Although I consider myself a
Domanist rather than a "conservative," I do align with nearly all
positions that are considered "conservative"; I must, however,
totally reject "American [sic] exceptionalism," which phrase I
had never heard until quite recently, and which I would like to never hear
again.
I've never
heard or seen this concept defined, but the idea seems to be that (the United
States of) "America" is radically different from every other country
in the world. Culturally, the USA is one of the most unexceptional places on Earth,
being almost undistinguishable from its northern neighbor. (In fact, Canucks generally
view themselves and Yanks as fellow North Americans—one might perhaps designate
them together by my coinage, "Yankanucks"—and regard the US-Canadian
border, which people have crossed in both directions for generations, as an
inconvenience.) An indignant patriot, if forgetful of the fact that we
have jettisoned our own "melting pot" ideology in favor of its
antithesis, "diversity is our strength," might retort that our status
as a "nation of immigrants" sets us apart from others. In
reality, other New World destinations, especially Canada, have shared in the
waves of immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, and even Old World countries
like Great Britain often have more ethnic heterogeneity than people on this
side of the Atlantic Ocean realize. It should be noted further that some
things thought of by us as quintessentially "American" really are of
foreign origin; for instance, the cowboy hat was developed in Canada, and
baseball is basically the same as "rounders," a game played by
British children. In centuries long past we might have evolved into a
unique civilization, but, because of such forces of globalization as mass media
and international commerce, the peoples of the world are growing closer
together rather than farther apart.
Attendance at
houses of worship reportedly is higher in the USA than in almost any other
heavily industrialized land, but, if one were to ignore that statistic and base
one's assessment of our piety on statistics related to moral issues, one would
have no reason to conclude that religious belief is more characteristic of our
country than of the nations of Europe, with which we are always being
contrasted. At the beginning of the 1990's, for instance, 420 abortions
were induced every day in the United Kingdom; in the USA, at the same time, the
number was 4400. Adjusting for the fact that the US had some 4½
times the population of the UK, an unborn child was well over twice as likely
to be murdered here in the USA as in that supposedly more secular European
state. Even worse, churchgoers reportedly are no less likely than anyone
else to become foeticides. (This doesn't necessarily mean that we are in more moral jeopardy than is the average
Western polity. We're all in the same boat, and it's going down; whether
the bow, i.e., the
Americas, or the stern, i.e.,
Europe, sinks first is of little consequence.) The one distinction
between us and Europeans in this category, therefore, apparently is that we are
hypocrites; Europeans at least admit that they are no longer religious, whereas
we Yanks say "Lord, Lord" but don't do as He tells us.
Yanks have a
reputation (at least in some circles) for favoring smaller, less-paternal
government than do Europeans, Canadians, &c.,
but this is not quite deserved. First of all, this distinction, cosmetic
as it may be anyway (see below), dates only to the period just after World War
II, when many nations imitated the reforms made by the National Socialists ("Nazis") in Germany; in
fact, during the 1930's, because of the great expansion of Uncle Sam's rôle
that occurred under President F. D. Roosevelt, we were actually more socialistic than countries such as
Canada and the United Kingdom, the latter of which had, since the
mid-Nineteenth Century, been the world's leading advocate and practitioner of
free trade, quite unlike the USA. Second, even before Obama ascended the
throne, the US government was far larger and more overweening than perhaps the
typical person knew; the combination of State and federal taxes already put a
greater burden on businesses in our economy than in any other save that of
Japan, and per-capita government spending was higher (even after accounting for
price differences) here than anywhere else except Luxembourg, Qatar, Norway,
Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. Indeed, the ostensibly
communist People's Republic of China is more truly capitalist and laissez-faire than the USA these days. Third,
opposition to a planned economy and so forth is far from universal in
Yankeedom, and this has been the case for as long as Jeffersonians have liked
to think of us as the champion of free markets.
Perhaps at
least some of the "exceptionalists" are stuck in the past (which,
admittedly, is a better place to be stuck than the present, now that we've
become the Obama Nation). Having been founded on a political instead of
an ethnic basis, the USA had a stronger claim to singularity when it was
new—but what about Switzerland and the Austrian empire?
Our
civilization is not exceptional even in deeming itself exceptional, assuming
that this is even majority sentiment. The classical Greeks, for example,
felt the same way, but they, as the devisors of logic, philosophy, science, and
theatre, had far better cause than we do for thinking thus. (And the opinion
was not limited to themselves; it used to be thought that the ancient Greeks
must have been a unique race, so much greater were their accomplishments than
those of any other people.) The Jews of Old Testament times vaunted
themselves as a chosen people in a promised land, but, according to the Word of
God, they were.
Naturally,
the content of the preceding paragraphs doesn't prove that the USA is identical to any other state, even to
Canada. This is probably the one country (at least so
far) to which people believe they have some sort of God-given right to
emigrate, legally or otherwise—but don't you think that when
"America" is pronounced "exceptional," this is meant in a good way? The truth is that
self-congratulation, whether the self is an individual or a personification
like Uncle Sam, is to be avoided. The New Testament and the Church
Fathers tell us that we are only sojourners in this world, and that our true
home—our true country—lies
in Heaven; Heaven may be a difficult place to come home to, if one has
dwelt chauvinistically on how special one considers one's homeland to
be.
