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Nobody said it was for Britons only…? Or one fixed ancestry or one sect.
Creed isn't ever instead of kinship, virtues, and values. It's part of the framework. For one, that's a really odd dichotomy, and for two, creeds are statements of belief. Beliefs are downstream of virtues and values, and virtues and values are part of the fabric of a society - culture - which is part of kinship. What makes you part of one people and not part of another is not blood, or certainly not merely blood.
You were literally appealing to a quote about shared ancestry. You again are committing an error. People are socialized into various beliefs by culture. But those socializations do not prevent them from adopting political creeds.
Historically, many of the first immigrant groups were first rejected precisely on kinship, virtue, and cultural grounds: "They're not like us, they're not Protestant, they don't share our manners." They became legible as Americans because they adopted, appealed to, and fought under a set of principles. They became American by virtue of this.
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This is empty without a why, because objectively all men aren't equal. They are only equal in certain philosophical or moral ways. What is the philosophy that informs this? People have to believe in that narrow(er) definition of equality before they can be said to believe in this.
If this is about you rejecting any foundation not founded in a dead god then let's not waste time. The belief in equality is naturally not an appeal to absolute equality and was never understood that way. Its about our shared sapience, our shared moral agency. It is not an empty claim because it was never a claim of absolute equality in every way, and no one understands it as such regardless of the philosophical framework and presuppositions that guide them to that belief.
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Yeah - idiocy. Every classical republic or democracy practiced exile for this reason.
Are you promoting exile? It's fundamentally at odds with the very values that bind us. A creedal nation such as ours does put outer bounds on what you can do to people, even when you think their beliefs are wrong or dangerous. You don't get to exile or dispossess them for failing a catechism. You punish crimes, not heterodoxy. The very act of making heterodoxy a crime undermines our own shared creeds with regard to liberty.
That's not a bug, it's the shift from ancient ethnic models to modern constitutionalism. If what you really want is a return to something closer to a classical citystate that is culturally homogeneous, willing to expel the wrong thinkers then say so. Otherwise, I don't see what point you are trying to make. You act as if the Reconstruction Amendments, incorporation of the Bill of Rights, and the gradual rejection of religious tests are all just mistakes.
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The constitution, maybe - state governments, no. So clearly the founders of this country and you are at variance. Basically the story you're telling is the federal government consumed state and local rights. Ok, sure. That's a bad story, not a good one.
Then your are arguing for going back to something different entirely. Its clear that the federal law pointed in a different direction than many state laws. It's also clear that the ideals ratified in our constitution were forced upon the states after the civil war. You think this is bad, fine you do you. But that is literally a manifestation of our national creed supplanting smaller creeds. It is the story of people saying the "united states are" to "the united states is" which was gradual.
And let's be clear on exactly which rights were consumed, primarily those that conflicted with the bill of rights.
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of course. There is zero enforcement, and ultimately because this is all malleable and subject to individual opinion and consensus it's a losing proposition. I think it's flatly impossible to do creedal nation as you describe. Enforcing it would require self violation of its own principles.
As i said from the beginning, you can't enforce, you can only try to preserve and educate. That was always true for our nation.
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it's also the means by which the right is shown to be non-existent. So… there is no such thing as a right, then. Just consensus.
No this is completely backwards. It's the only means by which rights can be shown to exist as real protections. Gods don't defend rights, ideas in the mind don't defend rights, concepts on paper don't defend rights. A right only exist so far as it's protected. Without institutional protection a right is merely the idea, the principal. Principals can and do exist independent of protections. That would be where a concept of trampling a right comes from. People can and do come to various conclusions based on various presuppositions (even with the same presuppositions) on what those rights should be.
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Yeah, no. This completely mischaracterizes the historical record. The facts are the opposite. Kinship, religious sentiment, and moral virtues aren't a retreat from but a recovery of the founders' explicit design, in their own words, which integrated these elements as essential for viability. Stripping them away denudes the document of its foundations and reduces it to abstract legalism.
The founders viewed virtues, religion, and morality as indispensable for self governance. They're prerequisites to the constitution and republican form of government.
Again, you are making a claim I am not. I never said a people should be free of virtue, or a democratic society can function well with a poorly behaved people with no sense of civic duty. I reject the notion, implicit in yours an other posters, that this is at odds immigrants with various different backgrounds adoptingt our principles and living virtuous, productive, lives that are exemplars of civic duty.
As we moved away from ethnic privileges, religious preferences, and different classes of citizenry we did so by appealing to our creeds such as equality and liberty. As I said, our founders adopted ideals greater than themselves. There was a disharmony from the very beginning between our ideals and our actions.
