At the end of his book, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic, Michael Medved is very careful to distinguish between American exceptionalism and perfectionism. No person, and certainly no nation, is flawless. The test is if, and how, those flaws are overcome: “Confidence in divine providence, in other words, fosters accountability more than arrogance. Whenever we’ve fallen short, the stubborn conviction that the Almighty expects better has spurred efforts towards redemption.”
Michael then went on to quote David Adesnik of the American Enterprise Institute: “Critics often stumble on the complexity of this point, unable to comprehend how the United States can claim unique virtues if it also committed terrible acts of oppression. They fail to understand how the virtues embodied in the Founding ultimately subverted the forces of oppression.”
Perhaps the best way to understand the question is to take a look at the most famous (or infamous, depending upon perspective) example of the precise opposite of the view that America is exceptional and worthy of merit – Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. A full critique can be found in many other places, but here, let us zoom in on a Rorschach test to see where one is on this spectrum: the treatment of Abraham Lincoln. Zinn emphasizes contemporary critics of Lincoln, such as the staunch abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who once referred to Lincoln “as that slavehound from Illinois” because he was cautious about publicly condemning the Fugitive Slave Act, who claimed that “if he grows, it is because we watered him,” and labeled Lincoln “a first-rate, second-rate man.” Zinn also brings in a more modern critic, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (at one time a member of the Communist Party USA!), who said of Lincoln’s early position on slavery that it “breathes the fire of an uncompromising insistence on moderation” and that the Emancipation Proclamation “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” According to Zinn, the South’s willingness to secede and the North’s willingness to fight had little to do with slavery and everything to do with industrial policy. This is, of course, absurd, as one looks at South Carolina’s secession declaration, which will tell you: It was all about slavery.
For an opposite and eloquent view of Lincoln, Lars Moller’s article in the American Thinker, Abraham Lincoln: Conservative and Pragmatist, makes the point that Lincoln “…understood that a republic cannot survive if its foundational compact is shattered in the name of virtue. Thus, he pursued a gradual, legal path, aiming first to contain slavery before eradicating it. This was not moral cowardice but political wisdom – a recognition that justice, to endure, must be institutionalized rather than merely proclaimed.”
American exceptionalism produced Lincoln, and Providence placed him at precisely the right place and time. Humble though he was, he thought so too.
What of America since then? It is a fallen world, and we sometimes fall along with it, but have we generally thrown around the great “weight” Providence has exceptionally granted us for our own aggrandizement, or for higher purposes? At the end of an address to the World Economic Forum in 2003, Gen. Colin Powell engaged in a discussion with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, on “hard power” vs. “soft power.” Powell pointed out that neither American culture nor our political history suggests we want to use hard power, but situations sometimes mandate it.
It was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for domination over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.
Powell then went on to make what is perhaps his most famous statement: “We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years… and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in…”
The next time someone disparages America to you, ask them: What do you think the world would be like without the exercise of American power? And don’t let them give you an answer disconnected from reality, historical or otherwise. That power is exceptional, and it is by decree of Divine Providence.
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