American Exceptionalism

President Obama has been much criticized over his answer when he was asked in front of an international audience if he believes in American Exceptionalism. His reply was a politically correct hedge: "I believe in American Exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British Exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek Exceptionalism." While I’m not a huge fan of our current President, this article is not meant to pile on in criticizing him for this statement; in fact if one reads the entirety of his answer he goes on to effectively praise America’s achievements and contributions. Instead I’m writing to answer the same question put to myself: Is modern America truly exceptional among the nations of the world?

We can’t be called the richest anymore because we’re deeply in debt and our per capita income ranks ninth or tenth in the world behind countries like Australia and the United Arab Emirates. We can’t be called the happiest; a perusal of various international polls shows the U.S. not even in the top 10 for happy citizens - it seems the happiest people live in northern Europe. We can arguably still be called the most free, but that distinction is subjective – partially for the happy reason that much of the rest of the world has become more free than previously, and partially for the unhappy reason that our liberties have been compromised over many decades.

The United States can claim to be home to exceptional innovation, but other parts of the world are quickly catching up. We can clearly claim an exceptional military, but I don’t think the ability to beat up other countries is what we mean by American Exceptionalism. Anyway, our military power is too often like a man using a shotgun to defend his home from ants; he can destroy many ants, but the shotgun will never make him safe from the little buggers getting into his pantry. There are many other ways, good and bad, that we are exceptional: we are exceptionally diverse; we are exceptionally generous when disaster strikes any part of the world, we are exceptionally obese, we are exceptional consumers, we live in exceptionally large homes… on and on; but none of these answer the question satisfactorily.

If American Exceptionalism exists, the roots of it must be found in our history, so I chose to ask myself a different question: “Was America exceptional?” To this I can shout a loud and proud “YES!” Our country was born a glowing gem on the world’s landscape. It was “conceived in liberty”, on the notion of a government of equally applied law rather than a hereditary aristocracy. This was indeed unique in the world at the time.

Long before Independence America was exceptional for its space, its opportunity, and its freedom. Its people were exceptional in their hardiness, their love of liberty; and because of generations of Bible reading, Americans were unique in their literacy. Prior to the Revolution virtually all men and most women in New England could read and write and the rest of the colonies were not far behind. At this same time literacy among men in France was about 50% and the same in the English countryside though the English cities could boast closer to 70%. And Americans read much more than their Bibles, they read newspapers that reprinted the political and philosophical debates from both sides of the Atlantic, and they read pamphlets by the hundreds on the same subjects. Since the “Glorious Revolution” in the late 17^th century England was arguably the freest country in Europe, though still subject to an oligarchic aristocracy, but the colonies in North America were an ocean removed from the center of authority and the average American colonist was very aware of his freedom and he cherished it.

Americans were exceptional in land ownership. The average citizen in Europe had no hope of owning land, but a large percentage of Americans did, or could. How can we overestimate the effects on a citizenry of land owners standing in their fields thinking, “This land is mine!” compared to tenant farmers or slum dwellers in Europe. Further, owning land meant being privileged with suffrage – taking part in the governing process, so Americans were unique in their political involvement which most took very seriously; Americans were exceptionally engaged.

Early Americans were exceptional because they thought of themselves as exceptional. The New England descendants of the Puritan Calvinistic believers in predestination firmly believed that America and Americans held a special place in God’s Great Plan, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania believed that God had provided their part of America as a haven for the religiously oppressed. By the time of the Revolution these attitudes in a general way had spread throughout the colonies. Americans believed in American Exceptionalism before there was a United States of America, and believing it made them want to live up to it. This may be the primary explanation for the willingness of so many to suffer the depravations of the Continental Army in the darkest, hungriest days of the Revolutionary War.

The eighteenth century was called the “Age of Enlightenment” when thinkers and philosophers throughout the western world challenged intertwined political and religious systems that had been in place for centuries. These philosophers developed concepts that can be summed up in five simple statements: All humans are born with equal rights; reason is superior to dogma; ones method of worship is a private matter; government and religion should be separate; and people are capable of self government. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, gave the liberty loving philosophy of the Enlightenment a unique living laboratory to prove its value, and the result was indeed exceptional, as were the amazing people that made it all happen.

