A Nation Like No Other (3 page)

In other words, belief in American Exceptionalism leads inevitably to a smaller, more effective, accountable, and limited government. The American revolutionaries did not shed their blood for the welfare state;
nor did they aim to replace the arbitrary rule of King George and his “multitude of New Offices” and “swarms of Officers,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence, with their own oppressive bureaucracy. Instead, they fought for individual liberty—and that made America an exception among all other nations.

Today, American Exceptionalism is being weakened not only by the small, radical group of Americans who actively seek to undermine it, but by this larger group of people who may even vaguely support it, but don't really know what it means or where it came from. Clouded by this confusion, they acquiesce to policies that inevitably distance our nation from our founding ideals and historic values. As we slowly become more like Europe, with the attendant debt crisis, self-defeating energy policies, suffocation of private enterprise, and stifling bureaucracy that characterize that continent, they can be fooled into believing this trajectory is consistent with America's historic, exceptional nature.

The good news is that America, thanks to our founding creed, is uniquely poised to thrive in the twenty-first century. Our inherent idealism and generosity, our capitalist spirit, scientific leadership, vociferous defense of individual rights, and penchant for innovation position us to reap amazing benefits from the Information Age, in which scientific, technological, economic, and entrepreneurial dynamism—not government-led industrial planning—will increasingly determine a nation's economic strength. There is a reason why so many great innovators, from Benjamin Franklin (bifocals and the lightning rod) to the Wright Brothers (the airplane) to Steve Jobs (the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), are Americans—because American Exceptionalism cultivates and rewards the habits that made them successful.

Yet just at this moment in history, American Exceptionalism is being diminshed by growing indifference and concerted attacks against it. Instead of leveraging all our cultural advantages to excel in the new economy, the Obama administration is moving us in the opposite direction. As the government grows ever larger, ever more bureaucratic, and ever more intrusive in the economy, the ideals and habits underlying American Exceptionalism are being steadily eroded. Work, creativity, and entrepreneurship are rewarded less, while the ability to manipulate
the vast bureaucracy, navigate the impenetrable thicket of regulation, and game the byzantine tax code are becoming paramount skills. Daring managers and innovative engineers become less important to companies than placing well-connected lobbyists in Washington who can directly influence the government's dispensation of favors and beneficial legislation.

For example, in March 2011 the
New York Times
reported on G.E.'s giant, 975-person strong tax department, which helped the company avoid paying any corporate income tax for 2010:

A system in which companies need an army of tax specialists, Washington insiders, and well-connected lobbyists to compete is a system in dire need of reform. This state of affairs breeds corruption as well as widespread cynicism toward both business and government. Yet too many people today accept this arrangement as our normal state of affairs, discounting the possibility that there is a better way, a system in which a smaller, more accountable and transparent government allows more freedom for people and businesses to compete honestly, a system where there is more incentive for technological breakthroughs, creative thinking, and innovative methods than there is for peddling political influence and manipulating the rules.

This is why, now more than ever, we need to restore the values and habits of American Exceptionalism. The principles of liberty that underlay America's founding point in a dramatically different direction than where we're heading now. Big Government and an increasingly centralized economy are the antitheses of liberty, which is fundamentally connected to free enterprise, local power, and smaller, more effective, limited
government. Our Founding Fathers understood these ideals and fought for them, just as we, in a different way, must fight for them today.

A Nation Like No Other
is dedicated to the proposition that American Exceptionalism is so central to our nation's survival that every generation must learn why being an American is a unique and precious experience.

A Nation Like No Other
reflects my belief that the Left has so censored and distorted our history that too many Americans no longer understand why their country is both exceptional and an exception to the form and practice of government in all other countries.

A Nation Like No Other
seeks to reaffirm and rebuild Americans' belief in their own country.

The facts are all on our side. America is simply the most extraordinary nation in history. This is not a statement of nationalist hubris. It is an historic fact. It is also proven every day by the thousands of immigrants who give up everything they had to come to our shores and realize the American Dream.

