AMERICA’S FADING EXCEPTIONALISM – MORT ZUCKERMAN
Sunday, June 12th, 2011US NEWS
America’s Fading Exceptionalism
Only serious leadership on immigration, the national debt, and unemployment will make America great once again
Posted: June 10, 2011
- Our 21st century does not seem to be on course to be described as the “American century,” the title indubitably merited for the 20th century. For most of the last 100 years, America was fairly characterized by the Economist as “the lord of all it surveyed . . . convinced of its supreme benevolence, and the engine of a productivity miracle that left Europeans in awe.” Of all the great nations that have left their mark on modern civilization, none has matched the United States in both economic and cultural sway over life on the planet.
The rise of America was meteoric. Early in the 19th century, it produced less than 2 percent of global output. Britain’s Queen Victoria reigned over a fifth of the Earth’s surface and Britain dominated world trade; one third of all seagoing ships were British; of 1,000 tons of cargo passing through the Suez Canal, 700 tons were British, 95 were German, and only 2 were American. Not much more than 50 years later, the United States produced 36 percent of global economic output. Mark Twain captured the mood of this ascendant America: It enjoyed “the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.”
Today the aces represent a core competency in creating a populist and upwardly mobile society: We remain first in total R&D expenditures, the first in university rankings and in Nobel prizes, the first on all indices of entrepreneurship.
America is indebted to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and to English law, but American exceptionalism is founded on a freer, more individualistic, more democratic, more open, and more dynamic society than any other. We learned from the past and then we forgot it, as we sought to forge an even better future. (more…)
