The central image of the U.S. government of itself is that it is a model government for the world to admire and mimic. It is a gold standard in terms of governance of the country with respect to democracy and human rights, and in terms of world peace and addressing the world’s critical problems. In a sense we as Americans as well as the people of the world have more of less accepted this characterization of the U.S. and the American people, because for more than half a century from the end of WWII to about the beginning of the 21st century, so many of us in the U.S. and in the rest of the world have often tried to pursue this so-called American dream without seriously thinking what was this American dream, whether reality matches this depicted dream, whether it has been achieved, and more importantly how far is the actual U.S. government from this gold standard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article looks more carefully into the American government and its actual practice during its existence in the last 250 years so that we can have a better benchmark to assess the actual American government. For our assessment, we will consider the following metrics:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part I of this two-part article discusses the first two metrics of democracy and human rights. Part II discusses the other two metrics of peace and addressing world problems.<\/p>\n\n\n
Is the U.S. a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? This means whether the U.S. government is all the people (i.e., whenever we mention people, we are referring to all the people), whether the control of the government is in the hands of the people, and more importantly whether the purpose of the government is for the benefits of the people? First let us look at the Constitution of the U.S. The key to democracy is that the people have a right to vote and therefore the people are in control of the government, and the decisions of the government should then be for the benefits of the people. People elect representatives to vote for them, and the key is how many congressional representatives a state should have. From the very beginning when the U.S. Constitution was created in 1787 and ratified in 1788, a black person was counted to be equal to three fifths of a white person. This did not change until 76 years later in 1864 in the middle of a divisive and deadly 4-year civil war (1861-1865) when the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed. Then it took about 100 more years until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement finally gave more recognition to the rights of the black citizens. Furthermore, even today about 250 years after the U.S. was founded, black and and other types of Americans are still being discriminated in schools, housings, businesses, judicial courts, and almost every other aspect of life, and are being arrested and killed much more frequently by police. How the Native Americans were treated and are still being treated can be considered to be an example of genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are the decisions of the U.S. government for the benefits of the American people. There are several metrics we can consider. One metric is the top 1%’s wealth as compared to middle 60% of the American public (i.e., so-called middle class). After years of declines, American’s middle class now holds a smaller share (26.6%) of U.S. wealth than the top 1% (27.0%). [1] Another metric is the Gini index [2], the most commonly used measure of income distribution (the higher the Gini indes, the greater the gap between the incomes of a country’s richest and poorest people). According to Ref. [3], the Gini index for the U.S. is 41.50, which is near the highest among industrialized countries. It is important to note that the Gini index for China has gone up to 38.6, which is also very high and an important issue that China also needs to address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another area that needs to be looked at is the homeless issue in the U.S. The number of Americans living without homes, in shelters, or on the streets continues to rise at an alarming rate, as discussed in a recent Dec. 28, 2021 report by Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour. [3] In cities like Los Angeles, the homeless situation is especially bad, with over 66 thousand people<\/strong> in the county experiencing homelessness. This represents a 12% rise from 2019, with the city of Los Angeles reporting a 16.1% jump to 41,290. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a country supposedly as rich and as successful as the U.S., the above statistics may be surprising and unexpected. However, if you look at how our government leaders, especially among the Republican Party in the last couple of years, perform their jobs, when their objective is essentially solely for their own or their party’s self interests. They focus on outright lies to try to reverse election results, to forcibly occupy the nation’s capital and overthrow our legitimate government, to change voting regulations and procedures to disenfranchise the legitimate rights of voters, to gerrymandering electoral districts to favor specific political interests. When you take this into account, it is not surprising at all that we end up with the results mentioned earlier in a supposedly democratic and model country that the world is supposed to admire and mimic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, such unreasonable behavior of our political leaders is not just limited to the Republican Party, because in the realm of world diplomacy, we see so much biased news and outright fabricated and false news, especially with respect to China, coming from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. It is not surprising that there has been so much anti-China and anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. always describes itself as a country that is at the forefront of advocating and supporting human rights., and when another country who is not one of the U.S.’s own strategic partners has any hints of human rights issues, the U.S. would not pass any opportunity to attack that country on any hints of human rights violation. On the issue of human