by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n 1)\u00a0American exceptionalism \u2014 Perhaps it derives in part from our putting a higher premium on freedom and liberty than, as in the French and other European cases, egalitarianism and fraternity; also, we were truly the first multi-ethnic state that sought to embrace a common culture rather than carve out cultural or racial fiefdoms. By 1820, there were already all sorts of sizable blocs of European ethnics, and so America no longer thought of itself as of merely English descent. I might quote, as a dissent from this theory, Obama\u2019s moral equivalence on exceptionalism \u2014 remember he said that we are exceptional only in the sense that everyone else, from the Greeks to the Brits, thinks they are exceptional, too.<\/p>\n 2) Proletariat \u2014 Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants (as John de St. Crevecoeur wrote).<\/p>\n 3) A gun-owning society, unlike Europe \u2014 On the theory that an armed citizenry would fight any federal effort to overturn individual liberties: That tradition later made our citizenry more comfortable with firearms, with obvious advantages for our military<\/p>\n 4) \u201cWe in Europe are the Obama\u201d \u2014 Obama also fails to see the irony that only an exceptionally free and proud America could have provided the military umbrella necessary to Europe\u2019s development into an essentially disarmed socialist society \u2014 one dependent militarily and economically on the U.S. largely because we are so unlike it. Or, as a French intellectual whispered to me at a party not long ago, \u201cThere is only room in the West for one Obama \u2014 and we in Europe are the Obama.\u201d<\/p>\n Obama also fails to see that American exceptionalism resulted in a degree of freedom and affluence for millions impossible elsewhere, which in turned fueled his own romantic idea of utopianism, e.g., because America was so rich and leisured, an Obama could indulge in criticizing it for not being consistently perfect.<\/p>\n On Obama\u2019s distancing himself from American traditions, he is a paradox since his own success would be impossible in Europe or in Africa or Asia, and yet even in his privilege he sees himself as often antithetical to the very conditions that made him.<\/p>\n A question remains: Much of Obama\u2019s comfortable leftism is a product of careerism; for a prep-school kid who went to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard and ended up in Chicago, his chic redistributive and radical ideas were sort of like medieval churchmen wearing crosses \u2014 it was part of entr\u00e9 into the club.<\/p>\n So it is hard for Obama to question an orthodoxy that for him was amazingly lucrative and opportune in careerist terms. Without a race-class-gender grievance mindset, and without a fault-America-first worldview, Obama would never have risen so far so fast in the circles he navigated. His only challenge now is to disguise and manipulate before an edgy public the thoughts, associations, and assumptions that have been second nature to him for 30 years but which are proving to be an anathema to the American people. He is our first president to be entirely unfamiliar with the productive classes of the private sector, without experience in anything much outside of universities and grievance politics. Consequently, he is increasingly bewildered that he can\u2019t sway foreign heads of state and now the American public with the same old \u201chope and change\u201d vacuity that so wowed Ivy League totems.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner 1)\u00a0American exceptionalism \u2014 Perhaps it derives in part from our putting a higher premium on freedom and liberty than, as in the French and other European cases, egalitarianism and fraternity; also, we were truly the first multi-ethnic state that sought to embrace a common culture rather than carve out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[609],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ti","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1130,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dead-souls\/","url_meta":{"origin":1816,"position":0},"title":"Dead Souls","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Millions of us shuffle around, sighing that most of what we hear pounded into our brains is either banal or as untrue as it is dangerous to identify it as such. So we ignore it, we the dead souls who live in the world\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2010"","block_context":{"text":"November 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/november-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2125,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-the-liberal-anger-over-the-asian-tour\/","url_meta":{"origin":1816,"position":1},"title":"Why the Liberal Anger Over the Asian Tour?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 27, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There is a surprising amount of\u00a0liberal discomfort, here and abroad, with the underwhelming nature of President Obama's Asian tour.\u00a0Apparently this results from\u00a0displeasure over the lack of any substantive dialogue with the Chinese\u00a0about climate change (and\u00a0China's inordinate coal burning), censorship, the lack of human rights,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4552,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/american-exceptionalism-the-message-of-tuesdays-verdict\/","url_meta":{"origin":1816,"position":2},"title":"American Exceptionalism: The Message of Tuesday’s Verdict","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Tuesday's election was the greatest turnout in American political history, the first majority vote for a president-elect since 1988, and the largest number of ballots cast for a president in our history. What are we to make of it all, besides the obvious\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2004"","block_context":{"text":"November 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/november-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11415,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/are-we-on-the-verge-of-civil-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":1816,"position":3},"title":"Are We on the Verge of Civil War?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 22, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps. It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure, and freedom in the history of civilization. The ancient historian Thucydides\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civil War"","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6470,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/putin-saruman-come-alive\/","url_meta":{"origin":1816,"position":4},"title":"Putin — Saruman Come Alive","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner \u201cIt was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire woke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves.\u201d \u2014 J. R. R. Tolkien,\u00a0The Two Towers. 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