American Exceptionalism

[Samson]

You people think it is a maral crime to understand how and why others may have objections to our international policies..

I cannot speak for all Us People, but I'm not even sure what a "Maral Crime" is.


Am I gonna go to hell?

 

[Samson]

I'm sure your mother thinks you are exceptional. Doesn't the claim of exceptionalism smack of ego and arrogance?

HEY!


Leave my momma outta this!

 

[Mr. Peepers]

In every way that is important to me.

I asked for examples. This country is not even remotely perfect and never has been. There are many in our society who do not agree with you at all. And here are MANY around the world that have had it with our imperialistic attitudes, stupidity, ignorance, arrogance and disdain for honoring treaties and pacts. There are many who tire of us meddling in their political process and "propping up" leaders that we think we can control or sway to serve our interests, no matter how much of a dictator or butcher he may be. Why can you not admit that this country is not the perfect shining beacon of whatever righty "by god" patriotism that you wear on your sleeve? This country is far from all bad, but we are also far from rightly owning our arrogance.

 

[Si modo]

In every way that is important to me.

I asked for examples. This country is not even remotely perfect and never has been. ....

I never said it was. Strawman.

.... There are many in our society who do not agree with you at all. ....

Too bad.

..... And here are MANY around the world that have had it with our imperialistic attitudes, stupidity, ignorance, arrogance and disdain for honoring treaties and pacts. There are many who tire of us meddling in their political process and "propping up" leaders that we think we can control or sway to serve our interests, no matter how much of a dictator or butcher he may be. Why can you not admit that this country is not the perfect shining beacon of whatever righty "by god" patriotism that you wear on your sleeve? This country is far from all bad, but we are also far from rightly owning our arrogance.

Hey, too bad for you. I think my country is exceptional. You have a problem with that. I don't care.

 

[Si modo]

Yes, America is exceptional, but we are not refering to the pride we have in our nation, but the dangerous concept of using American military might to shape the world into our own image.


AE foreign policies is the sign of political madness. That is all!!

I'm no believer in Newspeak definitions. I AM a believer in American exceptionalism. We are exceptional.

.... I'm sure your mother thinks you are exceptional. ....

She did, when she was alive. You haven't deserved the right to even speak of her. (Imagine those words spoken at a sub-zero - Fahrenheit - temperature, too.)

 

[ihopehefails]

Yeah we provide democracy around the world whether they want it or not.
and if a million or so of them die in the process, well that is just the price of Americanized democracy.

You guys actually don't like freedom because you did not mind the communist purges when they were done in Russia and in China because I can't understand why you would complain about the deaths of millions when its spreading democracy but not when it is implementing a communist idea.

 

[ihopehefails]

"(Enter country here) exceptionalism" leads nations to disaster.

Nice to see Cheney is a big advocate for it though. Considering that he was the intellectual force behind one of the worst administrations in American history.

Its always amazing how people on the left want to attack America whenever someone says American exceptionalism so the next time we say you hate America stop denying it and show us one time when you actually defended this country's name or didn't join in the America bashing started by someone else.

 

[ihopehefails]

"(Enter country here) exceptionalism" leads nations to disaster.

Nice to see Cheney is a big advocate for it though. Considering that he was the intellectual force behind one of the worst administrations in American history.

"American Exceptionalism" is not defined as a simple matter of national patriotism.
(Perhaps that's why the OP went to the trouble of providing links to better explain the term before entering into discussion.)

American Exceptionalism has more to do with the "exceptional" system of government our founders provided to us. This is a system which lacks the class devisions of typical governments of the age and emphasized the equality of the individual as well as his unalienable natural rights. It was the "exception" to the rule of the day.

And even now, it still has the potential to remain "exceptional". That is, if we can stop the socialist movement from destroying it.

I agree with this sentiment because American exceptionalism isn't about Americans themselves because I am an American and I can tell you that in my day to day dealings that most people are not exceptional in fact, some are real dicks but what is exceptional is the government and ideas of freedom that has flourished in this country.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Yeah we provide democracy around the world whether they want it or not.
and if a million or so of them die in the process, well that is just the price of Americanized democracy.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan: "We are the oldest continuing democracy in the world. . . . We don't make refugees, we admit them. When the rich of the world get sick, they come here to be treated, and when their children come of age, they send them here to our universities. We have a supple political system open to reform, and a wildly diverse culture that has moments of stress but plenty of give. . . . The point is that while terrible challenges face us -- improving a sick public education system, ending the easy-money culture, rebuilding the economy -- we are building from an extraordinary, brilliant, and enduring base."

