America the exceptional.

• Author: Podhoretz, Norman
• Position: American Thought

ONCE UPON a time, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that, for better or worse, the U.S. was different from all other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it different vividly were evident from the day of its birth.

Unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident math that all men are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual's fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. America was to be something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and be judged on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic contradictions of slavery and the position of women, but so intolerable did these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved--even if, as in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought.

In all other countries, membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another never could become full-fledged members of society--but the U.S. was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it only was necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and the principles for which it stood.

In all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by citizens were conferred by human agencies: kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In the U.S., by contrast, the citizen's rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be "inalienable"--that is, immune to legitimate revocation.

As time went on, other characteristics that were unique to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why the U.S. was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term "American exceptionalism" not in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, where it mistakenly has teen thought to have originated, but in a book by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in the U.S. of a strong Socialist party.

More recently, I have discovered that the term actually may have originated with the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that U.S. workers had no intention of playing the role Karl Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming Socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, "Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!" Stalin and his followers, though, themselves were exceptional in denying that the U.S. was exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however, almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or evil. This, too, went back to the beginning, when the denigrators outnumbered the enthusiasts.

At first, anti-American passions were understandably fueled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe by the republican ideas of the American Revolution, but the political side of anti-Americanism soon was joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have more staying power.

Here is how the brilliant, but volatile, historian Henry Adams--the descendent of two American presidents--described the cultural indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic: "In the foreigner's range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character.... No foreigner of that day--neither poet & painter, nor philosopher--could detect in American life anything higher than...