America is exceptional indeed, yet our cultural heritage, our unique habits of liberty that have made us such a successful society, are now being threatened by a combination of centralized bureaucracies, leftwing ideologies, destructive litigation, and an elite view that American Exceptionalism is no longer acceptable or even permissible.

In this book I will share with you the most important ideas of American Exceptionalism, what policies arise from it, and what we can do to sustain and strengthen our role as the singular nation of the modern world.

Our task is twofold. First, we must rediscover the meaning and vitality of American Exceptionalism. Focused on the maneuvering and horse trading of everyday politics, many Americans on both sides of the political aisle have lost sight of the vital principles that shaped our national identity and our entire system of government. We must understand and explain the enormous energy, innovation, and wealth that have
resulted from our commitment to the principles underlying American Exceptionalism. A nation that dedicated itself to protecting the right of every citizen to pursue happiness witnessed an explosion of human creativity and progress that has continued apace for more than 230 years. Abraham Lincoln eloquently described the source of this tremendous prosperity:

Recovering and reasserting American Exceptionalism will help us move toward our second goal: putting forward a program of governance that protects American liberties and offers greater opportunity and a more vibrant economic future for every American. The diminishing sphere of liberty today, particularly economic liberty, demands redress. The tools to do so are already at our disposal. The principles of American Exceptionalism point to a clear, proven alternative to the corrupting, insider dominated, government-centric system that inevitably leads to the replacement of genuine free enterprise with crony capitalism.

Our Founding Fathers got it right. Now it's time we did, too.

—Michael Kammen

T
he fundamental ideas of American Exceptionalism are found in the Declaration of Independence read to General Washington's troops near Bowling Green. The Declaration was drafted by the troops near Bowling Green. The Declaration was drafted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where the Founders sought to affirm their common beliefs in a clear, straightforward manner. The Congress, led by the Declaration's fifty-six signers, ordered that the document be distributed widely across the new nation.
¹

The Declaration sets forth an American Creed, a unifying body of beliefs to which the Founders and their countrymen subscribed. It is this creed, not Europe's historic conception of blood and soil, that defines membership in the American nation. A creed is open to everyone who shares the beliefs, and immigrants become Americans through affirming it. The creed set America apart, an exception to the beliefs other countries have about organizing government and society.

The American Creed is the source of American Exceptionalism to this day. It is both universal and timeless—relevant and accessible to the present generation and to future ones. Spiritual and political leaders throughout our history have called on us to reaffirm our creed and renew our civilization. Martin Luther King Jr. did this explicitly when he declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”

The action announced in the Declaration—a severing of political ties with the world's most powerful empire—was radical, but its ideas were not new. Instead, the Declaration of Independence was a succinct summation of beliefs—what the Founders called “truths”—already deeply ingrained in the American psyche. That is why the Second Continental Congress voted unanimously that these truths were “self-evident.”

Years later, in an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration's purpose was

If the ideas in the Declaration were not new or particularly radical, then why did this single document fundamentally alter world history? The answer is this: no nation had ever before embraced human equality and God-given individual rights as its fundamental organizing principle. America was the exception, because never before had a nation recognized sovereignty in the citizen rather than the government. And never before had a nation been brought forth that was dedicated first and foremost to identifying the source and nature of the individual's rights and defending those rights, and only secondarily to defining the scope of governmental
power—and then only in relation to, and limited by, the individual's unalienable rights.

At the time of the American Revolution, many of the world's rulers justified their authority on the divine right of monarchs, while others didn't bother with any justification other than their ability to wield brute force against their populations. But in America, the individual—not the government—has always mattered above all. Unalienable rights are vested in the individual, not the government, to which we temporarily and conditionally give limited power for the purpose of maintaining social order, the public good, and national defense.

In sum, America's founding document contradicted the prevailing theory and practice in the rest of the world that prioritized government rights over individual rights. In America, the government was designed as the servant of the people, not their master.

During the “Miracle in Philadelphia” in the summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention translated the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into a supple, sophisticated, and unique expression of Enlightenment governing philosophy. Their work ultimately produced the United States Constitution, and shortly thereafter, its first ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.