What makes the United States the greatest country in the world?
I dunno. Yosemite?
I like the above video’s puncturing of American exceptionalism. I especially like the Yosemite line, but when the piano starts to play, and the patriotic nostalgia begins again (“We used to be the greatest country,…”), I grow displeased. The fog starts to drop. We’re back in the realm of the mixed bag, of some true things mixed with some bullshit things. How hard it is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even for three minutes.
But here’s what’s true. The United States really has been a beacon of liberty in a very dark world for over two centuries. By fits and starts, it has moved toward the light (even as so many other countries have moved toward darkness).
The light is the Anglo-French Enlightenment. It is the intellectual source of contemporary science, religion-state separation, democracy, capitalism, individual rights, freedom of the press, and the separation of government powers (legislative, executive, judicial). These seven things, for good and ill, have shaped the modern world, and (thankfully) continue to shape it.
The United States has been on the sides of these good things from the beginning.
So the United States has pride of place here (as ancient Greece is special in pride of place for bearing the first rudiments of science, theater, philosophy, democracy, and humanist art and architecture to the world).
And ancient Rome also has pride of place (as the first Republic, however brief). It’s why the American founders, with both hope and affection, referred to their new country as “the New Republic.” Their models for experimentation were Greco-Roman and Anglo-French (whose intellectual drivers–Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Condorcet, etc.–also believed they were hearkening back to ancient Greece and Rome).
So beauty, truth, and good ways of doing things are productive–they have a way of getting themselves reproduced. They “show, don’t tell.” They sell themselves. In this sense, Greco-Roman culture is seed, the Anglo-French Enlightenment is theory, and the United States is practice. These three memes are one, and unlikely to ever wholly vanish from the memory and practice of people (in the same way that the wheel, once discovered, has never gone away). Where they cease in one place, they will be taken up by others in another place–because they work.
And this is why I hate strained and mystical patriotism (“there’s something unique about our people, our troops, our land, our relationship to God”). It’s idiocy. Herderian patriotism hijacks the good in the service of the bad, as when fundamentalists try to turn U.S. history into a narrative of Christian culmination.
But when something is successful, it’s important to identify the right things as the cause. In the case of the United States, it wasn’t Jesus or blood and soil mysticism, it was Washington and Jefferson with a little help from their Greco-Roman and Anglo-French friends.
That’s the truth.