Sure, Obama loves America
— just not the America we live in
By Kyle Smith
NYPost.com
Rudy Giuliani thinks President Obama doesn’t love
America. That’s not true. Obama surely loves
America, though not the actual existing country. He
is head-over-heels gaga for a fictional America, a
notional America, an enlightened America, America
with an asterisk.
This is a great country, potentially, if it ever
grows up and learns a few things.
Whenever Obama praises America, especially in
foreign lands, he is careful to append caveats that
make it clear America should, as he once said in
another context, get off its high horse. He doesn’t
apologize, exactly, but he makes it clear that his
overall image of America is of a morally shrunken,
chastened land whose sins render it unfit to exert
much authority in the world.
“There have been times where America has shown
arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive,” Obama
said in France.
We need “a new beginning between the United
States and Muslims around the world, one based on
mutual interest and mutual respect,” he said in
Egypt, suggesting the US had not previously
respected Muslims much, adding that “fear and anger”
has “led us to act contrary to our traditions and
our ideals.”
In Prague, he said America has “a moral
responsibility to act” on arms control because only
the US had “used a nuclear weapon,” as though
winning a war that Japan started was shameful.
Even when Obama claims to support American exceptionalism, he can’t do so without a “but.”
Obama’s famous view of American exceptionalism —
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I
suspect that the Brits believe in British
exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek
exceptionalism” — is curiously qualified: When you
ask a mom whether she thinks her baby is cute, you
expect to hear, “Of course!” not a reflection on the
nature of subjectivity.
Sometimes, though, the automatic response, going
with your gut, is the correct one: America really is
exceptional. The data prove it. We routinely stand
as an outlier in surveys of international attitudes,
because we have unique features, and those features
make us better than other countries. Somebody has to
be the best country on Earth. It happens to be us.
Except it didn’t just happen. We are the oldest
democracy, and the succeeding ones — our many
imitators around the globe — were far more
suspicious of freedom, individual rights and tipping
too much of the balance of power to the people
rather than an elite class.
America: Heck, yeah.
Place people want to be
One measure by which we know
America is exceptional is that Americans say so.
Pace Obama’s blithe assumptions about the UK and
Greece, Europeans don’t actually think as highly of
their countries as Americans do. A 2013 Gallup
survey said 80 percent of Americans think “the US
has a unique character that makes it the greatest
country.”
A 2006 National Opinion Research survey said
Americans were the most patriotic people on Earth. A
2011 Pew survey of Western European attitudes vs.
American ones found that the US was the only country
among a group including Spain, France, Britain and
Germany in which people were more likely than not to
say, “Our culture is superior to others’.” Clear
majorities disagreed with that view in the other
four countries.
America’s vast military spending — more than the
next 10 countries combined — also sets us apart, but
Americans have fewer qualms about using force than
other countries. Or, perhaps, our commander in
chief.
If the Obama foreign policy is defined by
diffidence and caution and guilt about the history
of the US and the West, that isn’t the American
attitude. By an 18-point margin, Americans said in
an Economist/YouGov poll that it was “inappropriate”
for Obama to invoke the Crusades in discussing ISIS.
A majority (52 percent) agreed that Islam is more
violent than other religions, shunning Obama’s
oft-stated view that “no religion is responsible for
violence.” Support for military action against ISIS
is at 78 percent in a CNN/ORC poll, and even support
for ground troops is up to 47 percent.
Is American confidence — some might call it
swagger — justified? More people who want to leave
their native country want to come here than anywhere
else. According to a Gallup estimate in 2013, 138
million citizens of other countries want to move to
the US. That makes us No. 1 by a huge margin (more
than three to one over the UK).
If word has gotten around that the streets are
paved with gold — the US still enjoys the largest
per-capita GDP of any major country — you can thank
the Capitalism Improvement Co.
Americans are simply far more skeptical than
others of the idea that the laws of the marketplace
are to be feared. In a 2005-2008 World Values Survey
of 14 nations, Americans under 30 were the least
likely to agree that governments should make incomes
more equal and by far the least likely to agree that
taxing the rich to give to the poor was “an
essential characteristic of democracy.”
America even came in fifth from the bottom in
saying income inequality was “too large” even though
America is the place where income inequality is most
obvious — because our relative lack of constraints
on success means we have the most colossal titans of
wealth.
Americans nearly lead the world (second only to
Venezuela) in rejecting the idea that success is
determined by forces outside your control:
57 percent of us say that isn’t true.
Gotta have faith
Religion is a major marker
of American exceptionalism. Though liberals would
have us believe that Christianity in the US is on
the same doomed trajectory as in Europe (where empty
churches are being turned into bars and discos), a
Pew survey last year said “there is little sign of a
consistent generation gap on these questions.”
What questions? For instance, 73 percent of US adults believe that Jesus was born to a virgin and 74 percent that an angel announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds. Even among adults with postgraduate degrees, 53 percent agree that Jesus was born to a virgin.
