This picture from last December 25th shows the American flag flying above the Lutheran Cemetery in New Sweden, a rural town northeast of Austin that Swedish immigrants founded in the 1870s.
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I arrived in the United States as a child from Cuba, and immediately realized things were different here. Nobody talked politics—it was a boring subject. Everyone went calmly about their business and trusted everyone else to do the right thing. Pedestrians walked in front of moving cars because of some abstract notion called the “right of way”! (I still can’t bring myself to do that.) The rules of social life were understood and internalized. Beyond that, it was up to you. The American people seemed to have freedom in their bones, in their DNA: so deep that they didn’t even notice.
Is there such a thing as American exceptionalism? When asked that question, Barack Obama once replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As often happened with Obama, he was both glib and wrong.
Actually, each country is not exceptional in its own way and doesn’t deserve a little trophy just for being there. The U.S. stands apart. And it isn’t so much who we are that separates us from other nations as the path that brought us here. Each American alive today benefits from an extraordinary history. Call it luck, call it destiny, but those who came before us rose to every challenge in a manner that defied probability and bestowed on us, their heirs, the easygoing freedom of pedestrians who casually face down moving cars.
Let’s start at the beginning. In the hands of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, the Revolution could have gone wrong in many ways. Instead, we got the generation of the Founders and Framers: a world-historical flowering of political genius. These were tough-minded, pragmatic men, who fought and won a war against the greatest power on earth and built a framework of government that has lasted 235 years. But they were also brilliant political thinkers. Their most enduring legacy was an ideology of individual freedom to which even our decadent latter-day politics must refer and yield.
That's the beginning of Martin Gurri's essay "All Immigrants Are Born on the Fourth of July: A personal take on American exceptionalism." I, born on the Fourth of July, the son of one immigrant, the grandson of three, and the husband of yet another, invite you to read the full essay.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
