Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, July 03, 2010 10:37:19 PM
I've gone on at length on the two great things that President Obama does to divide us. One is that he is clearly on the counter-culture side of the culture war. This is nothing new, the guy who came before him was on the other side of that (although not nearly as far), and Clinton introduced us to the concept of a counter-culture White House.
Obama has a deeper problem: he is not an American exceptionalist. That is to say, he thinks we are nothing special on this planet, and therefore should stop lording ourselves over everybody else. This is the basis for his apology tour, now two years old and still running.
The period running from the Declaration of Independence to around the deaths of Jefferson and Adams fifty years later, is dubbed by historians as "The Era of Good Feeling". This was a time when the nation was much smaller, most news was communicated in person and almost everybody alive had lived through our birth pangs. That meant that just about everybody was invested in America, the concept.
In the near two centuries hence, this has all been diluted by time, events, a burgeoning population ever more distant from the direct experience of the Founders. Worse, there is a group of people here, centered in parts of the counter-culture, that are deliberately trying to rid us of much of this phenomenon.
Well, count me out of that one. I don't worry about what is or isn't in the textbooks, my children will grow up with an earful of what a unique place this country is, and what it means in the world today.
Think about it: we have the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and our history of imperial aggression in the last century is remarkably free of territorial ambition. We have spent a ton of money and shed a lot of blood during the same time, protecting others from ambitious dictatorships. We are the last bastion of liberty on earth. We own the least likely government to seize power, money or property (although we seem to be trying to prove otherwise at present).
I still believe we are the cradle of human rights on this planet. I believe that we are the bulwark of stability for our civilization here. I am as invested in America, the concept as the Founder's generation was, and I will not allow those who want to drag us into the swamps on the other side of the oceans to succeed. Not as historians, not as politicians, not as public figures.
The concept of American exceptionalism was popularized in DeTocqueville's "Democracy In America" in the early nineteenth century, and has been a connecting force with Americans ever since. The movement to negate that is something that grew into power a century ago, went back into hiding during the two World Wars, and is back with us again.
On Independence Day, at least there is a siesta from this struggle, and almost everybody here raises glass to America. I'll take what I can get. I'll cook a slew of dead animal flesh, do a cigar and cognac, raise a toast to the Greatest Generation, and blow some things up.
Tomorrow, I'll return to the cultural trenches. America will not become unexceptional on my watch.