For a century or more America was an exceptional place of opportunity. There was always more land in the west for those hardy and courageous enough to claim it, and every man had equal opportunity to apply his mind and his hard work toward making himself whatever he was capable of becoming. It’s difficult for Americans today to understand how unique and wonderful that was.

The land is all claimed now, and far too much regulation and taxation has eroded opportunities for the individual entrepreneur, but still America draws emigrants from around the world because the economic environment created by two centuries of freedom still shines of liberty and opportunity in countries stuck in oligarchy or those whose pendulum has swung past liberty into the injustices of socialism. So I’ve answered my original question: America is still exceptional, but we cannot perpetually claim exceptionalism because of the accomplishments of our parents and grandparents.

The generation of Americans before mine was so exceptional that they helped save the world; mine started out in confused anti-establishment, pleasure-above-all activism and then slid into decades of political apathy bringing America into danger of being swept along with the world’s collective pendulum. Recent re-involvement and self-education by a significant segment of the population is heartening, but so far it’s only a beginning, and we still suffer from too many Americans not understanding our exceptional history, or caring. I don’t know if a generation hence we will still have a legitimate claim to American Exceptionalism.

Our Founders and Framers had no desire for America to remain the exception in an otherwise despotic world. They hoped and predicted that other countries would join us in greatness, in liberty, and in our experiment in self government; they believed in the inalienable rights of all people, not just Americans. They did not fear foreign power as much as they feared internal complacency that would allow our government to do what unchecked governments naturally do, grow and amass power. The story of the world and of America since their time has exceeded both their greatest hopes and their greatest fears, but through it all America has remained exceptional.

Governments, Corporations and Unions

The following is based on the premise developed by philosophers of The Enlightenment and embraced by the Founders of the United States of America that every individual holds equal inalienable rights – rights that cannot be taken away or transferred to another person or entity.  Inalienable rights might be violated, but they cannot be morally eliminated.  A criminal person or despotic government might imprison an individual or even kill the person, but that does not diminish the person’s right to freedom or to life, even if death renders that right to the past tense.  The individual’s rights have been violated, but not eliminated. Inalienable rights cannot even be given up voluntarily; one has the right to submit, but retains the right to withdraw from submission.

From this first premise it follows that no group of individuals has greater rights than a single individual.  Each individual holds his or her rights inalienably, but rights do not add as a group grows.  If this were not true then any group would have more rights than any individual, thus rendering the individual’s rights as alienable rather than inalienable, and a majority would have the power to take away the rights of an individual or a minority.  We may see a majority violate the rights of a minority, but it does not have the moral power to do so, or to eliminate them.  In the natural order of things, organized groups of people do not have rights, only individual members do.  An organization assuming “rights” that it does not possess can be done only by force or fraud, or when granted immorally by a government (a form of force).

Softball teams, men’s clubs, and sororities are examples of organizations that do not have rights.  Two types of organizations that have artificially been given rights by government are corporations and labor unions.

Individual businessmen have the proper right to join with their fellows in a business venture.  They may choose to incorporate under a legally binding contract in order to define the venture and to record ownership, & etc, but the corporation should not have rights or responsibilities under the law beyond the rights and responsibilities of each individual involved.  Corporations can be very powerful business tools allowing individuals to pool capitol for far greater ventures than any single one could attempt, but a corporation should not be treated as an individual shielding the actual individuals from liability or taxation (nor should it be taxed as an individual).  No corporation should enjoy more government benefit than any other corporation or individual, and certainly no corporation should be considered by government to be “too big to fail”.

Similarly, while no individual has the inalienable right to the fruits of labor without laboring, each has the right to work or not work at any given job pursuant to agreeable terms with the employer, and each has the right to band together with his fellows and agree as a group to work or not work, and to negotiate collectively with an employer.  They may do so with the strength of contract if each so chooses, but no group of them has the right to compel any individual to work or not to work, or to enter into such a contract against his will.  Certainly many workers banded together for purposes of negotiating wages and working conditions have more negotiating power than any one individual, but the union of workers should have no rights under the law beyond the rights of the individuals.

