“American Exceptionalism”
Does anybody know when and where this phrase originated?
I suspect it was invented by Seymour Martin Lipset in the 1990s to represent the neoconservative theory that America is a country founded on an ideology, rather than the conservative view of a country founded by an historic people.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/americanexceptionalism.htm
I don’t see why conservatives adopt it. At best it’s hubris, at worst it’s warmed over marxism with a patriotic camouflage.
Nope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
“The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville first wrote about it in his 1831 work Democracy in America:[7]
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.[8]”
Furthermore...
“In 1927 Jay Lovestone, leader of the Communist Party in America, defined American exceptionalism as the increasing strength of American capitalism, a strength which he said prevented Communist revolution”