America remains exceptional
‘To deem America exceptional is not to deem it infallible, but its imperfections can only be addressed if Americans embrace their common heritage while resisting the allure of tribalism.’
My life has been marked by a curious obsession – one that others have tended to greet with bewilderment when expressed. For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with the United States. My ultimate ambition has long been to immigrate to America as soon as possible.
Admittedly, I understand why friends of mine find this desire inexplicable. Britain, my home country by birth, is not some oppressive or otherwise inhospitable state. There is opportunity here, liberty is valued, and I was raised in the company of genial people. Regardless, although I appreciate the significance of British thought to America’s development, I feel no connection with any other facet of British culture.
How can this be the case when all aspects of America’s history, government, and identity fascinate me? To that question, I could once offer no clear answers. This is simply how I am – unofficially American, one might say – for inherent and largely ineffable reasons. As the late Hungarian expatriate turned American – the estimable Peter Schramm – proclaimed of his journey, I was ‘Born American, but in the Wrong Place’.
Throughout my childhood, residing in America dominated my fantasies. Even then, the American way of life seemed superior to me for reasons that I struggled to articulate when challenged. Gazing at an American flag would stir a feeling in me that the Union Jack did not evoke. I understood that it represented something greater, something unrivalled in its meaning.
As I matured, so too did my sentiments. Until my final year of school, I was ignorant of politics; observing the 2016 presidential election impelled me to refine my passion. While following each candidate’s campaign and enduring the raucous debates, it occurred to me that I had never read the Constitution of the United States. Obtaining a battered library copy and scanning every intricate provision afforded me my first exposure to the genius of American government. Seeking to expand my knowledge, I discovered The Federalist Papers and other writings by the Founding Fathers. Through devouring them, I learned that America can rightly be labelled the last, best hope of humanity.
In its constitutional heritage, its principles of liberty, and the inclinations of its people, America is exceptional. It emerged from colonies that were unencumbered by feudal systems and moulded by liberal ideals, but it was also founded upon a specific creed that promised autonomy and justice to every citizen.
That unique combination has yielded the most prosperous, innovative, democratic, free, and open society in existence, as the immigrants who remain drawn to it annually by the million would affirm. This society has been maintained by a dynamic people, incomparably resolute in their concern with liberty, who have surmounted overwhelming obstacles to realize the principles that permit flourishing for all.
The unfortunate consequence of loving America is that, when the nation is endangered, you will be afflicted with visceral distress. We are currently experiencing such a tragic moment. Aggressive, and, at times, violent groups seek to uproot America’s institutions, deface its history, and undermine its creed.
Protestors topple statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among others, as sitting senators indulge them. A statue of Abraham Lincoln – erected by freed slaves in the nation’s capital – is surrounded by anti-riot fencing and under the constant watch of police, lest it be pulled down by activists who denounce the ‘Great Emancipator’ as a racist and white supremacist. With its ‘1619 Project’, America’s leading newspaper, The New York Times, fundamentally distorts – as Allen C. Guelzo, an esteemed historian at Princeton University observes – the American story to assert that slavery was the ‘love-object of American capitalism’ and the ‘prize that the Constitution went out of its way to secure and protect’.
These assaults on the American character are disturbing, for the nation cannot endure if its people do not share an understanding of what that character truly consists in. America’s flaws are not to be concealed, nor are the failings of the figures who have shaped it to be obfuscated. Yet to reject America as a tainted land of oppression and error is to reject all that it has bestowed upon the world by virtue of its extraordinary ideas.
America emerged on an identifiable date from an exceptional revolution, which was orchestrated not as a radical uprising directed toward some utopian goal, but as a restoration of lost, inherited liberties. The Founding Fathers prevented the revolution from leaving terror in its wake by respecting all that had been perfected before it, as they worked to construct a new constitutional order that would build on the British tradition of constitutional principles and freedom under the law. This origin innately distinguishes America from other nations. Indeed, as Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People, the Founders embarked upon ‘the greatest of all human adventures’ when they created the United States.