rights, again the U.S. considers itself to be a beacon for other countries to follow and to mimic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s look more carefully at the human rights record of the U.S. As it was already mentioned in the previous section on “Democracy,” it was written explicitly in the U.S. Constitution that a black person is considered to be three-fifths of a white person, and this was not changed until the 13th Amendment in 1864. Then the whole reconstruction movement was basically postponed for about 100 years before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s started to restore the basic rights of American black citizens. Even now in 2022, the American blacks and other minorities still suffer significant discrimination and are much more likely to be arrested, killed, or found guilty in the judicial system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Native Americans were never treated properly, their lands were stolen; they were attacked or killed, and then put into reservations. Living in reservations is comparable to living in the 3rd world, with inadequate housing, high unemployment, low wages, often with income coming only from social security, disability benefits, or veteran compensation, poor health with significantly shorter life expectancy, with reservation land tightly controlled by the federal government. [4] <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Native American children were usually educated and brought up in American Indian Residential Schools, which were established in the U.S. from the mid 17th to the early 20th centuries with a primary objective of “civilizing” or assimilating Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture. These schools forced removal of indigenous cultural identifiers: cutting the children’s hair, having them wear American-style uniforms, forbidding them from speaking their indigenous languages, and replacing their tribal names with English-language names for use at the schools, as part of assimilation and to “Christianize” them. The schools were usually harsh, especially for younger children who had been forcibly separated from their families and forced to abandon their Native American identities and cultures. Children also sometimes died in the school system due to infectious disease. Investigations later in the twentieth century have revealed many documented cases of sexual, manual, physical and mental abuse occurring mostly in church-run schools. [5] When we remember how the U.S. treated the Native American, it makes one wonder how can the U.S. with a straight face accuse other countries of mistreating their minorities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We should also remember:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then we should need to remember the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942-1945, when they were rounded up from their homes in various parts of the Western U.S. and shipped to internment camps. [9] These include many Japanese Americans who were born in this country and served in the U.S. military fighting against the Japanese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We will continue the rest of this article in “Tale of Two Standards in World Politics – Part II” in the “Other” category page in the same issue of this website [9]. In Part II, besides discussing the other two main metrics of “Peace” and “Addressing World Problems,” we also revisit the American Dream issue and then provide a conclusion summarizing both parts of this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This ends the first part of this article “Tale of Two Standards in World Politics – Part I”. In Part I, we discuss the U.S. government from the perspective of democracy and human rights. We conclude that contrary to what the U.S. government and mass media have always tried to depict that the U.S. is a model in terms of its democratic government and human rights that the world should copy and mimic. This is not saying that the the U.S. government is a worse government than that of other countries, but we do want to emphasize that the U.S. government has not been a model government for the whole world to copy and mimic. We should acknowledge that there may not be one model of government that is always best suited for all countries at all times. We should be willing to let other countries to try their own form of government, and be willing to coexist with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] See, e.g., https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2021-10-08\/top-1-earners-hold-more-wealth-than-the-u-s-middle-class<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2] See, e.g., https:\/\/www.indexmundi.com\/facts\/indicators\/SI.POV.GINI\/rankings<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n [3] See, e.g., https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/show\/whats-behind-rising-homelessness-in-america<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4] See, e.g., http:\/\/www.nativepartnership.org\/site\/PageServer?pagename=naa_livingconditions<\/a> and https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/realspin\/2014\/03\/13\/5-ways-the-government-keeps-native-americans-in-poverty\/?sh=14b1b0db2c27<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [5] See, e.g., https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_Indian_boarding_schools#cite_note-Stephen_Magagnini-3<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [6] Ghosts of Gold Mountain<\/em>: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Continental Railroad<\/em>, by Gordon Chang, Mariner Books, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [7] The Chinese in America<\/em>, by Iris Chang, Penguin Books, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8 See, e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act: https:\/\/www.history.com\/topics\/immigration\/chinese-exclusion-act-1882<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8] See, e.g., https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHuman Rights:<\/span> <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Brief Summary of Part I:<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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