[troutwine]

> What sort of logic supports that American values are those held by a minority of Americans. What possible values suggest they are the normal ones?

There's a very present "last bastion" framing in most of the right-wing media I track. It'll depend on exactly what the foundational beliefs of the community are that drive this framing -- John Birch society derivative folks arrive here via a different path than white supremacist survivalists and them a different path than evangelical fundamentalist Christians -- but it's common enough. It goes hand in hand with the notion that the US has fallen from the ideal set forth by the Founders and that only your in-group really gets it and has a hope of restoring it.

Alex Jones is a good, mainstream-ish example. Dude's a Bircher and has spent decades coaching his audience to believe that Globalists are in league with Satan and intend to destroy humanity, if only they could get the US out of the way. Satan/The Globalists are _this_ close to succeeding. Once they do, Real American Values will disappear from the world, ushering in the post-human era. Jones preaches survivalism (sorta, feeding your neighbors to your daughters will give your daughters prion disease) to his audience and I hope you see how the two strains of thought would fester into a framing like you've called out.

[joshka]

Thanks - as a non-American living there, this is pretty helpful to further my understanding.

I wonder whether there's any actual examples of the values being brought back from a point where they have disappeared.

[ianai]

“Evil Geniuses: the unmasking of America” was pretty good at tracking this. Basically politicians are using the framing of the glorified past within “American values” to manufacture dissent and create us/them other-izing between US citizens. The book explains it much more in depth. Get people to stop thinking of their fellow citizens as part of the same group as them in a fundamental way and chaos reigns. Maybe eventually it’s civil war. (It definitely drives that country from thinking of international factors.)

Probably another interesting definition of American values would be the ones held in foreign people. Sort of in the same way there’s who you are and then there’s the person in the minds of everyone who knows you. Except the US is a super power that’s done a lot of steering the world over the last century and that’s instilled some common practices across the world. Like citing CDC guidelines or using the US currency for reserve.

[8bitsrule]

Many American values are fuzzy, hard to make out; how they are applied is only visible if you dig into history. Not the history in textbooks though ... at least until you've innoculated yourself with Howard Zinn's history. Pay particular attention to how those values - say, 'all men are created equal' - apply to minorities.

[troutwine]

> I wonder whether there's any actual examples of the values being brought back from a point where they have disappeared.

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Are you asking about examples of people that have been de-radicalized?

[joshka]

To be clearer - given Jones asserts that the reversal of satanists/globalists is good, are there examples of where such a reversal has had positive measurable effects on a society? I'm looking to understand perspectives opposite to my own here (as an atheist, non-American, liberal leaning person).

[troutwine]

> given Jones asserts that the reversal of satanists/globalists is good, are there examples of where such a reversal has had positive measurable effects on a society

Uh, it's not that kind of belief system. The notion that we should order society by measurable things is not necessarily a universal belief, even if it's one I agree with personally. Last bastion apocalyptism like I've described doesn't really do "measurable".

[mensetmanusman]

One common example is that religious cultures have a family culture that can propagates through time by having replacement levels of offspring.

So far, to date, every secular and atheistic culture tends towards inverting the demographic pyramid by having about half the required number of offspring to stabilize their culture/viewpoint through time.

This view assumes that there is any meaning to life, of course.

[joshka]

And the counter example on that is that disproportionate taking of POC adult males from the community has a destabilization effect on that community / family.