The human tendency is to place their faith in
something; your atheist friends may scoff at the
Bible, but observe them long enough and you’ll
probably see them with their nose in a horoscope or
a feng shui guide or mystical mumbo jumbo like the
self-help book “The Secret.” (A 2009 survey showed
Democrats were roughly twice as likely as
Republicans to believe in ghosts and fortune
tellers. About a third of Democrats consider yoga to
be a spiritual thing.)
The rich American tradition of credulity is an
endless source of hilarity to our more worldly
friends in Europe (except in Iceland, where they
believe in elves) but religiosity yields benefits.
For instance, with religion comes morality —
Americans are at or near the top of the charts, for
instance, when it comes to charitable giving and
saying infidelity is wrong. (Some 84 percent of
Americans agree with the latter statement, by far
the highest level of any rich country, though
surpassed by several highly religious nations such
as Turkey and the Philippines).
And, according to the 2014 World Giving Index,
the US is the only country in the top 10 in each of
three categories measuring charitable giving and
tied for the title of “most giving country” on
Earth. (The tie is with Myanmar, where there is a
strong tradition of giving to Buddhist monks).
So: America is devout and capitalist at the same
time. It’s individualist, but also giving. This is
an exceptional combination of traits.
Free and defiant
Even more of an outlier is
our attachment to guns. To a degree completely
unheard of in the rest of the world, Americans keep
firearms. Per-capita gun ownership is double that of
any other country (Yemen is No. 2).
The gun tradition in America has nothing to do
with a right to hunt; it’s rooted in the same
skepticism about the efficacy of our ruling class
that yields much lower levels of government spending
than in Europe. The Second Amendment is derived from
the idea that you, the citizen, ultimately have the
right to fight back against your government, which
cannot take the first step in extinguishing your
rights by disarming you.
Nor can government silence you. In virtually any other country on Earth, words can put you in jail, and no, we’re not talking about state secrets or yelling fire in a crowded theater.
I don’t just mean China or Cuba or Myanmar here.
Australia, Britain, France, Canada, you name it: If
what you say is deemed by the government to be
“offensive,” you’re in big trouble.
In Australia, “sedition” is a criminal offense.
In 2011 in France, nearly 300 people were convicted
of the crime of “insulting” others, and that number
will be far higher this year, following the Charlie
Hebdo massacre.
In 2006 in Austria, quack historian David Irving
spent a year in prison in Austria for denying the
Holocaust. Three years ago in Wales, a 21-year-old
college student who drunk-tweeted offensive remarks
about a soccer player spent a month in prison.
Two years ago, a Christian activist arriving in
Canada who was expected to deliver a speech
offensive to gays was instead stopped at the airport
for three hours so his luggage could be searched to
determine whether he violated “hate propaganda”
laws. Then he was arrested for distributing anti-gay
pamphlets on a campus where he was hit with a charge
of “mischief.”
“We are a welcoming campus,” the university
president proclaimed as the activist, Peter
LaBarbera, was being welcomed into a pair of
handcuffs, then welcomed into a police car which
transported him to a welcoming jail cell.
America is exceptional: We’re pretty much alone
in thinking that “I’m offended” doesn’t mean “So you
go to jail.”
What makes us unique
American exceptionalism is, then, tied up with
unfettered speech that might offend. It’s linked to
free-market economics. It’s blase about income
inequality. It clings to guns and religion.
Could there be a reason why Obama has seemed
equivocal about the concept?
By a margin of 46 to 11, more right-wing
conservatives than left-wing liberals agree that the
US is the best country, according to last year’s Pew
survey. In another survey, when Americans were asked
to guess whether American exceptionalism was a
belief of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, George W. Bush
and Obama, the latter came in last, by a large
margin.
Even when Obama claims to support American
exceptionalism, he can’t do so without a “but.”
At West Point last year he said, “I believe in
American exceptionalism with every fiber of my
being. But what makes us exceptional is not our
ability to flout international norms and the rule of
law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our
actions.”
That’s a strangely twisted definition: We’re only
special if we stop acting as if we think we’re
special?
Americans are, of course, far more skeptical of
the idea that our actions must receive the blessing
of international bodies. In a 2011 Pew Survey, only
45 percent of Americans said we should get UN
approval before using military force. In France,
Britain, Germany and Spain that number was 66
percent to 76 percent.
The reality of American exceptionalism is that it
tells a story of a country very much at odds with
the fantasy version preferred by Obama and other
liberals, a sort of continental campus where “hate
speech” is carefully controlled, everyone thinks
income inequality is a big deal, government is
respected or even beloved, the churches are empty
and no one owns a gun.
Much to Obama’s chagrin, Americans overwhelmingly
reject the idea that we’re all enrolled at the
United States of Oberlin. They love America as it
is.