Exactly. US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. But the defeat of Nazi German and Imperialist Japan had huge, favorable results for human rights.
Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.
Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps?
> That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.
WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was from the US side. The Soviet side had such things as massive artillery barages of cities, no step back rule where people with machine guns shot their own soldiers for not advancing fast enough.
You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy.
FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive.
Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist.
Less polarized? Huey Long got shot for FDR to get in, and actual socialism was a thing in the United States. Assassination attempts were regularly made against union busters.
What I meant was that there was a better sense of what left or right actually means on an international scale.
Nowdays centre-right presidents like Barack Obama or Biden get called socialist, somebody on the international centre left like Sanders is apparently a communist and Chomsky is an out of his mind, left of Mao crazy person. Pink haired college kids are apparently a serious threat and there's a "culture war" or something.
It seems fairly abnormal, especially considering Medicare for All is apparently still crazy, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic the U.S. is currently doing terrible at.
I don't think polarized is necessarily the right word for it, it just seems like American politics has jeered strongly to the right, dragging the people who dislike it into liberalism to seem reasonable.
