Nation Like No Other

Why American Exceptionalism Matters

Newt Gingrich

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781596982710
• eBook ISBN: 9781596982727
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It's become fashionable among the liberal elite to downplay, deride, even deny America's greatness. The political correctness police insist that America is "hated" around the world for being too big, too powerful, too rich, too successful, too loud, too intrusive. And besides, it's not nice to brag.They are completely missing the point.America's greatness, America's exceptional greatness, is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism.To understand American Exceptionalism, as Newt Gingrich passionately argues in A Nation Like No Other, one must understand our unique birth as a nation. American Exceptionalism is found in the simple yet utterly remarkable principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, "that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness."Our nation is exceptional, continues Newt, because we—unlike any nation before or since—are united by the belief and the promise that no king, no government, no ruling class has the power to infringe upon the rights of the individual. And when such a government attempts to do so, we will vigorously reject them.Sadly, many politicians and leaders today have forgotten our sacred commitment to these ideals. Our government has strayed alarmingly far from the scope of limited powers framed by our Founders. Meanwhile, the liberal media seek out, and sometimes create, stories intended to portray America as a bully and a thief. Even our own president seems clueless, assuring us that yes, yes, he believes in American exceptionalism, just like the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism and the British in British exceptionalism.But American Exceptionalism is not about cheerleading for the home team. It's about recognizing and honoring the history-making, world-changing ideals our Founding Fathers enshrined to make this a nation of the people, by the people, for the people. And, as Lincoln warned, we must rededicate ourselves to those principles, lest our truly exceptional nation perish from this earth.

PART I

REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE

A civilization without memory ceases to be civilized. A civilization without history ceases to have identity. Without identity there is no purpose; without purpose civilization will wither.

—Michael Kammen

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CHAPTER ONE

THE AMERICAN CREED

The fundamental ideas of American Exceptionalism are found in the Declaration of Independence read to General Washington’s troops near Bowling Green. The Declaration was drafted by the troops near Bowling Green. The Declaration was drafted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where the Founders sought to affirm their common beliefs in a clear, straightforward manner. The Congress, led by the Declaration’s fifty-six signers, ordered that the document be distributed widely across the new nation. ¹

The Declaration sets forth an American Creed, a unifying body of beliefs to which the Founders and their countrymen subscribed. It is this creed, not Europe’s historic conception of blood and soil, that defines membership in the American nation. A creed is open to everyone who shares the beliefs, and immigrants become Americans through affirming it. The creed set America apart, an exception to the beliefs other countries have about organizing government and society.

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The American Creed is the source of American Exceptionalism to this day. It is both universal and timeless—relevant and accessible to the present generation and to future ones. Spiritual and political leaders throughout our history have called on us to reaffirm our creed and renew our civilization. Martin Luther King Jr. did this explicitly when he declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”

The action announced in the Declaration—a severing of political ties with the world’s most powerful empire—was radical, but its ideas were not new. Instead, the Declaration of Independence was a succinct summation of beliefs—what the Founders called “truths”—already deeply ingrained in the American psyche. That is why the Second Continental Congress voted unanimously that these truths were “self-evident.”

Years later, in an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration’s purpose was

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.

If the ideas in the Declaration were not new or particularly radical, then why did this single document fundamentally alter world history? The answer is this: no nation had ever before embraced human equality and God-given individual rights as its fundamental organizing principle. America was the exception, because never before had a nation recognized sovereignty in the citizen rather than the government. And never before had a nation been brought forth that was dedicated first and foremost to identifying the source and nature of the individual’s rights and defending those rights, and only secondarily to defining the scope of governmental power—and then only in relation to, and limited by, the individual’s unalienable rights.

At the time of the American Revolution, many of the world’s rulers justified their authority on the divine right of monarchs, while others didn’t bother with any justification other than their ability to wield brute force against their populations. But in America, the individual—not the government—has always mattered above all. Unalienable rights are vested in the individual, not the government, to which we temporarily and conditionally give limited power for the purpose of maintaining social order, the public good, and national defense.

In sum, America’s founding document contradicted the prevailing theory and practice in the rest of the world that prioritized government rights over individual rights. In America, the government was designed as the servant of the people, not their master.

AN APPLE OF GOLD AND A PICTURE OF SILVER

During the “Miracle in Philadelphia” in the summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention translated the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into a supple, sophisticated, and unique expression of Enlightenment governing philosophy. Their work ultimately produced the United States Constitution, and shortly thereafter, its first ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.

