AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Baggers go on and on about "American Exceptionalism" and I've only once gotten a clear explanation from a poster at POLITICO: America isn't subject to the normal proceedings of history and that means, among other things, that American will never be eclipsed on the world stage.

Today Fats Limbaugh gave his own definition:

If you want police citing you for eating too much trans fat, vote Democrat. If you want death panels in your health care legislation, vote Democrat. If you want higher health care costs, vote Democrat. If you want to believe that we are not a great country -- and Michael Kinsley today writing in Politico actually says we're not a great country and never have been and he's all ticked off about people who say we are, the exceptionalism thing is overdone. And he illustrates how he totally misunderstands what American exceptionalism is. He ought to listen to me. American exceptionalism is not that we're better people. It's not that we're any different DNA-wise. It's not that we're special. It's not that God has chosen us. American exceptionalism is this: The history of the world is oppression, tyranny, authoritarianism, control, dungeons, and prison. The history of the world is people living in squalor. Check it. The history of the world is human misery. The United States is the exception. And why?

Not because we're better people but because of our founding documents and the notion that our freedom is part of our creation, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Our Founding Fathers codified our very existence in our founding documents. Our Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that limits the freedom of government, that limits the reach of government. That is what is exceptional about America. Sometimes the whole phrase "American exceptionalism" is lost. Try to look at it this way. There's a standard, whatever it is, and then there's an exception to the rule. We are the exception to the rule of humanity. The rule of humanity on this earth has been torture, imprisonment, squalor, totalitarianism. We're the exception to that rule. Human freedom. That's what American exceptionalism is, and it is at risk.