Thread by @bansisharma

1. American Exceptionalism

The Left will never understand American exceptionalism. Peter Beinart's ignorant rant in The Atlantic starts by asking an insanely wrong-headed formulation ("Who's to blame for ...") and goes downhill from there.
theatlantic.com/international/…

2. Beinart asserts that Obama's "experience as an African American, and his familiarity with American foreign policy in Indonesia, where he had spent part of his childhood, made it impossible for him to believe that the American government possesses some intrinsic righteousness."

3. This is an infuriatingly accurate description of Obama, and yet an equally infuriating misrepresentation of the very concept, let alone the ethos, of American exceptionalism.

4. Beinart further asserts that "For Obama, what made America exceptional was its capacity to progress beyond its ugly history."
No wonder Obama thought every country is exceptional (which also means no country is), because every country of course possesses the same "capacity."

5. I too spent the whole of my childhood away from America, and a lot of my adulthood too, but I never ever had any doubt about what makes America exceptional. It is not any particular incarnation of its governing administration, no matter how great or otherwise it might be.

6. It is not even any particular combination of its inhabitants at any given point in time, although there have been and continue to be very many great and exceptional people in America.

7. What makes America exceptional is that it is the first and only country which at its very founding made government subservient to people, not the other way around, which was everywhere the order of the day when America was founded. Many have copied us since our founding.

8. Put another way, what makes America exceptional is our very Constitution which has served as a beacon to the entire world ever since our founding, and most of all to successive generations of Americans themselves. God bless America!

9. America was not perfect at its founding, nor is it even today. But our Constitution set us on a blessed path to becoming more perfect over time, so long as we strive in accord with its principles and prescriptions, honed out of the crucible of excruciating human history,

10. Of course many on the left who do not view our Constitution as deserving of much deference, but instead find it as an irritating constraint on their political ambitions to remake society per their authoritarian impulses, are miffed by any allusion to American exceptionalism.

11. A favorite trope of the left is to slap the label "American exceptionalism" on anything they are inclined to disparage, thereby setting it up for ridicule through verbal trickery alone. Sophistry is not intellectual rigor. It is the hallmark of imposters.

The END