John Steele Gordon offers
thoughts on American exceptionalism:Our first piece of luck was the land we occupy and its geopolitical position on the globe. Abundantly endowed with natural resources and with a vast territory, we are a continental power, like Russia or China. But we border on only two other countries, both friendly, so strategically we are also an island power, like Britain or Japan.
Our second piece of luck, even more important, was our mother country. It was in medieval England that the concept of personal liberty — the great gift of the English-speaking peoples to the world — was born. And local control of local matters was the norm in England. So both liberty and self-government came to America with the very first colonists. The United States, more than any other country, was created by individual people, not rulers, so power has always tended to flow from the bottom up, not the top down.
In the early days, that made America exceptional indeed. If today it is less so, it is only because the idea that the locus of political power resides with the governed, not the governors, has spread around the world.
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When the American colonies fell out with the mother country in 1776, they did so over differing ideas as to the nature and extent of the liberty that they all held dear. This was a dispute not over political power, but over political philosophy. And the dispute produced an event that was more than exceptional, it was unprecedented in world history: a country that emerged solely out of an abstract but extraordinarily powerful idea that has motivated it ever since. As Abraham Lincoln noted 87 years later, the United States was "born in liberty" and motivated by the idea that government should be "of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Americans wrote the modern world's first written constitutions to limit the power of government and protect the rights of individuals. This exceptional idea, too, has now spread around the world.
