american exceptionalism

I think it is time for this topic.
Some define American exceptionalism as a belief that this country is ordained by God to lead the world. This version goes from John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill" in 1630 to Ronald Reagan's use of that symbolism in the 80's.
This is the favorite definition of those who are opposed to the concept.

Wikipedia opens the topic ("neutrality disputed" -as I expect it always will be) with: "American exceptionalism is an American theory that the United States occupies a special role among the nations of the world in terms of its national ethos, political and religious institutions, and its being built by immigrants.
This is pretty close to the notion of American exceptionalism that I am going to argue for.

I believe that America is exceptional. By that I do not mean what Obama apparently meant when he said that he thought America was exceptional and he was sure that everbody else thought that their country was exceptional too. That is called uniqueness. And every country is unique.

I mean that America is very different in several substantive ways. (I cannot use the expression “very unique”.)

As de Tocqueville noted it was the first working representative democracy. But that facet has lost its significance.

For a half century after WWII it stood astride the world like a colossus with (for awhile) a GDP greater than the rest of the world combined while holding only 6% of the population. But probably England did that in the century before and Rome 2,000 years earlier. Besides those days are gone, anyway.

I. It was built by immigrants. Although one could say, “Well it has been built now, so that goes by the board.” But this is one of those substantive ways in which America is different. At its founding America was overwhelmingly northern European in ancestry and protestant in religion. WASP - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. But they accepted those Catholics and Jews and freed their slaves and gradually the complexion of the country changed. Now they come from all over the world. Has any other nation ever done anything like that? Willingly allowed their racial composition to change so much that the current predictions are that in a few more years those whites will be in a minority? If we want to we can make it so that each of our foreign ambassadors arrives at their assignment and finds himself in a country from which some of his ancestors came. We are the world’s laboratory experiment to see if “we can all just get along.” We certainly have more experience with it than anyone else does. I remember in the sixties some folks in European countries looked down their noses at us because of our racial problems. They now understand that it was not as easy as they thought to deal with racial minorities of a significant size. What about religion? Well we are now in the process of expanding that freedom of religion beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition and making it truly universal.

II. The Civil War is part of that history, too. Lincoln saw the war as penance for the crime of American slavery. Has any other country ever engaged in a slaughter of 2% of its own population in order to free an oppressed minority? To compare that to modern pain, 2% of our current population would be 6,000,000 Americans.

III. But the main thing is that to be an American is not simply a matter of geography or blood (see Monday May 10) or ancestry. As many have noted an American is defined by location and the acceptance of the creed: the "self-evident truths” of the Declaration; the Constitutional restraints that begin with things like “Congress shall make no law …” or “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.

So, yes, I believe in American Exceptionalism.

Some will say, “Yeah but look at all of the bad stuff that America did.” OK, look at it. We’ve got it. In that we are not exceptional.