America is over for irish/europeans?

topper75 wrote: »

There is actually worse than that though here: you have whole swathes of people who are convinced they know all they need to about the U.S. through their 'learnings' from watching films and TV shows!
Their loss.

I know. It makes me smile when I hear people declare that they have no interest in ever going to the US, even on a brief holiday, based on what they think they know about it from watching TV. But yeah ... it's their loss, ultimately.

It's a very varied place. I mean talking about the USA is about as broad as talking about the EU as if it were all totally homogeneous.

Some parts of the states are lovely, others aren't.

I think Trump and the extreme right political environment that he has around him are doing horrendous damage to the US' image abroad and also stirring up all sorts of toxicity in the US itself. How long that will last is unclear. The political landscape could flip dramatically as people start to get fed with him and the Tea Party stuff, or it could continue and become very strange.

The US has always has an extreme right. I mean while it was the land of opportunity for some it ran a full Apartheid regime in the south states that existed well into the 1960s and the attitudes continued far beyond the official ending of that stuff.

It's had McCarthyism, it rounded up Japanese Americans and locked them in internment camps purely based on their ethnicity during WWII.

On the other side of it the US has been very progressive on a whole range of social issue and is highly individualist in its culture.

It's also a country that suffered from a very distorted political system due to the impact of the electoral college and senatorial elections that add enormous weight to geographic representation rather than population representation. The result is the rural and conservative parts play a role in politics that is FAR beyond their population size. It would be like giving each Leitrim same number of seats as Cork and Dublin in certian elections because you had to treat each county equally despite size.

The result of that is crazy national politics that doesn't remotely represent the views of the vast majority of the US population. Instead it plays out some kind of crazy rural and southern Vs coastal and urban proxy civil war.

It's a country that has a good and bad sides and massive regional differences and it's something you have to weigh up when considering spending extended time there.

All I would say is for every MAGA Hat wearing Trumpeteer NRA fanatic there's at least one possibly totally under representated social progressive somewhere too.

It's a polarised society and it's got a lot of issues but it can still be interesting and energetic and offers high quality of life to those who are in the right place with the right resources.

I wouldn't write it off entirely but I would approach it with the view that the US isn't Western Europe and often has totally different attitudes to a lot of issues. It's a parallel but different culture and holds quite different values on a number of issue.

In terms of economic and lifestyles the differences have also narrowed a lot. The US used to be on a whole other level of economic opportunity to the rest of the developed world and Ireland before the 1990s was a developed country that had been through the economic wringer serveral times over so the gap was even bigger. Ireland in the 20th century was also very conservative and utterly Church ridden in terms of most public policy. The tables have turned on that and in many ways Ireland's now socially very progressive while the US seems to be running into the same kind of religious dogma inspired politics we just shook off. We seem to be going opposite directions on many of those issues.

I'd say we look at the US now with a more critical eye and also from a wealthier perspective too.

All I would say is the US is a maelstrom of conflicted points of view and that's in some ways what's made it what it is. Whether that can work long term, who knows!? It's still an interesting rollercoaster ride of a place if you've a good seat.