The debate between liberals and conservatives has become, ever more explicitly, a debate about American exceptionalism — precisely as a National Reviewcover story predicted last spring. Conservatives seek to defend that exceptionalism from what they regard as the threat posed to it by the Obama administration’s agenda. Liberals have not yet hit on a unified response to this charge, but their commentary bears out our contention that these days their attitude toward American exceptionalism ranges from discomfort to hostility.
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This liberal commentary has had three themes: that American exceptionalism is a ridiculous or dangerous idea; that President Obama is just as supportive of it as conservatives are (in which case, shouldn’t liberals who make the first argument be denouncing him?); and that conservatives are using exceptionalism to insinuate that Obama is a foreigner.
The liberal case begins by confusing exceptionalism for jingoism. Thus Michael Kinsley calls exceptionalism “[t]he theory that Americans are better than everybody else” and that “the rules don’t apply to us.” Peter Beinart says that Republicans are in thrall to “an anti-government ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world.”
It is true that most Americans, and a disproportionate number of conservative Americans, consider this country to be the greatest nation in human history. But what believers in American exceptionalism affirm is a different proposition: that there are distinctive features of American society and governance — of our creed and our culture — that have contributed to our success. That view does not entail any obligation on the part of our leaders to believe in our country’s superiority to other nations, let alone to proclaim it constantly, as the liberal caricature of our view would have it.
Nor do we deny that President Obama wishes the best, as he sees it, for the American people and seeks to bring it about. Our claim is that his agenda will undermine distinctive and valuable national traits. So, for example, further socializing health care will foster a culture of dependency, entitlement, and centralization.
The claim that Obama, too, is an exceptionalist rests on a different (and incompatible) misunderstanding of the concept. The fact that he has from time to time suggested that America has “core values” that are “exceptional” and spoken warmly of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence does not come close to demonstrating that he has any appreciation for what separates us from a social democracy. What matters is that his agenda would shrink that gap significantly.
Kinsley ended his column by defending liberals against a mostly imagined slur. “If you think your country is in danger,” he asks, “how is it unpatriotic to say so?” It isn’t unpatriotic. It isn’t sinister. And it’s what we have done.
You fundamentally misconstrue American exceptionalism, just as Kinsley does, and just as self-hating Americans do.
You say what makes us special are our society and governance, our creed and culture. What’s our “creed”? What’s our “culture”? And how do any of the things liberals say they like or want to do threaten either?
I submit to you that, by any definition of “creed,” the attacks come from the Right, not the Left. It is not the Left that challenges the 207 year old precedent of judicial review or the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. It is not the Left that wraps secession in a faux gown of so-called “tradition” and takes it to a commemorative ball.
Likewise, by any definition of “culture,” except that depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting, the attacks come from the Right. It is not the existence or absence of comprehensive single-payer health insurance that separates us from the “social democracies,” or any other legislation which the Right, in its simple-minded reliance on economics-as-algebra, believes will reduce our vast, ever self-rejuvenating army of creators and innovators to a bunch of jelly-minded Newspeakers in Mao suits. Nor will Spanish subtitles or bongos in Lafayette Park bring down America, any more than Jazz, or pot, or even R-rated movies did.
The Founders hit on a formula so elegant and comprehensive that no serious scholar has ever proposed scrapping it. Those words have facilitated and nurtured an explosion of creativity the like of which the world has never seen.
No, our debate’s not about American exceptionalism. On any given Sunday, we renew our commitment to certain Creator-endowed principles which are the undeniable foundation of both our creed and our culture. The debate between Left and Right is about how much of that becomes public policy on Monday.
The progressives want socialism. Plain and simple. Obama has derailed the train the train in a major way -- tax cuts could stimulate economic growth???? That's a major sin.
That being said, two years from now when the economy is booming....Obama re-elected? Voters have short memories.
Your editorial contains some truths but seems overburdened by overgeneralization and a lack of precision.
Frankly, I think the more genuine brand of conservatism is anti-federalist, not "rah rah Americanism."
Regardless, what really unites the Right is its belief in the superiority of Western culture (even if we often disagree on which aspects of this culture are most important) in the face of relativism, multiculturalism, deconstructivism, and all the other strands of modern political philosophy espoused by the Left.
If America is, in fact, exceptional, it is because the nation (or more accurately, "federation") epitomizes the Western ideal to a large extent. Alas, unfortunately I predict such exceptionalism cannot last much longer under the strains of the Leftist ideology which is taking hold more and more each day. (Hence, the cry of "We're not exceptional!" is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy the louder it becomes.)
The only entity that Obama believes is exceptional is Barak Obama.
We read this in an article by Peter Baker, "Education of a President" New York Times Magazine Oct 12, 2010.
