I remember it from reading about it in history books, something that everyone could benefit from doing in this day and age. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. (over, and over, and over again)

Education and learning is the solution. We need to educate people. Everyone. It's the only way that will ever actually lead out of this mess.

I agree with all your points except one, "we've never been great". That's way too absolute, or at least, one way of interpreting it is, and that's the interpretation I want to raise issue with.

I'm not going to try to argue that on balance, in total, the American contribution to the world has been great, or even that it's been positive at all. I truly think it it has, overall, but I'm not going to debate it, because that's not a hill I'm interested in dying on and it's not really a useful hill to own anyway.

"we've never been great" can be interpreted two ways, and I want to be clear about dismissing the other interpretation: America has done many great things and in those things, at those times, it has been great. I don't care if you think the majority of things America has done are good or not, or how you weigh them all against each other. That's not a useful metric and is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, this is not a zero-sum game of finding where the balance point lies. What is important is that there are many, incredibly great things America has done. Those things should not be dismissed, thrown away and scandalized just because they've also done many incredibly bad things.

We are all flawed creatures, we create flawed nations, we have to accept that. Perfection, moral or otherwise, is not an attainable goal in the present or probably ever. But our superpower is that we can learn, generationally, in a way that other species simply do not. We can learn from our mistakes and our immorality and our evils to become better. We don't always do that, obviously, because we are still flawed creatures. But we can learn, and that's what has set us apart, and if we want to continue to progress we need to learn. In order to learn, we have to see the reality, and see the examples, both the bad ones and the good ones, and learn from them, and get other people to see them and learn from them.

Like I said in a sibling comment, we need to learn from our history or we are doomed to repeat it. That includes the good and the bad. Repeating the good is good and we need to learn how to do that. Repeating the bad is what we need to learn to avoid. They're both important goals.