Making America Exceptional Again

 My guest today is Michael Wilkerson. He is the author of Stormwall and now “Why America Matters: The Case for a New Exceptionalism"

Topics:

America is challenged by four distinct crises: a crisis of circumstances, a crisis of identity, a crisis of institutions, and a crisis of engagement.

"Mark Twain’s comment that “every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction” can be turned on its head. Every civilization, including America’s, also carries the seeds of its own rebirth. Like the legend of the phoenix, sometimes this regeneration must come through fire and ashes."

"In believing that God had a unique plan for America, early American exceptionalism traveled a well-trod path of English exceptionalism. Each saw themselves as a new Israel and their land as a new Canaan, a promised land of divine inheritance. With the failure of the English Civil War to bring about long-lasting republican and religious reform, English emigrants."

"However, it was presidential candidate Trump who initially seemed to repudiate the concept of American exceptionalism altogether. He said that he “never liked the word.” In Trump’s view, the phrase was offensive to other nations and fundamentally not representative of the decaying state of America."

"The idea of American exceptionalism hit critical mass in the first half of the nineteenth century. An increased awareness of national self, of history, of being part of something greater, took hold of the American consciousness. The victory over the British in the War of 1812 gave Americans an immense sense of pride and an increasing awareness of being part of a nation that was greater than the individual states they represented."

You talk about our reaction to Covid in contrast to the Eisenhower era response to another Asian Flu.

"Murray argues there are four foundational virtues that, more than anything else, shaped American exceptionalism: industriousness, honesty, religion, and marriage. The first two are pure virtues and the last two are virtuous institutions supportive of public morality."

"It is impossible to separate the idea of American exceptionalism from the idea of a creator God. While many countries in the era of Christendom—Great Britain in particular—made similar claims, most have been abandoned in the modern age, other than in the pro forma maintenance of religious symbolism in State ritual. America is perhaps the only modern nation-state to make the obligation of covenant relationship so explicit, and to have maintained it through the subsequent de-Christianization of the Western world."

We are deconstructing America to create a socialist Utopia that never works. And we're doing it in slow motion until recently.

Your American Heritage April 22 2023