His acolytes had reserved a spot for him on Mount Rushmore. If Obama could repair the United States, according to his staff, no one could.
Obama's was exceptional of selling himself to the media and public and of course to the Nobel Prize Committee.
Nice try, MikeB, but no cigar. A single-payer health "insurance" program is EXACTLY what separates us from the social democracies. And our view of economics may not be as complicated as Keynesian voodoo but it has the benefit of actually working.
American exceptionalism is IMHO derived from our Founder's recognition that our individual rights are a result of 'natural law'. We do not rely on the government or a sovereign grant us rights. That is the element of our founding documents that rarely if ever appear in the constitutions or other documents of other nations even other democracies. Those natural rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (including the right of property ownership). Liberty of the individual is the right that the progressives continually trample on. As a single example, many more of which are available, is the so called right to healthcare. In order for you to get your free healthcare or your right to it, either you have to deprive me of my property to pay for it or you have to steal it from the healthcare provider. In either case liberties have been trampled.
"Sooner or later you run out of other people's money." Maggie Thatcher
@ MikeB: You stated "We have Medicare, Medicaid and Tri-care, and we are still an exceptional nation, are we not?"
First, a few facts: today, the trifecta you cite accounts for 40.61% of our federal budget. If you throw in Unemployment/Welfare (another favorite of social democracies), that number goes up to a whopping 56.74% of our federal budget! Defense, by comparison is paltry 18.74%.
The worst part of SS, Medicare and Medicaid, however, is that they will be insolvent in the next 10-30 years (depending on which one we are talking about) because we are promising to pay out more than we will have in the 'bank'.
I wonder how exceptional we will be when the money runs out?
"It is true that most Americans, and a disproportionate number of conservative Americans, consider this country to be the greatest nation in human history."
Well, isn't it? If not, by what measure do we fail that judgment?
True patriotism, honest patriotism, from-the-heart patriotism, should be a unifying force, not a divisive force. This editorial suggests just a hair short of directly that those who disagree on domestic policy do so because they somehow do not love their country -- notice the sly shifts between two meanings of the word "exceptional". We were the first country in history to peacefully pass power through debate and election, not inheritance or warfare. That's what makes us exceptional. Not having underlying respect for the intentions of half the country is what is truly unpatriotic.
@ MikeB, I appreciate the effort you expended to type out these 300 words of entertaining prose. But for all the verbiage, you tell us what American Exceptional is not, but you don't explicitly tell us what it *is*. The references to an elegant and comprehensive formula expressed by The Founders, and to Creator-endowed principles, suggest that your definition has to do with the following passage from the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Is this it? If so, then how does a member of the Left reconcile the incessant encroachment on liberty over the past 70 years flowing from the seemingly inexorable progress of liberal regulation, spending, and taxation? Put another way, how does a member of the Left imagine that The Founders would react if they were plunked down in the middle of 21st century America? My guess is that they would immediately cite the next part of the Declaration -- "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government" -- and immediately take up arms to throw off the Liberal yoke. Can you possibly doubt that this would be the case?
The quality of Liberal thought often suggests a hidden agenda and their reasoning is often dubious and sometimes juvenile. Perhaps this is why they will often shy away from being straightforward. One would not expect them to be otherwise given the rare instances when they reveal what they want and who they really are.
It really boils down to numbers. Liberals are only about twenty percent of the population. What they think, therefore, isn’t that important (they may think of themselves as a minority, but in this instance this distinction doesn’t count). What Liberals do is important for the damage they inflict on the country as a whole and on individuals that come under their sway. Other than that they are, for all practical purposes, irrelevant.
What I mean by property rights is my right to the product of my labor and or ingenuity. Its mine by natural law and not yours or the government's. This is so because if you or the government is going to appropriate it I simply will cease producing. It is not in my self interest to be your or the government's slave.
Unfortunately the progressives have this irrational idea that society can thrive on the theft of other's labor. That's where Maggie's observation becomes relevant. Sooner or later the producer's quit producing and society's dependents lose their goose.
Go pay for your own healthcare. Don't trample my natural rights.
Just tweaking your point, we are a nation whose organizational documents are so worthy of respect and imbue in us such faith and confidence in the government they establish that peaceful transfers of power are both the actual and expected result.
In a conversation with a self-proclaimed progressive over the summer, it became clear to me that he thought the phrase "American exceptionalism" was based on "exceptional" in the sense of "double-plus good" rather than "out of the ordinary." When I tried to set him straight, his response was, in effect, "Well, that's not what all the average-Joe conservatives mean by it."
I suspect this confusion is at the root of a lot of disagreements on the issue.
I would submit that we are exceptional country in spite of the fact we have out of control entitlement programs like medicare, etc instead of because we have them. get rid of them and we become even more exceptional.
