American Exceptionalism

And why can only the United States be exceptional in an American way

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It’s a colossal mistake for nations around the world, whether developed or developing countries, to attempt to emulate the United States of America. I do not say that. To be negative about the United States merely to underpin the specific circumstances which justify American exceptionalism.

The United States’ success is due to the endeavours of its founding fathers, as well as the opportunities afforded to it.

Unlike many other nations around the globe, the United States has some of the best Geography, which leads well to geopolitics. As a result, the United States dominates the best parts of North America.

The United States is also incredibly fortunate to have a single national language, in contrast to places like India, where there are over 1,600 separate languages and the state of India has 22 Official state languages.

Having a united ethnic group with a unified language lends itself to internal political stability; it also means that any politician speaking in Washington can be understood throughout the country, unlike in India.

Where will not all understand the Prime Minister in Delhi? That is not to criticise India, but meant to highlight the real facts on the ground.

Politics and history are not fair, and politics is the art of doing what is possible with the available Materials.

And that’s where nations around the world make a colossal mistake.

America is the way it is because of exceptional qualities that cannot be replicated abroad.

In the United States, it had the fortune of becoming a modern nation during a time when industrialisation was underway, which ensured that, as a continental-sized nation, it did not face the danger of fragmentation.

In contrast to China, which has fragmented multiple times in its history, a civilisation that stretches back 5,000 or 2,200 years, depending on how you count it.

There are benefits and drawbacks to Political, Social, and historical continuity — the past can bind as well as it can imprison us.

To see that in effect, all we need to do is look at the United States regarding its legacy of apartheid and its legacy of racism, and why American race politics continues to poison the United States today, even though it has been well over 50 years since the end of apartheid with the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

As for the Unity of the United States, it was the new industrial technologies of the 19th century that prevented fragmentation, except for the Civil War of the 1860s, which was partly due to this.

The states at the time were not as closely connected due to political limitations stemming from a lack of communication technology, which led states to develop more independent identities that clashed with the Federalist form of government and the Majoritarian Views of the North.

Each state was much more like an individual country than what the USA is today. Thanks to modern communications, that kind of state identity no longer really exists; Americans see themselves as citizens of the United States.

Rather than a citizen of any US state, for example, the leader and commander in chief, Robert E Lee, who led the Army of Northern Virginia predominantly during the American Civil War?

The chief reason that individuals sided with the Confederacy in rebellion against the federal government and the Northern Free States was their primary loyalty to the state of Virginia.

His loyalty to the state of Virginia meant there was a major Geostrategic weakness in the Confederacy’s war planning, as its top commander focused primarily on the security of one state.

I would argue it is accurate to describe Robert E. Lee as not fighting so much for the Confederacy itself but for the integrity and independence of the state of Virginia.

That kind of view today.

When it comes to states’ rights and the values of state independence within the overall federal government today, it’s incredibly out of fashion in the United States.

It just goes to show how politics changes, how that change can be influenced by communication technology, and how there is greater freedom of movement due to the aeroplane and the train.

That also prevented the United States from becoming a bilingual nation, as separate languages developed within primitive communication systems, which could have led to the United States breaking into multiple countries.

Instead, the United States has an effective federal system with 50 states and one centralised federal government, where the language is English.

For this reason, given the importance of national unity, the Chinese government seeks to promote Mandarin, the modern version created in 1932, as the primary language.

That is also why Singapore, a city-state founded in the mid-1960s, adopted English as its primary language to foster national unity.

As for key takeaways from this writing, one is that nations around the globe cannot emulate American exceptionalism. They must work with the materials they have and discover that in their own way, they will have their own exceptional isms. And those can be both good and bad.

And within my own country, the United Kingdom, a developed country, trying to copy the United States federal system as a model has led to national disunity.

It is leading to the possible breakup of the United Kingdom due to attempts to create a devolved federal system modelled on the United States in 1999, with the Creation of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

And that failed because the United Kingdom’s political system, landmass, and population density do not lend themselves well to the development of any federal system?

The UK’s political culture and system primarily stem from the political continuity of the Kingdom of England, dating back to the 13th century.

As for the political union with Wales and Scotland, and for Northern Ireland, that is a political union of parliaments and is not a cultural union.

By trying to emulate the United States, the British decision-makers in the late 1990s deliberately chose to ignore the realities of the materials in relation to the politics and culture they were working with, and the outcome is a disunited United Kingdom.