America, the Insecure: Hey, America: You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and people like you.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: The United States is the world’s original and still-greatest political experiment, founded upon a creed of liberty for all in a land of unprecedented, unparalleled opportunity. This land’s manifest destiny is to be a shining city on a hill, a light by which the rest of the world may see the glories of a new and better world. If the journey, approved by Providence, has been long and hard, it is all the more noble for being so. This is, was, and always shall be an exceptional nation, the envy and wonder of the world. America is, like, awesome.
That, at any rate, is the message coming from Tampa, Florida, this week. The Republican Party’s convention is, like all such gatherings, a moment in which the promise of America is called to renewal and American greatness is reaffirmed as the country’s guiding star. If the United States is not exceptional, then what is it and what is its purpose?
As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it in her speech on Wednesday, Aug. 29, “The essence of America, what really unites us, is not nationality or ethnicity or religion. It is an idea. And what an idea it is. That you can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things; that it does not matter where you came from — it matters where you are going.”
Viewed from this side of the pond, it is easy — and perhaps often tempting — to view this as just so much baloney and balderdash. This doctrinal declaration that America rocks has all the heft and seriousness of a slogan culled from Team America: World Police.