The Founders ensured that the Constitution would be exceptional by basing it upon their sagacious view of human nature. Perceiving individuals as, in the words of George Will, ‘sociable but self-interested’, they understood that interactions must be controlled by the law, and that government, as the ultimate reflection of humanity, must concomitantly be divided, separated, limited, and controlled by a robust system of checks and balances. This enabled them to construct an exceptional government that limits its various systems of power by placing them in opposition to one another. The Constitution is distinct among others because it delegates only necessary powers to the federal government, and articulates what the government may not do to its people. In turn, it provides all that it enshrines with ultimate security.
The Founders fulfilled the promise of British liberalism and more within the Declaration of Independence, which accomplished something unprecedented in human history that has never been replicated. By rooting America in the propositions that all men are created equal and in the possession of inalienable rights, which governments exist to secure through the consent of the governed, it established a singular nation explicitly ‘conceived in Liberty’ and dedicated to those ideals. Through emphasizing, however, that liberty must be moored by responsibility, and that the pursuit of happiness must consist in the cultivation of virtue rather than the indulgence of fleeting pleasures, the Declaration ensured that Americans would be morally prepared to govern themselves.
The Declaration is a pivotal expression of the American creed – a transcendent notion premised upon equality, virtue, individualism, and economic and political freedom, without which the union cannot be preserved. There is no alternative to the truths exhibited within the Declaration. Those unassailable, immortal values are all that enable America to endure, yet their sincerity has been challenged throughout the nation’s history. Stephen Douglas and the racists of the nineteenth century contended that they applied solely to white men – ironically, many of today’s anti-racism crusaders assert the same. In the Progressive Era, Charles Beard argued that America was created by an elite that sought to protect its own property, shrouding its motives beneath a spurious concern for universal rights. Howard Zinn famously employed both of these claims to contort American history, and protestors affirm them currently.
How could one feel remotely patriotic about a nation born out of such evil? Quite easily, actually, as those assertions are simply false. Slavery was a source of anguish for many of the Founders, and it was Thomas Jefferson who, despite partaking in the great evil, excoriated it within his initial draft of the Declaration. Though the passage was removed to appease South Carolina and Georgia, the proclamation of absolute truths remained.
The Founders were men of ideas, not mere property, and the Declaration was not a tool of empowerment for a particular group, but a call to freedom for all that treated those ideas earnestly. It advanced what the revolution was truly fought for, and expressed what subsequent generations were to fulfil. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. both understood this when they invoked the document in their crusades for emancipation and civil rights. Americans must do the same today to diminish existing iniquities.
One might question why my desire to become an American is not stifled by the present situation. My answer is simple: I believe that the American people, having overcome tremendous adversity on innumerable occasions, are auspiciously positioned to remedy the ills ailing the nation together. The story of the United States is one of progress toward the full amplitude of its founding. Americans are indomitable in their spirit, and it is through perpetually striving to realize the ideals upon which the nation was founded that they have solved all manner of onerous problems.
To deem America exceptional is not to deem it infallible, but its imperfections can only be addressed if Americans embrace their common heritage while resisting the allure of tribalism. This will only be possible if they share an understanding of the pillars upon which the nation rests. At a time in which an attempted erosion of these pillars is underway, they must be defended, for they are all that allow the world’s purest beacon of human flourishing to stand tall. It is, and has always been, through preserving the Founding that advancements will be made, so that the American ideal can become the American reality.
Let us acknowledge the complexities of America’s history, recommit to its principles and institutions, and recall that freedom and individualism must serve a moral purpose if self-governance is to be successful. Doing so will enable America to improve as it has so many times before without sacrificing its eternal core. The American creed and the essence of the Founding are exceptional for reasons that are entirely plain. It is our responsibility as Americans, unofficial and otherwise, to uphold them.