 

[PoliticalChic]

The USA is exceptional. Just call me jingo Si modo - it rolls off the tongue nicely. I can think of no better country in the world and I have no problem with thinking that way. Sue me.

Yes, America is exceptional, but we are not refering to the pride we have in our nation, but the dangerous concept of using American military might to shape the world into our own image.


AE foreign policies is the sign of political madness. That is all!!

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, often referred to as Turgot (10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), was a French economist and statesman. Today he is best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. In a 1778 letter, he described America as “the hope of mankind” because it “must show the world by example, that men can be free and tranquil, and can do without the chains that tyrants and cheats of all garb have tried to lay on them…It must give the example of political, religious, commercial and industrial liberty. The shelter which it is going to offer to the oppressed of all nations will console the earth.”

 

[PoliticalChic]

I think there's delicious irony when Dick (how appropriate) Cheney talks about the Constitution.

That's like Hugo Chavez talking about the wonders of a free media.

The French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy noted in a 2006 interview with the WSJ: “In France, with the nation based on roots, on the idea of the soil, of a common memory…the very existence of America is a mystery and a scandal…The ghost that has haunted Europe for two centuries is America’s coming together as an act of will, of creed. It shows that there is an alternative to organic nations.” [A society that took shape through conscious decisions and willful sculpting by its various founders and builders. –Medved]

 

[PoliticalChic]

Funny how a place some don't consider to be very exceptional is the same place people from around the world want to relocate to, and have for generations.

Wyoming.

“In most countries in the world your fate and your identity are handed to you; in America, you determine them for yourself. America is a country where you get to writh the script of your own life. 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.” Dinesh D’Souza, born in India.

 

[PoliticalChic]

The USA is exceptional. Just call me jingo Si modo - it rolls off the tongue nicely. I can think of no better country in the world and I have no problem with thinking that way. Sue me.

We all love this country.

Some of us just want it to live up to its ideals.

Others seem fine with PRETENDING it does

On January 11, 1989, in his last televised speech from the Oval Office, President Ronald Reagan, said: “An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American….We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs [protection]…. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

 

[Oscar Wao]

I think there's delicious irony when Dick (how appropriate) Cheney talks about the Constitution.

That's like Hugo Chavez talking about the wonders of a free media.

The French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy noted in a 2006 interview with the WSJ: “In France, with the nation based on roots, on the idea of the soil, of a common memory…the very existence of America is a mystery and a scandal…The ghost that has haunted Europe for two centuries is America’s coming together as an act of will, of creed. It shows that there is an alternative to organic nations.” [A society that took shape through conscious decisions and willful sculpting by its various founders and builders. –Medved]

Sure...I agree with that French guy, about how unique and great our system of government is.

HOWEVER, what I find IRONIC is that someone like Cheney is lauding this "alternative to organic nations," when he's the one who was undermining this "alternative" (the foundation of our Republic, AKA the Constitution) from '01-'09.

 

[PoliticalChic]

The USA is exceptional. Just call me jingo Si modo - it rolls off the tongue nicely. I can think of no better country in the world and I have no problem with thinking that way. Sue me.

We all love this country.

Some of us just want it to live up to its ideals.

Others seem fine with PRETENDING it does

Individually or nationally, it is never a good idea to self-delude, lie to oneself!

“The United States is comically bad at making its own case,” Maddox writes in the book’s opening pages. This observation will ring true to those Americans who wonder how their country—which welcomes more immigrants than any other, is more generous in its foreign aid than any other, and whose culture is so popular—could be loathed by so many. It will sound even more spot-on to those non-Americans, like Maddox, who consider themselves friends of the United States. For years, overseas admirers of the U.S. have had to endure witless editorials and boorish dinner companions ranting about how Uncle Sam is the root of all evil. Unfortunately, the government of the United States has failed miserably at defending itself in the court of world opinion.
Maddox makes the case for American indispensability. “American values are Western values,” she titles her third chapter. She stresses to her non-American readers that whatever differences they might have with America, they would do well to understand that the United States ultimately stands for individual rights, political freedom, and the free exchange of goods—all distinctly Western ideas.
CJ Mobile

 

[PoliticalChic]

We are exceptional.

In what way? You could say that every country is exceptional in its own way, true?

This ought to be good...

