The American narrative kind of groups the American and French Revolutions on one side as liberation! And the whole...
The American narrative kind of groups the American and French Revolutions on one side as liberation!
And the whole WWI-Interwar-WWII thing on another as totalitarianism!
And in between faffs about with its own expansion and Civil War
You know what gets left out? 1848, and the fact that every leading state thereafter was modeled after Prussia in taking The People seriously and starting out by conquering its own population
then Prussia went poof and Germany tried to model itself on America, except instead of doing what Yukichi Fukuzawa did and touring it to try to learn and appropriate the parts of the culture that seemed functional on the ground, it modeled itself on the prestigious ideas coming out of American universities
in, you know, the 1930s, early 1940s
oops!
That's… not really true, it was a lot more the “military-industrial” than the academic branch of the “New Class” that remade occupied Germany and Japan, which is part of how they ended up more explicitly anticommunist and patriarchal than the US, but the rest of the world had the Sixties too.
Also like, there were pretty strong leftist sentiments organic to both dating from before the wars.