Penny Thoughts: The Necessity of American Exceptionalism

The intellectual fraud of such racially motivated works as “Critical Race Theory,” the New York Times “Project 1619” and books, such as White Fragility by Robin J. DiAngelo, have launched an unmitigated assault on the history of the United States of America. This propaganda is compounded by such mindless media quislings as Donn Lemon of CNN who declared in 2018 that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men,” one of whom, in a bit of typical elitist irony, to which he is engaged to be married.

Their purpose is to re-write American history and to diminish the fundamentals and fabric of America’s underlying tenets. In so doing, they hope to achieve the dissolution of America as we know it.

This tactic follows the playbook of socialists who have sought to overthrow every country they have infested.  This was the strategy for Lenin in Russia and was reaffirmed by Stalin, then used by Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Eventually, when Americans realize what these works and movements actually mean, there will be a vivid resistance and hopefully a resounding rejection of this divisive, racist, Marxist maneuver.

These same currents have done what they could to dismiss the notion of an American meritocracy and, by extension, the concept of American exceptionalism. At the end of the day, it will be the function of American exceptionalism which will ultimately give rudimentary awareness to Americans as they deny these incendiary concepts presented by the Leftist socialists.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the noted French historian visited a young American nation in the early 1800’s and recorded his observations in his landmark book Democracy in America (1840). The following excerpt from that work offers as good a summation of de Tocqueville’s belief in and observations of what he cited as America being “quite exceptional” as there is.

“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no other democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”

This assessment of America laid the foundation for the notion of American exceptionalism.

Since our nation’s birth, most of us have lived under this notion even though it has never actually been articulated as a creed or policy. Ironically, it was not until Russia’s Stalin recognized that the Communist Party USA was resistant to the revolution of worldwide communism and became appalled at their arrogance, which prompted him to rage that it was “the heresy of American exceptionalism” that prevented a thorough revolution as he conceived it. This was the first use of the specific term “American exceptionalism.”

In recent decades it was President Ronald Reagan who used the concept of American exceptionalism to point out how America has been the “shining city upon a hill” in serving as a beacon of liberty and freedom for the rest of the world’s nations.

American exceptionalism is rooted in the belief that Americans see their history as uniquely different from other nations. We see that history as having been born of our Revolutionary War from which emerged a unique new nation in history. This developed into a vision  of itself “based on liberty, equality before the law, individual responsibility, republicanism, representative democracy and laissez-faire economics,” as is noted by political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset in The First New Nation (1963).

While we have not paraded about the rest of the world in a boastful posture based on this exceptionalism, America is still seen as the best hope for those in suffering circumstances in their home nations to start over and build a better life. America was drawn into the two great world wars of the 20th Century and won them both insuring a safer and more secure world.

Still, America is more than a police force for the world. It is a center for international education. It provides financial security for the rest of the world. And invariably, when there are natural disasters in other countries, America is always the first to send aid to those countries. These actions are, indeed, exceptional. 

Let me also testify that having lived in Botswana, Bahrain and Malaysia the people in those nations expect America to be exceptional – not in a sense of American hegemony, but rather in a sense of American benevolence.

However, in today’s history revisionist climate, American exceptionalism, with the likes of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo stating that “America was never great,” has come under attack by the postmodern liberal-progressives as a “reactionary myth” according to political scientist Eldon Eisenach.

This is problematic, in that it erodes some foundational beliefs we have come to deeply hold implicitly.  Unlike the “American Dream” which presents a vision of its meaning, belief in American exceptionalism is the rudimentary underpinning of our entire American culture, from governance, to politics, to the intangibles of liberty, to security, to finance, to societal structures and to legal codes and behaviors.  In short, it IS what America is. For all intents and purposes, American exceptionalism is the soul of America.

It is like parental love. Even when our parents are not there immediately with us, we are buoyed up with the inherent knowledge that they do, in fact, love us.   It is both necessary and essential that we have this knowledge, for without it we can fail.

In effect, then, when those progressive leftists began to attack American exceptionalism, they have attacked the very necessary and essential substance upon which America was formed and through which its soul has prospered.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of The West Alabama Watchman.