Oleg Atbashian, at PJM, explains the alternative vision of history, the progressive version, which the left uses as the implicit basis for its view of the United States.

Prior to July 4, 1776, not a single person in the world starved, got sick, worked hard for a living, or experienced any pain nor anxiety. No one had ever been oppressed or unfairly exploited because the oppressive and unfair American system had not yet been created.

“Habeas Corpus was the law of the land, along with Exit Strategy and Geneva Conventions.”Since the beginning of time employment had been equally guaranteed to anyone who cared to work, along with an equal pay of exactly $1,000 a week regardless of outcome, occupation, or geographical area. All work was equally pleasant and enjoyable. Those who chose not to work also received $1,000 a week in unemployment compensation and union benefits. Other guaranteed rights of the people included the rights to housing and free universal health care, as well as the right to 100% literacy through federally funded public education.

People never heard of war, crime, corruption, slavery, torture, murder, cannibalism, and man-made hurricanes. Peace and harmony reigned supreme because the concepts of greed, selfishness, and private property had not yet been invented by the American corporate interests and maliciously spread around the world as part of the American cultural hegemony.

Each person in that ideal world practiced his or her own peaceful spirituality, worshipping Earth, Nature, and the Sacred Feminine, while honoring the spiritual traditions of everyone else. Benevolent chieftains dispensed benefits to each of their subjects according to their needs, taking care that ethnic and sexual minorities were equally and proportionally represented in all spheres of public life. Habeas Corpus was the law of the land, along with Exit Strategy and Geneva Conventions.

Family planning, effective birth control, and early sex education ensured that every family had exactly 2.2 children per household, which prevented overpopulation and famine. Commerce, travel, and international trade were uncommon; everyone lived and died within not more than a five-mile distance from their birthplace. People didn’t feel the need to migrate, set up colonies, take over other countries, create empires, settle in uninhabited areas, or fight one another over a creek in the desert.

All farming was organic and for subsistence purposes only. The environment was clean due to reliance on alternative fuels and invigorating manual labor. As a result, everybody lived in comfortable, carbon-neutral houses, eating plenty of good food on a regular basis, and driving fuel-efficient automobiles when they weren’t riding their 18-speed urban cruiser bicycles.

This was an amazing achievement of indigenous cultures considering that there had been no division of labor and most people lived on farms. In the free time that remained after toiling the soil and tending to the animals, the indigenous farmers discerned the laws of nature, developed vaccines for deadly illnesses, stretched out the average lifespan prodigiously, and fed the starving in far away places.

This Golden Age lasted from about 20,000 BC up until the American Revolution. After 1776 everything just went downhill.