This was not my early education experience in an American public school. The history taught to elementary school students circa 2000 was whitewashed to the poin

This was not my early education experience in an American public school. The history taught to elementary school students circa 2000 was whitewashed to the point of almost being propaganda for American exceptionalism. Yes, later on in my education career I took classes that emphasized critical thinking and deconstructing ideas and texts, and these had a big impact on my worldview. But as a someone on the younger end of the millennial generation, I think collectively we became critical of our society due to the back to back travesties of the Iraq War and the financial crisis (as cliche as that sounds). For me, I have been completely disillusioned to the idea that social progress is inevitable, so I believe it’s well worth learning how to call out regressive ideas and the asymmetrical power structures that exist in our society. Yes I believe some people take this way too far (and the media capitalizes on this by cherry picking the most egregious examples and using those as a straw man to represent all of left wing thinking), but on the other hand I don’t think we should accept the status quo. On Hackernews, we usually strive to look for better ways to solve problems or to solve problems people didn’t even know they had, so I don’t see why we should accept the organization of society as either a global maximum or as static and immutable. It’s something that should be hacked and improved upon like anything else. As you can tell, my experiences have culminated in my adoption of a liberal worldview (more moderate on a few ideas, radical on a handful) but I can see how different life experiences could lead someone to adopt a different ideology. My biggest frustration currently is the status quo bias of mainstream American thought where we just ignore the existence of inconvenient problems. If you think less government activity will solve a problem, I’m glad to hear you out as long as your argument is in good faith.