I agree that "death to america" is not going to be a winning political message in the US, but at the same time there is just no way to make coherent sense of my political views from a frame that treats the interest of the US as such as important. If you hold or try to hold an allegiance to all humanity, or to the global proletariat or whatever, there might be no way to square that with messaging that will win with US voters. So you can either hew to the truth or you can lie and craft more sympathetic messaging. And I think the following premises put one in a double-bind:
all people are equal as moral patients
the rich broadly benefit at the expense of the poor, and in a better world they might be less rich
americans on average very rich in global terms
If you believe these things in conjunction, and care about truth, how are you supposed to craft a winning political message in the US?
Sorry obviously my mind is fuzzy and I'd usually lay out the case with more rigor. But that's the general issue. So I just bite the bullet and declare that I am not inherently an enemy of America, but I may incidentally find myself as one, and in that case so be it.
I am not sure that this is entirely to the point of what I was saying in that post. The idea isn't that America deserves some kind of special consideration. There's a way in which people on the political left have decided that the negative aspects of the historical legacy of America are basically and essentially what America is. This is, I think, what you would call "summarism" and I would call "reductionism." We can say just as well that equal treatment, civil liberty, and so on are constitutive parts of the American political legacy. A crude Platonic-Freudian analogy: suppose the nation is like a person. It's no good to think that the id or the appetitive part is what fundamentally constitutes the person. The virtuous person has to be capable of identifying with the thinking part of the soul—the part of the soul that has contact with the good—and bringing herself in alignment in thought and action with this part of her soul. Learning to be good is to some extent a historical and empirical process. It involves prolonged contact with the world. But we don't have to start all over again all the time: we use the pieces of the good we are already committed to in order become more completely governed by it.
A more constructivist way of thinking about it: values do not come from nowhere. They have to be made intelligible by progression from discursive resources that we're already furnished with. It is strange that so many Americans are converted to the cause of socialism, anti-imperialism, etc. on the back of their youthful liberal commitments—the kind that were instilled in them by their schools and community members, the various people who raised them and looked after them—see no connection between the ideas; that they don't think of one as fertile soil for the other. I think really what I think of as the "public library socialist" of the 20th Century were really committed to a kind of vision of the values of America. They were capable of identifying with something progressive and democratic that is at least latent in the ethos of American political culture. But now socialists are actually so individualistic, so post-existential that they imagine themselves as self-constituted completely a priori, that they pulled themselves into socialism, like Baron von Munchhausen, by the ponytail. To make moral progress you have to be able to incite a total change of seeing or you have to draw on resources already operative in the political culture (and what inferences you can license from those) and that latter involves a basic recognition that there is something there to work with.
As a side note: there is an interesting Rawlsian point that comes as rejoinder to the first bullet that is supposed to be compatible with moral universalism. Basically states are communities governed by coercion and there is thought to be some special obligation that the state has via the hypothetical agreement of the Rawlsian social contract toward the population that it coerces. Of course, this gets a kind of graded coercion-obligation progression when it comes to real states. I can't remember what paper this is from—Rawls didn't write it, but a Rawlsian did.
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