From Revolution to Indispensability
Continuing the discussion of American exceptionalism.

Thanks to Rich Lowry for his very gracious and effective response to my comments on his and Ramesh Ponnuru's strong National Review cover piece on American exceptionalism. With his clarifications, especially on the deterioration of some qualities of current American life that are no longer exceptional, such disagreement as there was between us is down to very marginal points.

Rich's reference to "European countries, Japan, and Canada" being more obedient and deferential to authority than Americans passes over the fact that much of Europe has no respect for any authority, an endearing but not necessarily always a good thing. And I thought we were discussing human rights, not public attitudes. Canadians certainly do not have fewer rights than Americans and have not had since the independence and confederation of that country in 1867.

I don't think "We are a nation of (Benjamin) Franklins" and "We are a nation of middle-class property-owners" are identical statements, and I agree that Franklin's services to American independence were heroic. I meant only that genius and heroism aren't the same thing. And of course, I agree that Woodrow Wilson had reservations about the U.S. Constitution, but I do not believe that he thought it a mistake to have established the United States as an independent and democratic country.

Calling the early South an "outlier" in American democracy is appropriate, but it is a bold gambit in terms of running the country, as nine of the first twelve presidents were southerners, and then none of the next 19 presidents after 1848, until 1964.

Not quite so easily accommodated are the reflections of Jonah Goldberg. I clearly struck a raw nerve in my reference to the Revolutionary War as, in part, "a rather grubby contest about taxes," when Britain asked the colonists to pay a representative share of the costs of ejecting France from Canada in the Seven Years' War. He raises this hoary point four times in a short piece, like a hyperactive cuckoo clock. In his wrath, he even accuses Rich Lowry of letting me "off the hook," claps his cyber-hand to his furrowed forehead, and exclaims "Oh please," like Truman Capote arguing with Kenneth Tynan, and solemnly admonishes his colleagues that it is not "wise or necessary for National Review to be seen as relitigating the American Revolution." No one asked for that.

At no point have I ever suggested that the American Revolution was "just" a genius spin-job on a massive tax-cheat, and I agree with Mr. Goldberg that any such claim, as he scoldingly put it, "really won't do." I have never left anyone in any doubt whose historic side I was on in that conflict.

Mr. Goldberg goes on to prove my point that all the fanfare about a "New Order of the Ages" was in part a cosmetic job on a jurisdictional dispute. At the end of the Revolution, the colonists bumbled along for six years with the Articles of Confederation, which was not a regime that would have legitimized the peppier claims of Jefferson, Paine, et al., including Jefferson's blood libel on the American Indians, and his prefiguring of the Nuremberg prosecutors in his attack on poor old George III, which fill the body of the Declaration of Independence between its stirring opening and conclusion.

The Constitution was a brilliant compromise between federal and states' rights, and the three-ton elephant of slavery in the room in Philadelphia was dealt with as well as it could be. (Jefferson's original impulse to blame the British for importing slavery to America in the first place, as one of his flaming grievances in the Declaration of Independence, was not followed, and fortunately so, given the notoriety of his conduct as a slaveholder.)

Mr. Goldberg devotes the rest of his comment to pointing out that Acton, Burke, and the contemporary "powerful" Danish foreign minister thought the American Revolution a great moment of liberty. Of course it was, but not because Americans immediately lived freer lives than they had as colonists or were freer than everyone else, or because the Americans were as tolerant of the roughly one-third of their population who were loyalists, as the British were of the one-third of Britons who favored the revolutionaries, including Britain's three greatest active statesmen, Chatham (Pitt), Fox, and Burke.

American events were a beacon of liberty because they established the first republic since medieval Italy, and the first serious republic since Rome before the Caesars; because monarchs were thought to be despots, constitutional monarchy not really having caught fire as a concept at this point; because it was an object lesson in the dangers of trying to collect taxes from people who will rebel to withhold them; and because of the propagandistic genius of the Revolution's chief polemicists.

Mr. Goldberg knows perfectly well that Burke's status as an Anglo-Irishman made him very uneasy about colonialism, as his lengthy persecution of Warren Hastings showed. He was seeking a commonwealth of free, English-speaking peoples and saw that what the king and Lord North were up to was not a future that would work.

And Mr. Goldberg must also know that Lord Acton, writing almost a century later, as the greatest English-speaking Roman Catholic intellectual of the 19th century except for Cardinal Newman (and as one steeped in the traditions of the Recusants and the English Martyrs), was appalled by George III's America policy. (It is little wonder, as Mr. Goldberg laments, that he wasn't more enthused about the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which held that the Toleration Act was a "popish plot" and has benefited from almost as great a public-relations snow job as the American Revolution.)

In the circumstances, it is surprising that Mr. Goldberg is not more impressed with the comments on the American Revolution of the British utilitarian Whigs who gave us the "Glorious Revolution" myth. I commend to him George Otto Trevelyan, whose history of the American Revolution is as admiring of the founders of the American Revolution as Mr. Goldberg and I are, but points out the tax-based origins of the Revolution.

Mr. Goldberg's huffing and puffing that "the history is quite settled" is humorously reminiscent of Al Gore's "settled science," but I will let him "off the hook," because I am only complimenting the genius of America's founders, even if that slightly demystifies their cause. They created the greatest nation in history and I, too, am grateful to them.

There is room for legitimate argument about how exceptional the U.S. really was (though not about the success of its image-making), and about the extent to which it encouraged democracy by its example. There is no possible argument that it led the triumph of democracy in the world in the 20th century, from Wilson to Reagan. The fantastic Eurodream of the EU's return to the influence of that continent in the world somewhat as it was a century ago has given way to financial strain, demographic decline, torpor, and malaise. The Japanese, who just 20 years ago were going to surpass the U.S. economically, have become a muddled, debt-ridden, national geriatric case. Russia is just an ill-tempered drifter in the world: an outlier, in the most versatile word of this exchange, and a very bedraggled one. And neither in justice, nor in education, nor in social services, nor even in demonstrable commercial acumen is the U.S exceptional now.

But it has the potential to become so again, quite quickly, and it is absolutely exceptional and unprecedented in the history of the nation-state in the scale and fermentation of its activities, and in the restless optimism of the national ethos. And there has been nothing remotely comparable to the rise of America in just two long lifetimes, from Washington to Lincoln and Lincoln to Roosevelt, from the colonists we have been discussing to half the economic product of the world, an atomic monopoly, and overwhelming influence in every field, including morally, in 1945.

That history, and that potential, are exceptional, and those people in every land who share America's highest values, civilization by any plausible definition, depend on the conservation and resumption of that exceptionalism. It is the exceptionalism of indispensability, and in that, I am in complete agreement with all of the others in this exchange.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected].

© 2024 Conrad Black