[Paul] Hollander’s acute observations of anti-Americanism, both foreign and domestic. America, he notes in The Only Superpower, is seen as the most modern of all countries, in the vanguard of almost everything, so all the discontents and disappointments of modernity—which are many, serious, and often contradictory—are laid at its door. For Hollander, anti-Americanism is a form of inverted utopianism: if it weren’t for America, mankind would be living in a latter-day Garden of Eden.
Between Experience and Reflection by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 27 April 2009

 

[ihopehefails]

I agree with the skeptics above but I have always marveled at conservative friends who throw this term around with little knowledge of our history. Or maybe knowledge is the wrong concept in this mindset. Consider our treatment of Blacks, Indians, Women, and rights till Lincoln, the beginning of the last century, FDR, and LBJ and still today and then look at inner cities today and exceptionalism seems a tough act.

"[T]he greatest challenge to [the American idea] is the false idea that American patriotism is inextricably bound up with the notion that being a normal nation is somehow beneath America's dignity. Belief in American exceptionalism is compatible with the idea of American normality: Our nation is exceptionally well-founded and exceptionally faithful to an exceptionally nuanced system of prudential political axioms." George Will

"Is it possible to construct a narrative that incorporates both the truly inspiring ideals of American democracy and the often ugly behaviors that have also characterized life in the United States? For whatever reason, speaking only for myself personally, it does seem difficult to think that way." U.S. Intellectual History: American exceptionalism

"The late eighteenth century was indeed an “age of democratic revolutions,” as Robert R. Palmer reminded us many years ago. But only the United States emerged as a functioning democracy. Tocqueville’s reference point was the French Revolution, which brought forth terror, dictatorship, Napoleon, national defeat, and reaction. The attraction of America to this remarkable French intellectual was its perceived distinctiveness. The mid-nineteenth century surge of liberalism in Europe had a significant impact in Britain, but much less on the continent."

"...It is not surprising that the years immediately after World War II, when the United States finally accepted a leadership role in world affairs, saw an outpouring of scholarship on the issue of American distinctiveness by scholars such as Daniel Boorstin, David Potter, Louis Hartz, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Their writing reflected the impact of World War II and the phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Few people doubted at the time that America was exceptional in its liberal-democratic character, industrial development, and mass affluence. Clearly, that is no longer the case. Today’s historians, like Boorstin, et al., search for a useable past.

The United States, it still seems to me, has been during most of its existence different in kind from most of the world. But, Frederick Jackson Turner or Daniel Boorstin notwithstanding, its values did not spring simply from the environment. They derived mainly from a Northwestern European blend of Calvinist Protestantism and British Enlightenment liberalism." History News Network


"Difference in degree? Or difference in kind? “American exceptionalism” is a categorical phrase that can easily become an intellectual strait jacket. But when acting as historians studying a relatively distant past we abandon the idea of enduring and substantial national differences at the peril of insufficient historical understanding" Alonzo Hamby in above link

It always amazed me how quick liberals like to point out past misdeed carried out by our genetic forefathers as if everyone should bear the shame. For years I struggled with why the hell you guys are so fucked in the head but now understand that this is the way collectivist think where individuals such as American citizens living now identities somehow overlap into the identity of other American citizens who happen to live in the past.

There is no individuality in this kind of thinking because if you saw the world as individuals then you can not make the ethereal connection with past living Americans and current living Americans as being guilty of the same crime.

 

[ihopehefails]

We are exceptional.

In what way? You could say that every country is exceptional in its own way, true?

This ought to be good...

[Paul] Hollander’s acute observations of anti-Americanism, both foreign and domestic. America, he notes in The Only Superpower, is seen as the most modern of all countries, in the vanguard of almost everything, so all the discontents and disappointments of modernity—which are many, serious, and often contradictory—are laid at its door. For Hollander, anti-Americanism is a form of inverted utopianism: if it weren’t for America, mankind would be living in a latter-day Garden of Eden.
Between Experience and Reflection by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 27 April 2009

Are you saying we are burguoise for them?

 

[ihopehefails]

loving your country is great

Lying to yourself and others about how the rest of the world views your country leads to 911 attacks

Another post why we deserved 911...

Do you actually go around blame rape victims if they happen to be to attractive?

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

loving your country is great

Lying to yourself and others about how the rest of the world views your country leads to 911 attacks

Another post why we deserved 911...

Do you actually go around blame rape victims if they happen to be to attractive?

Actually Truth didn't say we deserved 9/11, that's simply you spinning what she said because you can't address what she actually said.