The whole fucking point of America is that 's it's the nation where you choose, better, we choose *together*, as opposed to just inheriting whatever centuries old baggage your family or culture's been saddled with.

Well the point of it is to do genocides very efficiently

Modern conservatism is deeply un-American, and personally I'm glad to see Democrats and liberals taking this approach instead of instinctively dropping into a crouch and trying to pass whatever increasingly ridiculous patriotism/authenticity test the Right has devised this week.

A huge personal stumbling block to attributing accurate family baggage percentages is going to be that I don’t know if my early 1900s Asturians were the fascist or the antifa sort…or is that too recent? Are we meant to reach back to Vikings, Picts, Visigoths, Romans? So many straws to reach for!

Yes! Thank you! The US was based on self-invention as a national identity, rather than national/religious/ethnic forebears - unlike any other country ever. Self-invention and self-government are the true "American exceptionalism" - which the GOP is intent on destroying.

Thinking your country is somehow "better" is itself a huge problem, very typical of colonialism. My own country has a centuries-old habit of this, I get it. But it's not a good thing. And the US seems unusually attached to baggage from the 1700s, from a global perspective.