Three Cheers for American Exceptionalism!

by: tim dunkin | published: 10 22, 2014

There was an interesting story coming out of the Denver area recently which many may not have seen. It involved hundreds of high school students from five schools in Jefferson County, Colorado, walking out of classes, most often at the instigation of their teachers, and protesting several recent decisions made by the school board of that county, a board which includes several recently elected conservative members.

The two most commonly cited reasons for the protests were the imposition of merit pay for teachers and a proposed change in the AP history curriculum which left-wing opponents laughably called “censorship.” As Michelle Malkin pointed out recently, the driving force behind these walkouts was the teachers’ union, which is strongly opposed to the idea that decisions about teacher pay and the awarding of tenure would be tied up together with the actual performance of teachers in the classroom. The teachers’ unions absolutely hate that merit would be involved in this type of decision-making. According to the unions, publik skool teachers are delicate little flowers who must be shielded from any repercussions of their inability to do their jobs effectively, when such is indeed the case. As a vital part of the left-wing coalition, the teachers’ unions have a vested interest in maintaining ideological purity among teachers at the expense of actual effectiveness at teaching.

Yet, this isn’t really what I found to be the interesting thing about these protests. See, the vast, vast majority of high school students couldn’t care less about how much their teachers get paid or whether their teachers are getting union-mandated pay increases every year, whether they deserve it or not. Students really don’t care about this. So what was it that was getting the students out into the streets waving signs around?

The proposed changes to the AP history curriculum, the dreaded “censorship” that I mentioned above. See, conservative board members were pushing to make changes to the way history is taught in Jefferson County schools, using the Texas history curriculum as a model. These changes consisted of shifting the emphasis over toward concepts like individualism, patriotism, good citizenship, as well as simply cleaning up the curriculum of inaccuracies and falsehoods that currently are being taught. Wow. Pretty radical stuff, right?

But the problem is that the current AP history curriculum, which was prepared by far-left advocacy groups and was developed by the architect behind the Common Core standard for history teaching, is preferred by the left-wing ideologues in the educational establishment. As such, any move toward a more balanced, fact-based approach to teaching history will be met (and has been, in Jefferson County) with howls of indignation and screeches of hyperbolic brouhaha from the teachers’ union and left-wing teachers themselves, who then “encourage” (by giving de facto get-out-of-class-free cards to students) protests to coalesce. To listen to the wacko Left in Jefferson County and beyond, the county school board was getting ready to adopt standards that would have ignored slavery (it doesn’t), taught that Joe McCarthy was completely right (it doesn’t), and would have presented nothing at all about the bad parts of American history (it does mention them). Hence, the “censorship” nonsense. The irony of teachers and their befuddled students protesting a “right-wing” curriculum of good citizenship and patriotism while defending a very definitely left-wing biased curriculum is surely not lost on the astute observer.

Of course, it was all exaggeration, overstatement, and outright falsehood. But when has the Left ever shown any sort of reasoned reflection in these sorts of matters? One commenter on the Denver Post news story wondered breathlessly whether students would even be allowed to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail – because, you know, “not left-wing” = “racism.” As a matter of fact, the Texas program from which the proposed changes were modeled explicitly includes Letters from a Birmingham Jail in its subsection on the civil rights movement in the “U.S History Since 1877” section for 8^th grade social studies. But again, facts never stopped a left-winger from going on a good tear. There were other “progressives” posting in the comments that the new curriculum was “fascist” (so teaching about individualism and the free-market equals state control over every facet of life? Really?), while others opined that adopting the new history curriculum would make the Jefferson County school board worse than ISIS (because teaching good citizenship and patriotism is even more egregious than decapitating journalists, I guess).

None of this should surprise us, however. These folks on the Left – they hate the United States of America. That’s really about the only way it can be truthfully put. They hate America. They despise what America was built upon and what America represents. These are the folks who have a President who promised (and it’s about the only promise he has kept) to bring America down to the level of the rest of the world, who has explicitly denied the principle of American exceptionalism. These same folks are the ones who burn our flag and who loudly proclaim to foreigners all over the world how embarrassed they are to be Americans (yet they never seem to make good on their “threats” to emigrate somewhere else). Starting back in the 1960s, there developed a strain of thought (using the term loosely) in which America was viewed as being the cause of all the world’s problems, especially in the third world. Naturally, the people living in these countries, whose poor decisions have contributed to most of their own problems, were held blameless, mere pawns whose own behavior could in no wise have any negative effect on their societies.

Obviously, there are things in America’s history that are shameful. Slavery and Jim Crow, the way we treated the Native Americans, Japanese internment, and more. Nobody denies this – not I, not other conservatives, not the Texas model history curriculum – nobody. But equally as obvious is the fact that these things do not make up the sum total of American history. Indeed, they make up only a small part of American history, and are more than outweighed by the good, the admirable, and the just in American society and history. Not only this, but even with the bad aspects of our history, we’re still a far sight better than most of the rest of the world.

