On the nation’s 250th anniversary, the mayor of the country’s largest city sat at a desk once used by George Washington and told Americans what was wrong with American exceptionalism.
The story of this country, he said, has too often been written by people told they did not belong. Its achievements were really won by the excluded, in spite of America. Dissent, not gratitude, he intoned, is the truest form of patriotism.
It was a deceptive speech, and it deserves a response grounded in facts because the argument now runs well beyond one mayor. A rising movement has made the critique of exceptionalism something close to a creed. And it rests on a lie so foundational that, once revealed, the falsehood collapses.
The lie is this: that American exceptionalism means Americans are exceptional people. Better, wiser, and more virtuous than everyone else. Their evidence? Slavery and massacres and broken promises presented as though they settle the matter. But that was never the claim.
American exceptionalism has never been a boast about us, but rather our founding framework: a particular arrangement of government that locates rights not in the state but above it, divides power so no faction can control it, places the citizen above the government and produces results no other arrangement in history has matched.
The record isn’t even close.
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