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Whenever I explain the "USA" to (Eastern) Europeans, I always simply state the notion: "diverse country of the extremes". Yes, widespread obesity, but health o

Whenever I explain the "USA" to (Eastern) Europeans, I always simply state the notion: "diverse country of the extremes". Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc. Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the best research institutions and universities in the world. Some companies with the highest R&D spending anywhere. Many of the foremost intellectuals end up living there once they enter the international stage. Backwards, conservative, patriotic? Yes, but also extreme progressive bubbles and widespread leftist sentiments. "American elitism"? Largely yes in many ways, but also very friendly, welcoming to strangers (even though they are just hyperbole with excitement in many contexts compared to us). When I read the comment section here it seems like it fits my narrative. The US, country of the extremes. Drinkers, and puritans. Now fight! By the way: The article is so speculative, how can you discuss this in such earnestness? My problem with The Atlantic in general. Many articles are kind of "grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that", which then has this "intellectual" appearance about it, but says very little. Not convincing at all. The US is like a social experiment. Deal with your racism, alcohol, health, drug legalization, gender debates, sjw/pc culture, and all that, and please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight (though sadly that doesn't always work out it seems). And before I get angry responses: It's written somewhat tongue in cheek, extend me the courtesy of not assuming the worst about my person.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gideon13 5y ago
Interesting conflation of "patriotic" and "conservative" with "backwards".
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago
  My comment is not about giving the most nuanced picture of the US, but about the caricatures that seem to exist within, sometimes in stark contrast to one another. "USA USA USA" chants, american flag on the lawn, big pickup trucks, the possession of firearms, monster trucks, american football, people who attend WWE events, "Trump voters" and MAGA hats (let's throw it in there, because it's tied into that), there's a certain stereotype there, and it's not exactly tied to those people being the cultural or intellectual elite of the country.
  - stephencanon 5y ago
    I would say that "nationalist" is the more accurate term for this behavior. There's nothing patriotic about it.
    - potatoman22 5y ago
      To be a nationalist is to be a patriot.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - stephencanon 5y ago
        Orwell said it well: "By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power."
- vortegne 5y ago
  "Conservative" and "backwards" are definitely the same thing though.
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your account has done a lot of that and we're trying for a different sort of site. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That would also include not calling names or being snarky in comments here.
tolbish 5y ago
Policymakers don't really have to deal with the realities of what you mention. Like the bad education, for instance. That isn't really "your problem". The externalities of an awful public education system are borne by the unfortunates. Not you, who did things right, and not the people like you, who it is important you identify with. And so you're not going to give that issue anything more than lip service. ^ also written somewhat tongue in cheek
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The fundamental moral basis of the US is that some people are born better than others. If you have money, you're one of the chosen ones. The more money the better, without end. The losers who don't have money are not your problem. If they were as superior as you are they'd sort themselves out and have money too. But they don't, and of course that just proves how inferior they are. It's absolutely an 18th century aristocracy with Internet.
  - notyourday 5y ago
    If it were the case, we would not have had 1st post illegal immigrant generation do better than those whose parents were born in the United States.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    This simply doesn't match the facts. For example, the United States ranks near the top of the World Giving Index, which certainly wouldn't happen if "the losers who don't have money are not your problem". Importantly, this is a man-on-the-street level index, not a government spending index, meaning it more or less assesses the charitable attitudes of the people in various countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index
    - arthur-st 5y ago
      Other countries have more functional social safety networks, so lesser emphasis is put on individual charity to compensate for environmental failings. To give you an anecdotal example, where I’m from American way of going about charity is often perceived as a form of virtue signalling/paying off your sins.
watwut 5y ago
> health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money Doing elite sport in those competitive teams is not all that much healthy. It is tangential to your main point, but top level leagues are not in opposition to un-health. The healthy thing is moderate amount of sport, where you get yourself to improve performance, but don't push yourself to limit. Cheap casual sport that dont require gym membership but provides some social outlet would be better for average person health. > How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc. None of that is healthy and a lot of that contributes to obesity issue. Fad diets lead to yoyo-ing and to weight gain in the long term. It also causes proper health issues on its own.
capableweb 5y ago
Neither of the things you've listed sounds like diversity, it sounds like inequality. Why is half the country without proper education while the other ones are in the best research institutions in the world? And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves? The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot. Wages are so low in some places that people simply walk out of their work because they can't survive on it, while it's so high in other places that you barely have to do anything and still pull in enough to put you in the 1% of the world population when it comes to income.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  Inequality does create diversity as it gives people a vastly different life experiences.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    While that is technically true, it doesn't create the type of diversity you can really tap into since some folks are too poor to realistically participate in society, and a lot of society is too segregated for different viewpoints to be in the same place.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Just wow... I guess you would have different sentiment if you would be on the poor side of the inequality scale. Sentiment about poverty being good because it gives 'vastly different life experiences'? One of the things we can be actually proud here in Europe (mainly western part though), a rather strong middle class and tons of help to the poor (maybe too much according to some). I know its nice to find cheap poor folks desperate to work for peanuts, and you can pat yourself in the back how the environment gives everybody a chance to thrive, but that's not an American reality, just a self-perpetuating pipe dream. US is great for the ultra-rich, good for the rich, not-so-good for middle class and outright shit for the poor. But good luck trying to get this accepted in the US where folks are spoon-fed from the childhood how US is best in everything, rather than some healthy amount of critical thinking. Generally everybody, but in my humble experience Americans (and French) especially, profit greatly when (have been) living abroad for some time. Then we can have actual conversations what is great here and there and what outright sucks.