Liberals spend a great deal of energy deriding America while at the same time trying to favorably compare other societies to our own. To use one much-discussed example, every time the World Cup soccer tournament takes place, we are constantly berated about how much “better” soccer is than more typically American sports like baseball or football. By extension, the countries that play soccer are better than America, too, or at least the lefties would have us to believe.

But is it really so? After all – and let’s be frank - most of the places on this planet where soccer is popular are disease-ridden shantytowns. And the ones that aren’t, typically in Europe, are socialist tyrannies whose histories include purposefully engineered famines, industrialized genocide in death camps, virtually non-stop wars, genuine fascism, rampant colonialism, periodic pogroms, and more.

Or to put it another way, America doesn’t generally have to worry about epidemics of typhoid, cholera, malaria, malnutrition, or other pathologies; nor did America invent fascism and gas millions of Jews and other minorities. And the reason for these things is because of what America IS, at its fundamental core, what it was founded upon, even when we have not lived up to our ideals. Why would we want for America to become less like what we originally were, and more like what we were specifically designed NOT to be?

America doesn’t share these pathologies because we were built on a natural law foundation that found expression in a written Constitution that was designed to safeguard the natural liberties of individuals, and to place limits upon the ability of government to oppress the people. Up until the point where we started overtly ignoring the Constitution, an actual, genuine fascist government in America would have been an absolute impossibility. The sort of hero-worship that produced the cult of Hitler and Mussolini and which allowed the Japanese Emperor to drive his people into vicious wars of expansion simply did not, and could not, exist here.

This basis in natural law, in turn, gave us a foundation of liberty for the individual. We are able to enjoy freedom of speech that would get you fined or jailed in most of the rest of the world, even in supposedly civilized nations such as those in western Europe. America was built upon the principle of religious liberty for all, at a time when Europeans were still trying to figure out whether or not to kill the people in the neighboring valley for being of a different confession. And it is in these “soccer-friendly” countries today – whether in Latin America, Africa, or Asia – where we see the most consistent religious and sectarian persecutions and violence taking place. America didn’t have that because our foundation was explicitly based on the principle of religious liberty, even more than it was on protesting taxation or keeping our weapons.

These natural liberties enshrined in our Constitution, in turn, unleashed the creative power of the individual in that form of economics we call “capitalism.” Far from being a dirty word, capitalism has resulted in more broad-based wealth being generated for more people to raise the standards of living for more populations than ANY other system on earth. Capitalism allowed the United States to have the largest proportional middle class in the world’s history. We have had the largest, freest, and most prosperous and expansive middle class – small business owners, professionals, well-paid blue collar workers – on earth. And not only was it the largest, but it was also the most mobile and porous. Anyone who was willing to work hard instead of collecting a welfare check was, and still is, able to rise into the ranks of the middle class, or even further into the ranks of the rich. The reason we have had such a high standard of living, such a plethora of consumer goods of every imagineable variety, such access to the creature comforts that in former ages would have been available to the rich and the aristocracy only, is because of the freedom that we have had, that was engineered into the very founding of our system.

This standard of living, in turn, has allowed America to largely avoid the diseases, the famines, the civil strifes, the lawlessness, the poverty that afflict so much of the rest of the world. America’s wealth – the result of America’s economics and risk-taking – has built up an infrastructure in transportation, health care, agriculture, clean water, and so much else, that shields us from the pathologies that seem to be the baseline in much of the world.

The third world is not poor because America “stole their natural resources” or some such claptrap. The third world is poor because it’s constituents have largely, at a national and international level, followed policies that discourage, rather than encourage, investment, entrepreneurship, and involvement by those who might otherwise risk capital to benefit third world societies. After all, who in their right mind will park billions of dollars in investment capital into some third world banana republic that is just one demagogue away from nationalizing the assets of foreign companies just to buy a little popular support from largely uneducated populations who can’t understand that foreign investment benefits, rather than harms, them?

In short, these nations are poor because they have followed a socialist/Marxist model, instead of the capitalistic model. They made their choice not to imitate the despised Americans – and that means that they won’t be like the despised Americans, for good but mostly for ill. I think it’s about time that the rest of the world, and especially the third world, accepts that choices have consequences and started learning from those consequences.

So when you really think about it, when left-wingers and “progressives” try to downgrade America and make us more like the rest of the world, these pathologies are what they’re aiming for, whether they will acknowledge it or not. When the Left seeks to finish off American industry and fossil fuel production through the trojan horse of environmentalist, what they’re pushing for is for us to be a much poorer society with less access to the benefits of modern civilization. When they try to make the American health care more like the British or other models, what they’re trying to give us a system which is less efficient, has longer waiting periods, lower quality, and in general, will make us less healthy. As is typical for left-wingers, they want to tear down rather than build up. Instead of trying to help the rest of the world better itself, become more free, and build wealth and prosperity through investment and native industry, what the Left wants is to simply destroy the good things that we have while doing no good and giving no benefit to the rest of the world. It’s an insane proposition, when you think about it. And its one that we have to fight with whatever tools are available to stop. America must remain exceptional.

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