullshit.

OP has it in quotes, senpai. This means that he already pretty much shares your view....

Is Judeo a martial art?

Frank L. Baum of the Wizard of Oz fame started his career constructing elaborate window displays for Wanamaker's department store. Karl Marx made a few extra bucks as the european correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during the civil war. Followers of the french utopian Charles Fourier set up communes in New England, at the time, they were often associated with the abolitionist movement and the transcendentalists. Polymath Buckminster Fuller was the grand nephew of Margaret Fuller. Westwards to California. The War Adorno, Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg end up in los Angeles out of all places. You might expect the concentration of scientists in the southern california to foster a culture of intellectualism, instead, you get satanism and the church of scientology. Feels like the late roman empire, drug addled children playing on collapsing military industrial machinery, strange cults from the east, the processed food industry hadn't yet mastered the art of making fake food look like real food, America's middle class homes served horrors out of the banquet table of a science fiction oriental despot. The ESALEN institute and the personal computer. Bucky Fuller's ideas were big amongst the hippies who built geodesic domes in their communes, as they stood for the dream of an organic fusion of man, nature, and technology. At a Wyoming ranch, John Perry Barlow, a descendant of mormon settlers, musical collaborator of Jerry Garcia and the Dead, laid down the myth of cyberspace as the ultimate cowboy frontier.

Ayn Rand's fashion sense and its debts to russian constructivism. Deleuze's romatization of America as smooth space. 9/11.

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Can't think of one off the top of my head but I do have a related literary thought about America.

It's interesting how this country hasn't produced its equivalent of an Underground Man. Perhaps Ignatius from Confederacy of Dunces or Holden Caulfield are the closest approximations. Even then their sort of lame and not as deep as the theme should be.

I'm the talking about the Cynic. It's considered unAmerican to be a pessimist. Other cultures have more tolerance for it because they understand cynics can have valid and perhaps even useful insights into society, they might even serve as a kind of error correction resource because they point out where there could be room for improvement. For this to transpire however, it needs to be an optimist interpreting a pessimist.

There's the crazy thing about America. It values freedom but you need to conform yourself to a certain idea of freedom. This belief in Freedom becomes itself a form of control. That paradox appears in all kinds of places, but most often the workforce.

American Corporations for instance on one level are thought to embody the validity and freedom giving superiority of free market capitalism, yet corporations are also experienced by their workers collectivized in many important respects. You're not free in many times when you're on the job, and yet your are participating in Freedom by doing it.

Freedom goes not only both ways good or bad but all ways. It goes sideways and diagonally. It produces an idea of a nation that lets some people experience the pinnacles of human possibility and yet uses others as fodder.

America would really benefit from a deeper understanding of itself from angles that are unexpected.The freedom to do so, however, is not allowed.

But if a hot take on my part. No time for editing.

>oy-yah!
Indeed. As kaballate!

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The idea that Freedom may spell a chaos. So why America has such a difficulty understanding itself comes down to precisely this. That the freedom to go many ways invites the potential for chaos. It's hard to find the people who behave and think exactly like you do, because the paradoxical social pressure to represent individualism means endless argument and disagreement in the attempt to assert it.

That chaos leads to an unmistakable ability to produce media, and some aspect of American media production makes it the most prolific in history, but by its very mechanism promotes quantity over quality. This effusion of human possibilities is not channeled in any specific direction, the realization of a collective purpose. But the imperative to pursue happiness in itself becomes such a constraining directive.

The ability to produce an indefinite number of trinkets is ultimately beneficial in that according to the law of large numbers eventually you will produce something of rare and hyphenated value. Industries amass around a given concept, and then entrepreneurs and other interests go at it attempting to extract all the possible value from the concept. The result is almost everything, but almost everything is not always what you need. You often just need one thing. The pressure to "take it all" becomes embodied in other dysfunctional aspects of American society such as overeating even to the detriment of one's health.

The only way to experience true freedom is to recognize the limits of Freedom writ large. That big Freedom is really a type of restraint, but overcoming it might allow you to become truly free.

America was never great. Maybe it was great for certain individuals but you could say that about any country.

That's a stupid opinion arrived at by comparing human society to the Garden of Eden. A respectable opinion is achieved by comparing to against other societies in history. The majority of people would come to the conclusion that in terms of broadness of participation/rights/freedoms/opportunity across ethnicities and classes, living standards and equality in the dispensation of justice it might just be the greatest society in history. I think it isn't because it will fall apart quickly but you have to respect the efforts and achievements.

What Tocqueville saw was the regrettable Americanization of the world; his impetus for writing was to stall this process if he could, and his means to attempt to do so were the Aristocratic ones of playing fair. There will be no more Tocquevilles.
Never great? I will not even pretend to know what that even means, because it means nothing.

Read this. Or read Scott Alexander's summary of it: slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/

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