American Exceptionalism

As many of you know, Texas has been fighting on the battleground of schoolbooks recently. What will children across the country learn, because, as many of us realize, Texas schoolbooks lead the nation. One thing that has made it into the text books is the belief in American Exceptionalism. In a clip on Fox News today, James Rosen (one of their anchors) noted that one of the proponents against American Exceptionalism has been our 44th president. In April, while in France, Obama was asked “if he subscribes to the belief that America is uniquely qualified by its origins and history to lead the world” by a reporter there. In other words, the president was asked if he believed in American Exceptionalism. His response is alarming, albeit not unexpected. He replied, “I believe in American Exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British Exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek Exceptionalism….” He continued to say that the US would “not always be right” and that he sees no conflict between regarding America as exceptional and valuing other countries’ contribution to the world. (story anchored by James Rosen at Fox News)


There are several gaping flaws in this. Firstly, Greece was a poor choice in that, as they the people have been rioting and the country is on the verge of being bankrupt (with Germany and America bailing them out). England, while in a better situation than Greece at the moment, is struggling against the socialist system that they’ve put into place as much as most of Europe is now. While these two countries ruled a good portion of the world at one time, they have since declined (and quite a bit of it through socialism). Second, someone truly needs to get this man a dictionary, because he obviously doesn’t understand what the word “exceptional” means. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, exceptionalism is “the condition of being different from the norm.” So that begs the question of how can everyone be exceptional? I am a big fan of individualism, but there is a difference here that cannot be ignored. To have exceptionalism, there must be a normality that it is judged by. There will always be those that are better and worse at certain things, and that includes countries. Not everyone can be leaders. And lastly, to the point of this gaping flaws in his argument, it’s come to the point where I, personally, simply do not believe most of what comes from his mouth. When promises simply become ‘campaign promises’ that we aren’t supposed to believe, one must wonder when we can believe anything. He certainly hasn’t stood by anything except his distribution of the wealth and his health care. He’s standing by those two things in which the American people do not want very nicely. He also has a habit of going on apology tour for this country, showing that he leans more to the side of his blief that we're "not always...right" than in American Exceptionalism.


We are an exceptional country. We fought the only true revolution, where we did not replace tyrants with tyrants (according to Ronald Reagan) and, as a colony, won against an empire and against all odds. We continued, and fought to keep ourselves together and to free all men, no matter their color, in the Civil War. We fought to free the world in two world wars and have been struggling against communism and terrorism since. We are exceptional. To be told anything less is degrading and a lie. The world knows this, even if they won’t admit it, because they flock here from all countries. They flee overbearing governments and poor economies just so they can come to the Land of the Free. We have set a precedent for the world to follow though few truly can.

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