It's a bit irrelevant to me what other path than empire could have been taken, because I wasn't around in the 1840s to suggest that Manifest Destiny was maybe a

It's a bit irrelevant to me what other path than empire could have been taken, because I wasn't around in the 1840s to suggest that Manifest Destiny was maybe a terrible idea for a nation with a cultural mythology wrapped in small-community independence. I'm interested in what we can do now that we're a country of over 300 million people that spans a continent and won two world wars. And I'm ill-convinced that fascists are kept at the margins by individualism. Fascists appeal to and weaponize national mythological ideologies; the "self-made man" is every bit as weaponizable as the übermensch, especially if, say, failure of collectivist-minded policy in the face of an adherence to a "you are paid the money you deserve the money" mythology has allowed the delta between the extremes and the averages in society to grow to such a level that those who believe they should be the inheritors of the self-made-man mantle bust their asses for 40+ hours a day and can't afford rent. It is then the fascist comes to them and says "You would be as great as destiny says you should be, but for..." and makes up an enemy, always one with not enough power to fight back (so rarely, for example, the people who have all the money). > Forcing (via education policy) ideologically opposed communities to "accept" trans people ... is every bit the same as forcing them to accept the Irish and the black person and the Christian, or to learn state capitols, or to recite the Constitution; no more and no less. They live in America they get with the program. The program is their neighbors are their neighbors and that which they do that harms no-one is of no concern.