In George Washington’s farewell address he warns Americans of the perils of forming political parties. He warned “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism”. John Adams …show more content…
There was a time in America when such a value was expectant and refined. It created a focal point for unity and provided common platform between born Americans and also new immigrants. There was a time when groups of people came to the United States believing in the protections and principles provided by a particularly American system of law and economics. Until recently, the United States was both the modern liberal nation-state and the foremost supporter of national self-determination around the world. America allocated its very existence to a war of liberation from the British Empire. Afterward, the United States sealed its way of life in the Civil War by devastating the South’s attempt to secede from the American. At the same time, even before Woodrow Wilson included the principle of national self-determination in his Fourteen Points address and Franklin Roosevelt summoned it in the Atlantic Charter, Americans encouraged the right of other nations to secede from transnational empires and form their own nation states. America was unsuccessful in obtaining Canada in the War of 1812, but through much of the nineteenth century still it was hoped that Canadians would one day willingly join the United States. During the two world wars, America championed the rights of small nations against empires, together with its imperial allies like Britain and during the Cold War Americans identified with the oppressed nations of the Soviet alliance.
At the same time, the United States practiced the liberal nationalism that it so adamantly stressed. It is evident that in Washington’s past, it has been guided by self-interested nationalism. By way of the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War and the defeat of Southern secession, the principals of America made certain