Bye Bye - American Exceptionalism.

(NB: In honor of the former President of Harvard University I unabashedly plagiarize from a recent article, which features Victor Davis Hanson.  Appeared on the Fox News website today.)

American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is imbued with an unprecedented set of cultural values, political foundations, intellect, ambition and creativity that make it different and better than any other nation on Earth.

(No apologies here, Barack)

Unencumbered individualism has inspired the U.S. to unprecedented feats of creativity, technical achievement and economic growth. 

Hanson believes that every step to concentrate power in Washington, D.C., is a blow to the individual and a blow to American exceptionalism.

"That belief (in exceptionalism) continued through most of the 20th century," said Hanson. "It's why we won two world wars and created most of the major inventions from atomic power to Silicon Valley." Immigrants found upward mobility and chances to prosper in the United States based on talent and ambition alone, rather than on family connections, that did not exist elsewhere in the world.  Innovation in the United States changed the world dramatically in big and in surprisingly small ways.  Americans put men on the moon and powerful computers in the hands of almost every person on Earth. Americans also created seemingly mundane things, from sliced bread to time zones to the electric guitar, by re-considering ordinary items in ways that people in other parts of the world never did. 

America reshaped the culture of the globe in the process.

Modern woke and hard-left ideologies are stifling the meritocracy, creativity and fluidity at the heart of American exceptionalism, suggest Hanson, historian Craig Shirley and others — causing them to raise red flags.

“The nation now faces an identity crisis, historians and scholars tell Fox News Digital, as powerful forces armed by woke ideology and fealty to big government stifle the individualism and creativity that fueled American exceptionalism for 250 years.”

The United States, they warn, could soon identify as merely mediocre.  They and others believe academia has supplanted debate in favor of rigid leftist ideology, plus replaced meritocracy with identity politics and ideas such as diversity, equity and inclusion.

The bloated federal government, meanwhile, has grown to 2 million "unelected bureaucrats," Hanson said, devoted to "auditing, regulation and censorship." Their efforts come at the expense of the creators and the "mavericks" essential to American exceptionalism. 

(As I mentioned earlier, admin employees now equal teachers in major universities.  Overhead to Producers 1 to 1! DEI staff has tripled in three years)

The United States rose with dramatic speed from an outpost of 4 million people in the North American wilderness that miraculously defeated the British Empire in war to a uniquely powerful place in world history in little more than 150 years.

"American exceptionalism was proven by the great authors, great inventors, great politicians and great public intellectuals of the past 200 years," said Shirley.

"Reagan wanted to move power away from the government and toward the individual, weakening the government as the framers intended," Shirley said — all for the purpose of fueling the nation's most exceptional qualities.

Another president, Abraham Lincoln, may have defined American exceptionalism better and more succinctly than any politician, historian or scholar, while summing up the stakes of the battle to keep America -

"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose," he said before Congress on Dec. 1, 1862, "the last best hope of Earth."

(One of the most compelling reasons I support Ron DeSantis is courage.  It's one thing to talk a good game, another to play.  In his book, Courage to be Free, he articulates the stifling, damaging effects of the Administrative State where de facto we are governed largely by unelected bureaucrats directed by unelected financiers.  Better known as the Deep State.  DeSantis pledges to dismantle it.)