American Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism is not an abstract concept, but a definable set of ideas and circumstances.


The belief in the inalienable rights of man, endowed by the Creator (and hence off-limits to the revocation by man).


The adoption of a frontier mindset, favoring self-reliance, property rights, self-governance and individual responsibility over reliance on a public safety net. That mindset drove our early development as a nation and attracted the individuals who helped to build it. A desire to embrace that set of opportunities and risks rather than the status quo was the process of selection that formed our unique community and fed its traditions.


Reliance upon the idea that individuals will work harder, defend more fiercely and tend more lovingly, that which they have the freedom to own and make prosper.


A regular supply of ambitious, creative, entrepreneurial risk-takers, from every corner of the globe, who have constantly refreshed the engine of freedom and prosperity that is the American Experiment.


Those ideas, and the results they have produced, are balanced against the fact that collectivism/socialism/progressivism has not, does not, and will not ever work as a large scale system of human organization. It is a parasitic opportunist that cannot develop independently and exists only as long as it can continue to feed off the capitalistic host it is destroying, or manages to enslave it's participants to force their participation.


We have yet to see an example of National Socialism that is able to produce enough to both feed and defend itself independently. Every case where it has been attempted has either already failed or is in varying states of decay and deprivation.


This question is at the core of the conservative debate precisely because we are living through the results of misguided central planning, social engineering experiments run amok, forced scarcity driven by politicized science and an entitlement culture that runs from Wall Street to the inner-city.


Conservatives believe that governance, wealth and freedom should reside with the individual precisely because it is so much more difficult to persuade someone to relinquish any of them for the wrong reasons. Liberals/Progressives are constantly frustrated that it is so difficult to get control of those three elements in order to "try to make things better", despite the evidence that all previous similar attempts have failed.


These ideas lend themselves to endless extrapolation without contradiction because they are so patently correct. Rather than requiring endless exception and circular explanation, they are a font of clarity. They are simple and easily adapted to a lifetime of good governance without need for indoctrination.


All other pursuits of higher learning are foundational, but liberalism is a teetering construct without a clear basis for development of any of its conclusions from a defined set of principles. Its adherents have little appetite for debate or examination and little use for free speech. Their patchwork of beliefs must be repeated, back and forth, continually, to be sustained in the presence of so much objective fact that refutes their validity. It is a set of beliefs in search of a defining truth.


There is no deeper question to be answered in our time, than how long we will subject ourselves as a species, to a set of ideas that has clearly failed.

The Deficit Is A Shell Game

Both parties play it. Neither really wants to stop.

Think about it. The Federal Government takes in an obscene amount of revenue. An incalculable fortune under any standard. It finds endlessly creative ways to waste and lose money at every turn while never fully meeting any of it's objectives.

It's easy to believe that it's about entrenched bureaucracy or creeping socialism on one hand, or a military industrial complex run amok on the other, but it's much simpler than that. The truth is, both sides simply want to run a deficit. That is the objective. Everything else is misdirection.

That constituencies have grown up around this orgy of wasteful spending is useful, but still tangential to the purpose.

Every two years the parties come before us, in the fierce urgency of crisis, with one side warning that benefits will be cut, while the other warns that taxes will be raised and everyone voluntarily lines up to grant power to one or the other.

Someone once joked that lawyers were the only people that charged by the hour to protect their client from other members of their profession.

Is there any other sane objective that would explain the inability of either side to exert a modicum of fiscal discipline even as we are looking into the abyss?

It is the lawyer joke on steroids, played for the highest stakes possible.

Sadly, neither side seems smart enough to understand that the game is killing the client. They are both too afraid to blink first and give the other an advantage. They think there is still time to jump out before the cliff and they are counting on the other to give up first.

We can blame them for being evil and power-hungry, but really it is just an inability to back away from the greatest racket ever conceived. It is a lack of imagination, or a sense of deep denial, that prevents them from believing that the game will ever have to end.

What If They Were All Wrong?

As we find gravity in the Age Of Fallibility, it occurs that we never really considered how wrong so many people could be.

We always knew so many had it wrong about so many things. After all, you can't help it as you spend a little time here. We become inured to the fact that as a species we are more likely to make the wrong choice in almost everything we do. We see ourselves doing it and make excuses and watch others do it and shrug. We let the little things go and pick our battles. To do otherwise is an invitation to hell.

I suppose we expected more. In an information age there are so few excuses for not getting the facts right or reading the data. We understood it was a lack of initiative in many, a lack of intelligence (or self-preservation) in others, and a willful neglect for purpose of perceived personal advantage in some.

Maybe we were optimists to believe that the sample of those we knew and watched each day was a poor one. That somewhere, there were so many more who were right, balanced in a reciprocity to all that we saw going wrong around us.

I am increasingly convinced that there are not. At best, there were those who merely tried to change the rules to provide a more predictable and selfish outcome. If they were the "best and the brightest" to many, it was only because they were better at painting a bullseye around wherever their arrows landed.

All evidence points to a conclusion that they were wrong for some time and could no longer maintain the artifice of getting others to call it "right" in numbers large enough to discourage debate.

The good news is that there isn't any monolithic, intentional conspiracy to make so many things go so wrong. The bad news is that the Emperor has no clothes and the result to many is the same.