refurb 5y ago
I think the media coverage has twisted your view of the US. As someone who immigrated to the US, if you travel the country it seems like any other country. Rich people and poor people. Left wing and right wing. Religious and the atheists. I mean Americans could list a similar number of stereotypes about the British (for example), but if you’ve ever visited there you’d realize they’re not that different than anyone else.
- criddell 5y ago
  What are the British stereotypes? The only one I can think of is from watching BBC produced television series. It seems like the British response to any trouble, minor or large, is to put the kettle on.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Even as an American I know there are massive British stereotypes by class. For example, football hooligans with cockney accents.
graphtrader 5y ago
People in the US often want things both ways too. People want giant alcohol super markets with every type, size and price point of alcohol imaginable and then people want to bitch that other people have drinking problems to make a point about their a priori political beliefs. Very American.
dayvid 5y ago
When I was in Japan, I met a guy who was a manager of a Japanese supermarket branch in Hawai’i for some time. He said in Japan, people are usually about the same. But in America, people are either really smart or really stupid.
- NateEag 5y ago
  It's hard to generalize correctly about a population of three hundred million. That's especially true when doing it based on personal experience.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Hawaii is a place where that might be fairly said, though. Setting aside island natives, Hawaii attracts a lot of people. The reasons for wanting to visit and preceding life situations vary quite a bit. The result is you do meet a lot of characters, at least on the big island.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      I bet Hawaiians working in tourism meet a lot more people than I do. Maybe as many as two hundred a day (granted, only for a few minutes at those volumes). If you manage to do that five days a week for thirty years, you meet 1.4 million people, or 0.4% of the US population. Obviously in most cases you'd have no idea about how smart most of these people are. You'd probably remember the ones who did especially dumb or especially smart things in the three minutes you interacted with them, which doesn't actually tell you much about how smart they are. It's even worse for that than a puzzle-trivia interview. I think my point stands, even for a Hawaiian in tourism.
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        I don’t suppose there is any scenario in which you would give human observation credit. Regarding sufficient sample size, a person in that scenario would achieve it in weeks, or perhaps a year, assuming variance in types of visitors over the seasons.
dougmwne 5y ago
I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:) Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often operate like 50 small-to-medium sized countries. And there's less of a push to homogenize the country since one of our political parties fights against federalization. All that adds up to a country with a whole lot of variation. Describing what Americans are like is pretty useless. We're like everything.
- golergka 5y ago
  Russia is bigger in terms of area, just two times smaller in terms of population, but 10 times more uniform, at least. You wouldn't be able to tell apart two typical provincial Russian towns from the opposite sides of the country. So, no, just the size itself doesn't seem like a complete explanation for this.
  - tamariskneo 5y ago
    While size isn't a complete explanation, its important to consider the population distribution as well. Russia may be geographically larger but the population is much more concentrated than it is in the US.
  - kesselvon 5y ago
    U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban. Russia has the same thing - folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town. If anything, Russia and the U.S. are pretty similar in terms of regional and cultural tensions.
    - golergka 5y ago
      > folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town Not really. I live in Moscow, and financially I have a very different life from someone in a small town. But in terms of the culture and people around, the difference is not that big. Here's a random youtube vlog about a small russian town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w It's on the opposite edge of the country, and yet, I would only be able to tell it apart from Moscow's residential neighbourhoods by how tall the buildings, built from the same panels, in the same design series, are.
martincmartin 5y ago
"'grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that', which then has this 'intellectual' appearance about it, but says very little." Sounds like a lot of HN, TBH.
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago
  I would say it sounds a lot like social studies. But with those there is at least some scientific rigor (I hope). Journalists often just spin speculation based on carefully selected theories into a narrative, put it into long form, sprinkle it with some writing skills, and sell it as profound. And 'The Atlantic' is especially guilty of that (according to my experience). And they're guilty of it with this one once more (imo). The Atlantic: Pseudo-profound nonsense targeted at elites.
mr-wendel 5y ago
> please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight I'm glad this isn't completely tongue in cheek, because I consider this a huge compliment. I'm extremely critical of the USA, where I do live. The name of the game for the last ~100 years has been to allow wild cultural experimentation so long as cash is always king and big business gets bigger. Both aspects have had worldwide repercussions and especially given US foreign policy everyone is allowed a seat at the table to love+hate the US. The US is a social experiment and it's had some incredible fruit. It just feels so precarious with such incredible social and economic divisions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gideon13 5y ago

