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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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But something that has kind of thrown me off is if you meet someone from a developing country where terrible shit is happening they will say ‘fuck the government’ but they still love their country and will say so.

A lot of them love their country in the way people love the house they grew up in, not in the deep, ideological sense of Americans who have both a view of their nation as exceptional in practical terms and having a credal basis.

Having a creed is good - it can unite people and give purpose to fractured groups. Ask the Arabs.

However you can also fail by your own creed and be judged as a nation for it. This opens the door to the repudiation of the nation due to failing by its own standards.

A lot of nations in the world are honestly barely nations, products of the machinations of greater powers and historical chance. They don't necessarily even have a sensible history, let alone a creed. Even nations with history may not necessarily have a deep creed (many have basically adopted liberalism but it isn't as rooted in their founding as in America.)

So, if the nation is poor or corrupt it's easy to blame the government without feeling like the nation failed at its divine-given (or the secular equivalent) purpose.