Decline of American Exceptionalism?

Charles Blow, at the New York Times, draws the wrong conclusion from the recent report at Pew Research indicating that less than a majority of Americans (49 percent) agreed with the statement that "our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others." See, "Decline of American Exceptionalism":

Even if you put aside the somewhat loaded terminology of cultural superiority, Americans simply don’t seem to feel very positive about America at the moment....

We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism. We must answer the big questions. Was our nation’s greatness about having God or having grit? Is exceptionalism an anointing or an ethos? If the answers are grit and ethos, then we must work to recapture them. We must work our way out of these doldrums. We must learn our way out. We must innovate our way out.

We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you.

And that means that we must invest in our future. We must invest in our crumbling infrastructure. We must invest in the industries of the future. We must invest in a generation of foundering and forgotten children. We must invest in education. Cut-and-grow is ruinous mythology.

We must look out at the world with clear eyes and sober minds and do the difficult work as we’ve done time and time again. That’s how a city shines upon a hill.

Blow's understanding of exceptionalism is not based in history, values, nor institutions. His view is in the things we do (like work hard to expand government and "invest" in the future) not what we stand for. He's a classic progressive that sees higher taxes and spending (for "infrastructure") as the means to buffing up that "City on the Hill" image. But Blow's meaning misconstrue's John Winthrop's famous sermon, where he evoked the Christian metaphor that the United States was a light unto the world. But not only that. Looking back over at that Pew study we see this data at the table embedded below. Part of our exceptionalism is the belief in individualism, that the individual is basis of the good society and that the political order is established to preserve individual liberties. Progressives continually downplay individualism in American exceptionalism because it conflicts with their big-government nanny-statism. Charles Blow wants to continue building the big nanny state. When he says we must "invest" in all those things he's really saying that we must spend more on the traditional progressive programs that are bankrupting the nation. But the way to invest again is the restore economic liberty and unleash individual potential and entrepreneurialism. To do otherwise will do nothing but turn us into a dependency society like all of the truly crumbling European states highlighted by the Pew data:

Via Astute Bloggers, "PEW POLL REVEALS CORE PROBLEM AFFLICTING THE WEST: MOST EUROPEANS NOW FAVOR A NANNY STATE."

'Exceptionalism' Argument May Prove Potent for Republicans

At New York Times:

Few themes have recurred more regularly in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination than American exceptionalism, and few are as potentially powerful — or divisive.

The idea that the United States is inherently special is well established in American politics, if a bit vaguely defined. By and large, Republicans have used the concept over the years to mean strength and to signal resolve. Democrats have tended to cite it when talking about values and the ideals of American democracy.

In the context of the 2012 campaign, however, it has taken on a much more partisan edge, invoked by Republicans as a way to define President Obama as weak, lacking in core American values and almost unpatriotic.

It is easy to dismiss as election-season jingoism, the political equivalent of a “We’re No. 1” chant from the cheap seats. But the exceptionalism argument offers some voters a reassuring counternarrative to persistent joblessness, a long-term hollowing out of the middle class and a sense that the nation’s best days are past. And it intensifies the pressure on Mr. Obama to avoid sounding defensive about the difficult challenges he has faced as president and to articulate a positive story for why he deserves another four years.

“We have a president right now who thinks America’s just another nation,” Mitt Romney said last Saturday, at the most recent debate. “America is an exceptional nation. We have a president who thinks that the way to conduct foreign policy is through his personal effects on other people. I believe the way to conduct foreign policy is with American strength.”

At a Values Voter convention in October, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said that “those in the White House today” do not believe in American exceptionalism and would rather emulate Europe.

“The answer to our troubles lies in a positive, optimistic vision, with policies rooted in American exceptionalism,” Mr. Perry said. “See, American exceptionalism is the product of unlimited freedom. And there is nothing troubling our nation today that cannot be solved by the rebirth of freedom — nothing.”

Conservatives have used the concept as part of a broader indictment of liberalism in the age of Obama. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in September, the author Shelby Steele suggested that Mr. Obama’s upbringing in the 1960s shaped him into the embodiment of an anti-exceptionalism world view.

“In this liberalism,” he wrote, “America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil — an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.”

In Mr. Obama, wrote Mr. Steele, “America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.”

Man's Rights

Well, with all the recent talk about "Atlas Shrugged," I've been skimming back over some of her writings. The novel is almost 1,100 pages, and I have no plans to re-read it (although I'm considering The Fountainhead for another round). I have been reading some of Rand's essays, for example, "Man's Rights", which is featured in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. A sample:

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self- sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action-which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

More at the link.

FreedomWorks: 'Atlas Is Shrugging'

Via Daily Caller, "For FreedomWorks, Atlas is Already Shrugging":

RELATED: From Donald Luskin, at Wall Street Journal, "Remembering the Real Ayn Rand."