Interesting conflation of "patriotic" and "conservative" with "backwards".

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago
My comment is not about giving the most nuanced picture of the US, but about the caricatures that seem to exist within, sometimes in stark contrast to one another. "USA USA USA" chants, american flag on the lawn, big pickup trucks, the possession of firearms, monster trucks, american football, people who attend WWE events, "Trump voters" and MAGA hats (let's throw it in there, because it's tied into that), there's a certain stereotype there, and it's not exactly tied to those people being the cultural or intellectual elite of the country.
- stephencanon 5y ago
  I would say that "nationalist" is the more accurate term for this behavior. There's nothing patriotic about it.
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    To be a nationalist is to be a patriot.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - stephencanon 5y ago
      Orwell said it well: "By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power."
vortegne 5y ago
"Conservative" and "backwards" are definitely the same thing though.
- dang 5y ago
  Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your account has done a lot of that and we're trying for a different sort of site. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That would also include not calling names or being snarky in comments here.

tolbish 5y ago

Policymakers don't really have to deal with the realities of what you mention. Like the bad education, for instance. That isn't really "your problem". The externalities of an awful public education system are borne by the unfortunates. Not you, who did things right, and not the people like you, who it is important you identify with. And so you're not going to give that issue anything more than lip service. ^ also written somewhat tongue in cheek

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
The fundamental moral basis of the US is that some people are born better than others. If you have money, you're one of the chosen ones. The more money the better, without end. The losers who don't have money are not your problem. If they were as superior as you are they'd sort themselves out and have money too. But they don't, and of course that just proves how inferior they are. It's absolutely an 18th century aristocracy with Internet.
- notyourday 5y ago
  If it were the case, we would not have had 1st post illegal immigrant generation do better than those whose parents were born in the United States.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  This simply doesn't match the facts. For example, the United States ranks near the top of the World Giving Index, which certainly wouldn't happen if "the losers who don't have money are not your problem". Importantly, this is a man-on-the-street level index, not a government spending index, meaning it more or less assesses the charitable attitudes of the people in various countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index
  - arthur-st 5y ago
    Other countries have more functional social safety networks, so lesser emphasis is put on individual charity to compensate for environmental failings. To give you an anecdotal example, where I’m from American way of going about charity is often perceived as a form of virtue signalling/paying off your sins.

watwut 5y ago

> health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money Doing elite sport in those competitive teams is not all that much healthy. It is tangential to your main point, but top level leagues are not in opposition to un-health. The healthy thing is moderate amount of sport, where you get yourself to improve performance, but don't push yourself to limit. Cheap casual sport that dont require gym membership but provides some social outlet would be better for average person health. > How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc. None of that is healthy and a lot of that contributes to obesity issue. Fad diets lead to yoyo-ing and to weight gain in the long term. It also causes proper health issues on its own.

capableweb 5y ago

Neither of the things you've listed sounds like diversity, it sounds like inequality. Why is half the country without proper education while the other ones are in the best research institutions in the world? And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves? The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot. Wages are so low in some places that people simply walk out of their work because they can't survive on it, while it's so high in other places that you barely have to do anything and still pull in enough to put you in the 1% of the world population when it comes to income.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago
Inequality does create diversity as it gives people a vastly different life experiences.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  While that is technically true, it doesn't create the type of diversity you can really tap into since some folks are too poor to realistically participate in society, and a lot of society is too segregated for different viewpoints to be in the same place.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Just wow... I guess you would have different sentiment if you would be on the poor side of the inequality scale. Sentiment about poverty being good because it gives 'vastly different life experiences'? One of the things we can be actually proud here in Europe (mainly western part though), a rather strong middle class and tons of help to the poor (maybe too much according to some). I know its nice to find cheap poor folks desperate to work for peanuts, and you can pat yourself in the back how the environment gives everybody a chance to thrive, but that's not an American reality, just a self-perpetuating pipe dream. US is great for the ultra-rich, good for the rich, not-so-good for middle class and outright shit for the poor. But good luck trying to get this accepted in the US where folks are spoon-fed from the childhood how US is best in everything, rather than some healthy amount of critical thinking. Generally everybody, but in my humble experience Americans (and French) especially, profit greatly when (have been) living abroad for some time. Then we can have actual conversations what is great here and there and what outright sucks.

