What’s So Great About America?

I have written several times about the amazing disdain that American liberals and Democrats have for their own country. Each time the feedback from the left is vitriolic: How dare I question their patriotism? Of course I was doing no such thing, merely pointing out that conservatives tend to like America as it is while libdems think it is seriously flawed. A good illustration is provided by the comparison of two opinion pieces, one from the left and one from the right.

Mark Kurlansky (lefty) in today’s la times is sick and tired of the founding fathers and all their intents. The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over 200 years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the West.

I think that pretty much sums up the libdem viewpoint.

Kurlansky elaborates: America has the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public school systems and the worst benefits for workers, and the margin between rich and poor has been growing precipitously. Furthermore, we use military might less cautiously, show less respect for international law and are the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation.

And if that is not enough claptrap, he manages to find a critical sentence in Alexis de Tocqueville’s paean to America, Democracy in America. Tocqueville observed of Americans: They unceasingly harass you to extort praise and if you resist their entreaties, they fall to praising themselves.

Kurlansky fails to mention that Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s to find out why the Americans had been able to produce a stable democratic republic while efforts to do so in France had repeatedly failed. Tocqueville was the first to refer to America as exceptional -- that is qualitatively different than other countries. He attributed our national exceptionalism to what he called the American Creed – a belief system based on liberty, equality of opportunity, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. Indeed, those defining features of American exceptionalism are still alive and well today, having weathered undermining attempts by generations of socialists.

Kurlansky thinks the crux of the problem is our lack of anti-establishment thinkers who, he believes, are the only means whereby a society progresses. He praises Democrats for raising the expectation of being anti-establishment, only to have their hopes dashed by Republicans and by their own lily-livered commitment to the status quo. Apparently this anti-est lack is responsible for our having the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public school systems and the worst benefits for workers – that is, if you believe that rubish.

On the other pole is the immigrant scholar Dinesh D'Souza, Indian born but now a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The immigrant, says D’Sousa in The American Enterprise, cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. In the 1980s CBS broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, "People Like Us", intending to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. But people across the world saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. I asked a friend from Bombay who had been trying to move to the United States for a decade, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

Given the standard of living of the ordinary American, it is no wonder that socialist schemes have never found a wide constituency in the United States. As Werner Sombart observed, all socialist utopias in America have come to grief on roast beef and apple pie. The moral triumph of America is that it has extended the benefits of comfort and affluence, traditionally enjoyed by very few, to a large segment of society.

What’s more, in the United States the social ethic is egalitarian, regardless of wealth. The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but he isn’t in any fundamental sense better than you are.

In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible.

America’s founders solved two great problems which are a source of perennial misery and conflict in many other societies—the problem of scarcity, and the problem of religious and tribal conflict. They invented a new regime in which citizens would enjoy a wide range of freedoms—economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion—in order to shape their own lives and pursue happiness. It is now the hope of countless millions all across the world.

So which America is reality? Is it the most backward democracy in the West (Kurlansky) or the hope of countless millions all across the world? (D'Souza) Is America the libdem’s worst nightmare or the shining city on a hill that the rest of us love?