Posted by
mgraves on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 9:43:51 AM
And American Exceptionalism ended: not with the bang of a nuclear attack, or in a hail of gunfire of a coup d'état, or under the effects of a debilitating pandemic, but, rather, with an infantile cry for more government services.
Mark Steyn has been known to discuss how single payer health care so skews the relationship between the citizen and the state that future elections will be about the left promising more services and the "right" promising to deliver existing services in a more efficient manner. The problem is that we've already reached that point (i.e. Prescription Drug Benefit, No Child Left Behind, and even partial privatization of Social Security). There was no Waterloo or turning point.
It can not even be placed for certain on a timeline: was it FDR's New Deal, or perhaps earlier, with TR's progressivism? Could it have been the Warren Court, or LBJ's Great Society? Maybe Medicare or Social Security? Perhaps the 16th or 17th Amendments?
Whenever it was, American Exceptionalism, based upon the unique combination of rugged individualism and Toqueville's "associations", has surrendered to a typical combination of infantile collectivism and childish narcissism found in emotionally immature and "secure" Western nations.
America is about the "individual", no longer individuals. Rather than viewing Americans as individuals, the political class views Americans as individual members of groups. Seeing America as a nation of individuals made Americans reliant on themselves and their social networks and families. America about the "individual" merely means that America has groups of people that must be catered to as individuals so as to be able to fully self-actualize (whatever that means).
America has been reduced to the point where jobs producing, protecting, and maintaining have given way before an onslaught of political catering, organizing, and "rights" agitating. Those who produce, protect, and maintain now do so in ways that are approved by the political class. Instead of doing so within the law, these are now expected to do so within the framework of countless regulations (read: laws created and enacted by the executive).
The political class in America views its duties as encompassing those traditionally held by States (in Police powers), churches (social sanctions and moral education), families (education and caring for the elderly), unions (protecting workers), and business (creating jobs and growing and distributing wealth). The over-arching state intrudes in every aspect of our lives (for example, limitations on greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide--produced every time we breathe--which is effectively a lever to population control, which enters our bedrooms).
The over-arching state seeks to protect us from ourselves, our decisions, and the difficulties that come with life. The over-arching state regulates what we can eat. The over-arching state regulates what marriage is (a definition that has been, for most of human civilization, in the hands of religion and the family. The over-arching state says where we may send our children for school and what they may be taught there. The over-arching state "delivers" us from the consequences of our decisions, creating a nation of moral and psychological infants.
The over-arching state creates a society unwilling to face difficulties. And a society unwilling to face difficulties as challenges, but, instead viewing them as "unfair", is a society which has no self-confidence. For all the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools, children are not actually placed in an environment where self-esteem can be developed. Self-esteem does not develop where it is nurtured, it develops where it is earned.
Such a nation cannot long survive in the face of "adult" nations. At a time of Russian imperialism (for all the talk of American imperialism, it must be noted that America is the only "empire" in the history of the world that allows conquered nations to write their own laws, govern themselves, and expects no taxes or revenues from the conquered nations), North Korean insanity, Iranian nuclear brinkmanship, Venezuela's center of a collectivist latin power bloc, and the myriad other foreign policy concerns, America cannot afford to demonstrate childishness. An America able to assert itself in its own interests, alas, no longer exists.
Some may claim that President Bush's "adventurism" soured Americans on foreign policy assertiveness, but America had soured on the sacrifice required years earlier. The over-arching state has cushioned out of America the ability to sacrifice years ago.