Just thinking about how Indigenous Nations in North American had complex political confederacies and highly skilled agricultural traditions and economies before contact but American schools teach these concepts as brought to the continent from Europe.

The Articles of Confederation was a rip off of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that failed because unlike Indigenous Nations, the US has never had concepts of kinship or community obligation that grounds Indigenous Nations in a political culture based on a concept collective good.

Under the Articles of Confederation, states were too self-interested to contribute to the collective good of the confederacy. The federal government was powerless to compel their participation, thus the United States abandoned the articles of confederation for the constitution.

America has not reformed its hyper-individualistic political culture and that’s in part why we are where we are today. We talk about voting as in what is good for me, the individual voter. We talk about social programs as in what is the cost for me, the in usual taxpayer.

We even talk about the pandemic in terms of how public health measures cost us as individuals, as opposed to other countries that have a culture of collective good and readily recognize their obligations to one another for the sake of the whole community or country.

Navajo Nation went into weekend lockdowns for months where most forms of travel were prohibited to stop the spread of COVID for the entire weekend. That kind of measure is unthinkable for Americans.

All of this is to say that there is a deep rooted self-centeredness in American political culture that needs serious scrutiny and reform if we want to solve large scale collective action issues like the pandemic, climate change, public health issues, health care reform etc.