refurb 5y ago

I think the media coverage has twisted your view of the US. As someone who immigrated to the US, if you travel the country it seems like any other country. Rich people and poor people. Left wing and right wing. Religious and the atheists. I mean Americans could list a similar number of stereotypes about the British (for example), but if you’ve ever visited there you’d realize they’re not that different than anyone else.

criddell 5y ago
What are the British stereotypes? The only one I can think of is from watching BBC produced television series. It seems like the British response to any trouble, minor or large, is to put the kettle on.
- tolbish 5y ago
  Even as an American I know there are massive British stereotypes by class. For example, football hooligans with cockney accents.

graphtrader 5y ago

People in the US often want things both ways too. People want giant alcohol super markets with every type, size and price point of alcohol imaginable and then people want to bitch that other people have drinking problems to make a point about their a priori political beliefs. Very American.

dayvid 5y ago

When I was in Japan, I met a guy who was a manager of a Japanese supermarket branch in Hawai’i for some time. He said in Japan, people are usually about the same. But in America, people are either really smart or really stupid.

NateEag 5y ago
It's hard to generalize correctly about a population of three hundred million. That's especially true when doing it based on personal experience.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Hawaii is a place where that might be fairly said, though. Setting aside island natives, Hawaii attracts a lot of people. The reasons for wanting to visit and preceding life situations vary quite a bit. The result is you do meet a lot of characters, at least on the big island.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I bet Hawaiians working in tourism meet a lot more people than I do. Maybe as many as two hundred a day (granted, only for a few minutes at those volumes). If you manage to do that five days a week for thirty years, you meet 1.4 million people, or 0.4% of the US population. Obviously in most cases you'd have no idea about how smart most of these people are. You'd probably remember the ones who did especially dumb or especially smart things in the three minutes you interacted with them, which doesn't actually tell you much about how smart they are. It's even worse for that than a puzzle-trivia interview. I think my point stands, even for a Hawaiian in tourism.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      I don’t suppose there is any scenario in which you would give human observation credit. Regarding sufficient sample size, a person in that scenario would achieve it in weeks, or perhaps a year, assuming variance in types of visitors over the seasons.

dougmwne 5y ago

I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:) Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often operate like 50 small-to-medium sized countries. And there's less of a push to homogenize the country since one of our political parties fights against federalization. All that adds up to a country with a whole lot of variation. Describing what Americans are like is pretty useless. We're like everything.

golergka 5y ago
Russia is bigger in terms of area, just two times smaller in terms of population, but 10 times more uniform, at least. You wouldn't be able to tell apart two typical provincial Russian towns from the opposite sides of the country. So, no, just the size itself doesn't seem like a complete explanation for this.
- tamariskneo 5y ago
  While size isn't a complete explanation, its important to consider the population distribution as well. Russia may be geographically larger but the population is much more concentrated than it is in the US.
- kesselvon 5y ago
  U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban. Russia has the same thing - folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town. If anything, Russia and the U.S. are pretty similar in terms of regional and cultural tensions.
  - golergka 5y ago
    > folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town Not really. I live in Moscow, and financially I have a very different life from someone in a small town. But in terms of the culture and people around, the difference is not that big. Here's a random youtube vlog about a small russian town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w It's on the opposite edge of the country, and yet, I would only be able to tell it apart from Moscow's residential neighbourhoods by how tall the buildings, built from the same panels, in the same design series, are.

martincmartin 5y ago

"'grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that', which then has this 'intellectual' appearance about it, but says very little." Sounds like a lot of HN, TBH.

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago
I would say it sounds a lot like social studies. But with those there is at least some scientific rigor (I hope). Journalists often just spin speculation based on carefully selected theories into a narrative, put it into long form, sprinkle it with some writing skills, and sell it as profound. And 'The Atlantic' is especially guilty of that (according to my experience). And they're guilty of it with this one once more (imo). The Atlantic: Pseudo-profound nonsense targeted at elites.

mr-wendel 5y ago

> please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight I'm glad this isn't completely tongue in cheek, because I consider this a huge compliment. I'm extremely critical of the USA, where I do live. The name of the game for the last ~100 years has been to allow wild cultural experimentation so long as cash is always king and big business gets bigger. Both aspects have had worldwide repercussions and especially given US foreign policy everyone is allowed a seat at the table to love+hate the US. The US is a social experiment and it's had some incredible fruit. It just feels so precarious with such incredible social and economic divisions.