Is America Exceptional?

Introduction

American exceptionalism is a conviction that the United States is different from other nations because the United States was established on exact ideas and principles about people, liberty and a constitutional pattern of government while other countries have typically been formed round a common ethnicity, belief or a shared history. According to Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation, putting authority and governance in the hands of a free people was revolutionary, and this is why America is exceptional (Dallek, 244).

Discussion and Analysis

The concept of American exceptionalism rests on the notion that The United States is the only nation built on a creed, a creed first set forward in the Declaration of Independence that all people are conceived identically and that they have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which is manifested by property ownership); these rights, furthermore, were bestowed upon them by their Creator (Dallek, 244).

Because of these rights, the government's power is restricted to that which the people permit it as elucidated in the United States Constitution, the foundation article that established the three branches of the government government that make, enforce and judge the law. Further, America is built on a premise that liberty is a universal principle that concerns to all people everywhere. Therefore, while the prime blame of the United States is to protected the privileges of its people, America has a lesson responsibility to fight back liberty at dwelling and overseas (Dallek, 244).

For Mr. Spalding and his colleagues, “America is exceptional because different any other territory, it is dedicated to the principles of human liberty, grounded on the realities that all men are created identical and endowed with equal rights(Dallek, 244).”

The American Exceptionalism Debate

While the idea of exceptionalism is fixed in a philosophy that formed even before the birth of the nation, it became a well established theory amidst scholars by the 1800s, encompassing the French philosopher and historian Alexis de Toqueville, who composed in Democracy in America:

“ The position of Americans is thus rather exceptional, and it may be accepted that no democratic people will ever be put in a alike one.”

As weighty as this notion may appear, it was one time encompassed in a basic school curriculum on civics and American government that educated how the nation is a product of Western civilization, fixed in Judeo-Christian standards that paved the way for certain political liberties. However, the recent ...