The draft Declaration of Independence being presented to the Second Continental Congress by the five man drafting committee on June 28, 1776. The five men standing before the Chair are from left to right John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The original painting hangs in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.
Wikimedia Commons/John Trumbull (1756-1843)

On this fourth of July, we should all reflect on the aspects of the United States that have made it such an exceptional country in the past. On a more urgent note, we should all worry, given how far we have fallen, whether we will continue to be exceptional in the future.     

What Made Us Exceptional in the Past

The painting above, depicting the presentation of the draft Declaration of Independence of the English American colonies from the English Crown, portrays the birth of something that was then very new in human history. It continues to be something very special, although many on the political Left would not agree. What made it completely novel in the 18th century and what makes it very special even now, was foreseen and thought about in the Age of Enlightenment in the writings of John Milton, of John Locke, and of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. The new American republic however was the very first manifestation of the Liberal State.

This new American republic was the very first republic in which all the people were collectively the sovereigns. The Roman republic could not really claim that, being dominated by the patricians. The Athenian direct democracy, although not technically a republic, came close. However, to vote in the Athenian democracy, one had to be an adult male citizen who owned land, who had completed required military training, and who was not a slave. Certainly no previous republic had citizen’s rights as extensively codified as in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights; nor did they have as complete a separation of powers between coequal branches of government to prevent tyrants from amassing all governmental power. The United States of America was the very first state to possess all of these characteristics simultaneously.

The Insistence of the Left (and Others) that the U.S. Is Not Exceptional

The United States, being composed of mortal human beings, is not without sin. Dwelling on these sins, such as the early acceptance of slavery or the conquering of the land from the indigenous indian population, many on the political Left would claim there is little exceptional and different about the United States of America from other countries. Consider the voices from the following posts objecting to the idea:

• Why US exceptionalism is not exceptional
• How exceptional is America, really?
• Watch: George Washington University Students Don’t Believe America Is Exceptional
• The Problems With American Exceptionalism
• The Most Exceptional Thing About America Is Our Paranoia
• Is America Exceptional, or Only Great?

A common sentiment presented in these objections is that a belief in American exceptionalism is a jingoistic and dangerous attempt to feel superior to the rest of the world. In a quote taken from The Problems With American Exceptionalism by Timothy Borjian, we read

…American exceptionalism should be removed from domestic political ideology and discourse. Excessive national pride is a dangerous thing, as it causes arrogance and makes people believe that one’s nation is exempt from established ethical norms. The American people need to understand that when countries work together to create multilateral universal rules, like the UN Charter, they do so in order to strengthen the bonds between nations, not weaken them.

If we had enough common values with countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, and would-be countries such as ISIS to give a common foundation to those “multilateral universal rules”, such a statement would be easier to believe. Also, there is no reason to believe that a faith in American exceptionalism would cause us to feel we were “exempt from established ethical norms.” On the contrary, we would hope aways following established ethical norms would be a part of American exceptionalism. Of course there is still the argument about just which ethical norms are “established”!

Nevertheless, a number of these criticisms have a solid point, in that the United States is becoming less exceptional because we are becoming less true to our heritage. I will discuss this sorrowful fact shortly.

The Counterargument 

There is a serious and sizable counterargument that the U.S. is indeed an exceptional country, but you must be on the political right, a conservative in American political parlance, to believe it. To be more precise, you must believe government is not the best instrument to use to solve social and economic problems. What was really new about the United States when it was established was the extraordinary idea that all were equal before the law, that all had the same rights, and that we the people ruled ourselves. Kings do not rule us; and more apropos for the present day, technocrats do not have the right to rule us because of their supposed superior knowledge, which quite often only exists in their imagination. Needless to say, this mindset is counter to the beliefs of progressives.

To a large extent the belief government is not the best tool in the shed comes from an appreciation — for most people only intuitive — that most large social systems are mathematically chaotic systems. See the posts Central Planning for Chaotic Social Systems, How to Solve Problems in Chaotic Social Systems, Chaotic Economies and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and Economics Is Mostly About Human Psychology for more discussion on this topic. Any balance and stability of an economy can only be achieved at the microeconomic level, where supply-demand balances can arise automatically. However, that can only happen so long as government does not intrude into the economy and upset local supply-demand balances like a bull in a china shop with macroeconomic “stimulus” programs.

Evidence these statements are true can be found by comparing the per capita GDP of all the countries in the world versus their relative lack of government economic intrusion (AKA economic freedom), as I did in the posts Comparing the Economies of All Countries on Earth, and Are Leftist Economies Better Than Free-Markets?  For convenience, I reproduce the scatter plot of the nations’ points in the per capita GDP-Economic Freedom Index plane below. A nation’s index of economic freedom, calculated in a Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation collaboration, measures the degree of state intrusion into its economy. If the index is zero, the government completely controls the economy, i.e. the economy is totally socialist; and if it is 100, the economy is a completely laissez-faire, free-market economy.

Clearly, as a country’s economic freedom increases and state intrusion into the economy decreases, the country’s per capita GDP tends to increase exponentially. Additional interesting results are found if we plot a country’s GINI index versus its index of economic freedom. If the GINI is zero, the country’s GDP is completely equally distributed among all households; if it is 100, only one person receives the entire GDP as income and everyone else gets nothing. The corresponding scatter plot is shown below.

Here, given all the progressive propaganda about the unequal distribution of income in a free-market economy, we find a big surprise! The blue line in the plot is a linear fit that is meant to guide your eye. Surprisingly, as state economic intrusion decreases and economic freedom increases, the GINI index tends to fall linearly, i.e. income distribution becomes more equitable. There can be no mistake in the meaning of these two plots: the more a country moves in a direction of economic freedom from the state, the more exceptional it becomes as a positive example for other nations.

How Far We Have Fallen

We should hope eventually to become less exceptional as more countries become liberal (in the classical sense) states. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in reverse as the United States becomes less exceptional by becoming less liberal. For example, as I noted in Are Leftist Economies Better Than Free-Markets?, the United States has been increasingly diverging from a free market over a period of decades, and can hardly be viewed as a paragon of a laissez-faire, free-market economy. Simultaneously, progressives and their Democratic party have been growing increasingly authoritarian as they force us to travel along Friedrich Hayek’s road to serfdom. At the end of that road is the version of socialism known as fascism.

When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia finished on September 18, 1787, a departing Benjamin Franklin was confronted by a woman who asked “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.” May we remain true to our founding fathers and reverse course.

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