Is America Exceptional?

Is America Exceptional?
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Monday, Jan. 7, 2013

We have excerpts from an insightful speech given by Norman Podhoretz delivered Sept. 12, 2012 at the Hillsdale College, and posted in IMPRIS, Oct. 2012, Vol. 41, Number 10.

First of all, unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. What is meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambition…

Secondly, in all other countries membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, or rootedness in the soil. Thus foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.

Thirdly, in all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies: … In America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable” - that is immune to legitimate revocation…

We have excelled by following our Founding Fathers in directing our energies, as our Constitution exhorts us to do, to the preservation of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as well as to the pursuit of happiness tacitly understood by the Declaration of Independence to require prosperity as a precondition. (In his original draft of the Declaration, of course, Jefferson used the word “property” instead of “pursuit of happiness.”) …

So far as liberty is concerned, until recently no one but libertarian have been arguing that we were insufficiently free in the United States… Judging by what they say and the policies they pursue modern liberals are not all that concerned about liberty. What they really care about, and what they assign a higher value to, is economic equality( as reflected in the now famous phrase, “spread the wealth around”)…

Yet after surveying the numbers, the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University asks an excellent question: “What standard of fairness dictates that the top ten percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47% percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?” … The petering out of the Occupy Wall Street movement has recently confirmed, what Tocqueville observed on this point in the 1830s remains true today, Americans, unlike Europeans, he wrote, “do not hate the higher classes of society” even if “they are not favorable inclined toward them…”…

With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and have made it possible … for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history…

Consider the many apologies President Obama has issued for misdeeds of which he imagines Americans have been guilty in our relations with other countries in general and Muslim world in particular. Never mind that the U.S. has spilled blood and treasure to liberate and protect many millions of people from the totalitarian horrors first of Nazism and then of Communism…

The liberal community seems to think that the rest of the world would be better off without the United States… but most conservatives do not believe that a radical diminution of American power and influence would be good for us or for the world….

George H. Kubeck - The reelection of Obama was a tragedy and our country will experience it.