This is a very smart entry in the exceptionalism debate–NRO symposium here, original piece here–by James Bennett, who wrote the book The Anglosphere Challenge:

I thought John O’Sullivan’s comments on American exceptionalism were right on target. I share his discomfort with the possibility that this belief in some forms can lead to complacency about threats to the culture of a free society. Specifically, I believe the danger lies in the idea that the growing dominance of the state in British life has been inevitable because Britain was “European” in some way that America isn’t, and thus always more subject to socialism and nanny-statism. The corollary to this idea is because America is exceptional (due to its frontier heritage, or its republicanism, or whatever) it is inherently immune from the things that happened in other English-speaking countries.
That concern is what leads me to stress that America’s exceptionalism exists within a wider Anglosphere exceptionalism. In many of the things we consider to be uniquely American in terms of individualism, market orientation, and attitudes toward the state, Americans cluster together with other English-speakers in worldwide perspective as measured by objective metrics like the Inglehardt Value Survey. Our exceptionalism within that is real and important – John touches on some aspects of that – but defining that would be a task for a rather longer discussion.
Britons carried guns as casually. and as widely, as Americans well into the 20th century. The story of the Sydney Street siege in London, 1911, is illuminating in that regard. There, the unarmed police, finding themselves under fire by radicals barricaded in a building, armed themselves by asking random passers-by for guns, and so armed themselves rapidly. Gun control began exactly as it did in America and followed the same trajectory, only earlier. Looking at the history of socialized medicine, it is striking how few years separated the NHS in Britain (1948), nationalized health insurance in Canada (1962-1966), and US Medicare (1965). The left fully expected to finish the job by the 70s. It’s only since America’s great U-turn in the late 70s, when we stopped Carter, that we started to pull away from our cousins. How and why we took that U-turn is part of the story of American exceptionalism within British exceptionalism.
It’s important to understand exceptionalism correctly. We are not immune to following the same path as other English-speaking countries; we just have a few more speed bumps in our road.