Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru started a discussion on American identity with their essay, “An Exceptional Debate.” National Review Online asked a few of our friends and contributors to continue the conversation.

YUVAL LEVIN

“In the beginning, all the world was America,” John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Government in 1689. Well, times have certainly changed.

As Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru observe in their keen essay, these days America stands apart — culturally, politically, economically, and philosophically. It is, on the one hand, the most advanced example of the kind of liberal society that John Locke sought to lay out in that very treatise, yet on the other hand it offers an example of why liberalism alone is not enough.

Advocates of American exceptionalism generally offer one of two arguments in its behalf: the case for our exceptional creed, and the case for our exceptional history. But taken by itself, each of these arguments actually undermines our claim to uniqueness.

Our creed — that is, our belief in individual liberty and equality, and in the liberal society that protects them — is after all universal. Can universalism really be the essence of our particularism? And if we are defined by a universal creed, then wouldn’t we expect that over time, and given our successes, the world should become more like us, since the same ideals that move us are available to all?

If on the other hand our experience is what defines us — our roots in the English liberal tradition and European culture, the life-experience of our diverse constitutional republic — then we are unique only in the way that every nation is. As President Obama put it, surely the Brits and the Greeks are unique in the same way: Each is a product of its unique culture.

But as Lowry and Ponnuru suggest, what makes America exceptional is its combination of these two. We are at once a creedal nation and a product of our particular cultural origins. The two act to balance one another and make for a truly extraordinary mix: at once liberal and religious, forward-looking and conservative, substantively idealistic yet temperamentally moderate.

Too many Americans ignore one or the other element of that mix. Some on the left would like to ignore the ways that America’s roots in the level-headed and incrementalist British common-law tradition make it sensible about change and realistic about human nature — and the fact that we are a nation, not just an idea. Some on the right would like to ignore the ways that America’s commitment to enlightenment liberalism makes it deeply idealistic about individual liberty and social equality — and the fact that we have always been a nation on a mission. The combination of these facets of America, embodied in our Constitution, is a sober republicanism unlike anything the world has ever seen.

America is both a place and an idea; a culture and a philosophy. And this unique amalgamation is what makes it not only exceptional but also the last best hope of both liberal idealism and conservative realism in a time when both are in peril.

– Yuval Levin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs magazine. He is the author of Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. JOHN O’SULLIVAN My occasional bouts of nervousness about the notion of American “exceptionalism” are rooted in the fear that it will encourage complacency about America’s problems. Earlier patriots felt this nervousness when their nations were at the zenith — Kipling’s “Recessional” for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee is the classic expression of it — and they have all been proved correct. Their nations declined; their empires no long rule. But this warning scarcely seems necessary. Complacency is in very short supply in today’s America. Almost everyone on both right and left agrees that the country is going to the dogs. All that remains to be determined is the identity of the dogs. And among American institutions sinking into the Slough of Despond is the notion of exceptionalism itself. President Obama suggested that since all nations feel themselves to be exceptional, it’s really no big deal. Exceptionalism — it’s the rule. That sounds reasonable, but I don’t believe it. I live at present in Prague. I like the Czechs enormously. But they don’t seem to feel exceptional (except perhaps in their anti-heroism and geographical bad luck). Likewise the Swiss. What do the Swiss dream when they dream of vainglory? Maybe every nation is exceptional in some respect. But exceptionalism has to mean more than making a great cheese. It involves putting your impress on the world — by military prowess initially perhaps, but more solidly by economic and technological advances, and ultimately by dazzling cultural achievements that lead to the sincerest form of flattery: the world wants to be like you. Many nations have passed the first two tests — Portugal, Spain, China, and Holland among them. Others such as India are now entering the field. But the modern nations that have achieved all three number very few: France, Britain, and (of course) America. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have given a very eloquent and persuasive account of what makes America exceptional — the country is freer, richer, more democratic, more religious, and more patriotic than other advanced nations. They also trace these exceptional qualities to America’s birth as the rebellious child of Britain: The American Republic made the civilization of England and its traditional liberties available to all comers. As well as enjoying and exploiting these freedoms, however, America felt obliged by its rebellion to make the case for them both to foreign nations and to foreign immigrants. This makes America a special case of what the writer James C. Bennett calls “Anglosphere exceptionalism.” It is more self-conscious and even dogmatic in its love of liberty than its lazier and more confused cousins up North, across the Pond, or beyond the Pacific. Even its exceptionalism is exceptional. But one aspect of it, though mentioned, is somewhat underplayed by Lowry and Ponnuru, maybe because it is an aspect of Anglospheric rather than narrowly American exceptionalism. The political and economic orthodoxy of the Anglosphere — sound finance, property rights, the rule of law, free trade and free capital movement — has been the dominant global orthodoxy for more than two hundred years. Twenty years ago this orthodoxy looked likely to be dominant for another two centuries. But it is now seriously challenged by a very different tradition associated with Colbertian France and Wilhelmine Germany: state direction, economic and trade regulation, capital controls, protectionism, industrial cartels, etc. These ideas are highly appealing, for rather obvious reasons, both to undemocratic governments and to international organizations. And their threat to the freedoms of the Anglo-American tradition will not stop at the water’s edge when national sovereignty is also under attack. Other nations share in American exceptionalism and its benefits. It would seem prudent to rally them to the defense of common traditions. There’s such a thing as being too exceptional. – John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. MATTHEW SPALDING If there is one thing that Americans still overwhelmingly believe, it is that their country, despite its flaws, is unique — and exceptional. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru are absolutely correct in identifying America’s exceptionalism as the ultimate cultural issue. But to sharpen the point, it is a debate over two views of that exceptionalism. Modern liberalism is based on the view that America’s origins are fundamentally flawed, yet America is exceptional because of its ability to constantly reinvent itself — it is a nation always in the process of becoming. Encapsulated today by the likes of Howard Zinn and Richard Rorty, the argument grows out of the progressive rejection not only of America’s past but also its principles — there are no self-evident truths, no permanent rights, and no limits on government. The new exceptionalism is the possibility of progress through an ever-expanding nanny state. We have gone far down this path, and Barack Obama seeks to close the deal. Can we withstand the liberal assault? There is a crucially important continuity between our British roots and the American Founding. The Americans took British liberalism and ran with it, completing England’s Glorious Revolution. They built on an inheritance of the rule-of-law tradition, going back to Magna Carta, which became under the Americans a written (and much more robust) constitutionalism. They inherited the common law for daily governance. But let us not miss the extent to which America is truly revolutionary and thus exceptional in a way that England (or any other country) is not. Americans universalized, but also grounded, the principles underlying their inherited liberties. Turning to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” they centered liberty not in British tradition but in human nature and equal rights — a universal and permanent standard that transcends history and the particulars of time. Our religious heritage gave this American individualism a theological grounding, and so natural rights a deeper meaning consistent with revelation. The other aspects of our exceptionalism — our democratic ethos, commitment to economic opportunity, insistence on limited government — come out of that. In this political moment — this teaching moment — we must reclaim America’s exceptionalism as a nation based on an idea. To do so we must reconnect the good sense of the American people to the principles of the American Founding. Not as a matter of mere history, but as the source of permanent truths — truths that deny the progressive argument and challenge its project for our country. – Matthew Spalding is director of the Kenneth B. Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and author of We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.