Bacon, Guns & Whiskey

There was quite the kerfuffle when The Newsroom’s now-infamous monologue came out, and there were multiple fact-checks on the stats (like this one) that showed the numbers were true.

Nowadays, “American Exceptionalism” is largely a financial moniker. With the likes of China and Russia treating the US as a de facto non-entity, countries like India — in the face of US pressure — are, for the first time in modern history, turning away from the US and towards its enemies.

Even the conservative news outlet The Hill has written about it, so what’s the deal? In WW2, the US reluctantly entered a world war and emerged as the symbol of freedom and fight against oppression. But wars against communists in Korea and Vietnam (not wrong, per se, but not fights against the extermination of an entire group of people), Iraq, and proxy wars against a whole stack of others, have taken a nation that “fought wars for moral reasons” to a nation that fights to shape the destiny of others based on the views of the political leader at that moment.

The Founders created a system of checks and balances, including the Commander in Chief of the armed forces being separated from the ability to declare war, but Congress’ passage of the War Powers Act changed all of that. Congress, for all intents and purposes, ceded its power to the Executive — with a token requirement to be ‘consulted’ by the President within 90 days of starting a war.

But hey, maybe the US being the world’s policeman is the right way to do things — it’s not, in my personal opinion — but why are we doing it alone? Well, we shouldn’t be — and NATO stepping up its spending is a positive sign.

But what about education? As the Fordham Institute puts it, “it’s a mess”. More spending doesn’t mean more success. The Bartlett Center for Public Policy has a really good write-up about how money is not the answer.

So I’ve said a lot of words, and highlighted military power and education, specifically, but what does it all mean? It means that we need to focus on America First (judge me if you want to) but not America Only — as The Newsroom put it, “[w]e sacrificed [for others], we cared about our neighbors … and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy … [w]e aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it … [a]nd we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed.”

So get informed. America can — and should be the example for all others; the “shining city upon a hill” originally coined by Winthrop and quoted by Reagan. We can be the greatest country in the world without acting like we are — or worse, imposing our will on others and sending in our military when they don’t do what we want. How many rich people do you see walking around talking about how rich they are? The stupid, arrogant, ridiculous ones, I’m betting was your answer. Same concept here.

American Exceptionalism isn’t dead, but is waning and, without our intervention now, will soon be.