The United States government began giving certain groups artificial rights and powers very early in its history.  The ink was barely dry on The Constitution before the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, began trying to help corporations by various means including manipulating tariffs.  His motivation was a tremendous desire to see the United States prosper in the budding industrial revolution, but motives notwithstanding, it was a mistake and a dangerous precedent to grant groups of citizens, in this case corporations of manufacturers, privileges beyond any individual citizen.

As the country grew up in the nineteenth century politicians with motives much less pure than Hamilton’s continued to manipulate the law to the benefit of corporations – often at the detriment of the fledgling labor movement.  But eventually the pendulum swung and government began manipulating the law to give unions more power and corporations less.  In this environment it became necessary for every politician to choose sides – Big Business or Big Labor.

Lost in the shuffle was the fact that business and labor are both honorable parts of the capitalistic system of free enterprise that made the United States an industrial giant far beyond Hamilton’s greatest dreams, and made the American worker the most productive and best compensated in the world under the best working conditions.  In general capitalism was not given credit for these achievements; the achievements of big business were chocked up to greed and deemed evil, while the ever improving lot of workers was credited to the unions.

What’s not well understood is that unions - the banding together of workers in order to multiply negotiating power - cannot create wealth.  The workers can create, not the union, but a worker’s ability to create in the industrialized world is dependent on the existence of a massive infrastructure of innovation.  Prehistoric men, women, and children had to toil at hunting, gathering and other related tasks virtually all waking hours in order to survive.  Modern society not only survives but thrives in luxury by the efforts of only part of the population working a small percentage of the time.  One cannot negotiate with the laws of physics and physiology; negotiation did not create this huge improvement in human life, innovation did.

The industrial revolution has been an exponential rush of innovation accomplishing in 200 years more advancement than all of previous history, and throughout this time most innovation has been financed by corporations or individuals destined to profit from incorporating.  Unions should be given their historical due; they have helped workers negotiate with often faceless corporations whose members were too often insulated by immoral laws from the responsibility of providing a safe work environment and honest negotiation, but when unions are given credit for the forty hour work week and our high standard of living, their importance is being inflated.  Unions may have been the negotiating force that helped workers obtain a share of the benefits resulting from centuries of innovation, but it was the innovation that made the benefits possible, and it’s the innovators and those that financed them that deserve the credit – and the lion’s share of the profits.

But in relatively recent history a union/employer relationship has come to exist that does not involve profit.  This is the case of public employees being represented by unions that have been made very powerful by government.  Assuming this takes place in a republic it’s a philosophically unique situation where the employer which represents the people has given artificial rights to a group of employees who are a subset of the people and are paid by the people.  If a majority of the people wants public employees to be well paid and fairly treated then there’s no need for a union.  If this isn’t the case then why do the people’s representatives give undue power to the public employee unions against the will of a majority of their constituents?  This makes political sense only when public employees make up a very large voting bloc and/or a very large donating bloc.

Generally a group of people that have only their profession in common would be expected to be diverse in other areas including their political views, but public employee unions often do not allow this divergence of political opinion among their members.  This writer has interviewed teachers who are forced by their unions on a regular basis to donate to the campaigns of politicians that the teacher does not willingly support.  Somehow the union has acquired the power to have money withdrawn from the teachers’ paychecks and donated.  This means public employee unions use their government granted artificial powers to create artificial political blocs to support candidates that reinforce and enhance the union’s artificial powers.

In any given community the percentage of teachers is relatively small and even as a bloc would not wield excessive political clout.  Neither would the fire fighters, the road crew, police force, postal workers, or other specific groups of public employees.  But when all of these workers are unionized in artificially powerful unions and those unions form an effective union of unions, all with the same political agenda of further empowering public employee unions, and when all members are forced to support the same political candidates, if not with their votes then certainly with their dollars, a huge political machine is created that many politicians woo with an ever ascending spiral of compensation and entitlements that has brought many American States to the verge of insolvency.

The political machines created by the unions of public employee unions are not actually big enough to have the power they seem to enjoy.  The power they wield is because they are incredibly active and focused.  The practical remedy is for the rest of us to become equally active and focused on politically combating the candidates that cater to the unions and refuse to see the obvious unsustainability of the current trend.  This practical remedy is in fact a means of pushing our government toward the proper remedy which is an adherence to the principles of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution giving rights only to individuals and not to organizations.