Two of the amendments, the ninth and tenth, state clearly where ultimate power lies—not with a dictatorial central power, but with the various states and their people. In the great debate leading up to the Constitution’s ratification, many states conditioned their acceptance of the Constitution on the promise that the first order of business after its ratification would be passing those amendments, a promise the Founders kept.

Abraham Lincoln employed a vivid analogy to explain the connection between the Declaration and the Constitution. He said the Declaration was like an “apple of gold,” and he likened the Constitution to a “picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.” He continued, “The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken. That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger.”

Undeniably, the Declaration’s commitment to unalienable rights had a profound impact on the drafting of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, resulting in the following features:

• Religious liberty is the first liberty protected by our Bill of Rights, contributing to a free, flourishing religious life in the United States unlike that found in any other country.

• Private property is protected and contracts are upheld, so that people will be rewarded for their work and realize the fruits of their labor and their innovations.

• People can freely assemble and associate with whomever they want without interference from the government.

• People have a right to know the laws; these laws are followed by the government and are not applied arbitrarily; and people can petition to change the laws or government decisions.

• Government must protect the physical safety of the people in their homes and communities, and the safety and sovereignty of the nation itself—a precondition for securing all other rights.

The Constitution was not Americans’ first written commitment to these and other rights; as described below, the colonists had long been enacting their own written compacts and constitutions. But with the establishment of a new nation, distinctly American habits of liberty thrived in the new constitutional order and became the surest support for an individual’s rights and his ability to pursue happiness.

In a country of unique natural bounty, the protection of each of these rights through the rule of law led to extraordinary individual creativity and economic prosperity. These indisputably exceptional results originated from a unique set of historical and cultural circumstances. But exceptional results and exceptional circumstances should not be confused with the wellspring of American Exceptionalism expressed in the Declaration—the idea that the individual has unalienable rights from God that no government can abridge.

A HIGHER INSPIRATION

The Declaration’s writers understood there was a force in the universe greater than themselves, and they incorporated this humbling recognition in their work. One of the Declaration’s most famous passages proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This assertion makes some key assumptions about the relationship between man and God:

• It assumes that God created man.

• It assumes that God is sovereign over the universe.

• It assumes that man must obey an order of justice that God has instituted.

That order of justice requires all men and women to honor each other’s natural rights, because these rights are an unalienable endowment from the Almighty. When someone violates another’s rights, he is not merely breaking the law, he is violating God’s grant of protection.

This points to two additional assumptions underlying the Declaration: first, that if our rights are given by a divine Creator, then there is a divine plan for humanity; and second, that since all men are equal before God, they should be legally and politically equal as well. The equality of men was fundamental to the teachings of “New Light” preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, which permeated all the colonies during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s.

The Declaration acknowledges that our Creator endows all men with unalienable rights, and that to secure those rights men organize governments. Thus the source of authority for both instituting government and deposing it lies with the people. Indeed, the Declaration’s opening paragraph asserts the people’s sovereign authority from God to determine their own government:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (Emphasis added)

With every individual receiving sovereign authority directly from God, the Founders argued that individuals then have the power to loan some of this sovereign authority to government to organize its powers in such a way as to advance their own safety and happiness.

Acceptance of this simple hierarchy—God, then the individual, then government—set America apart, an exception from all nations that came before it.

A NATION FORGED IN EQUALITY

The Declaration of Independence was clear on the issue of equality—“All men are created equal.” There would be no hereditary monarch ruling over his subjects, nor would the people be made subservient to a privileged aristocracy. First expressed in the Mayflower Compact more than 150 years earlier, the concept of legal equality was the only logical outcome of the Declaration’s proclamation of liberty, unalienable rights, and government being rooted in the consent of the governed. The perpetuation of slavery blatantly violated both the letter and the spirit of our founding document.

The great American nation that arose from our forefathers’ revolution was ripped asunder by the Civil War. The war initially centered around constitutional questions, but two years into that terrible conflict, on the field at Gettysburg, Lincoln fundamentally redefined the struggle by harkening back to the Declaration at the beginning of his historic address: “Four Score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln was saying the war was no longer being fought over a narrow disagreement over constitutional interpretation, but had become a far more fundamental dispute over the nature of human freedom and equality.

Indeed, America is perhaps the only nation on earth to fight a civil war over the nature of equality. Lincoln understood the wider ramifications of this struggle, repeatedly declaring that the United States was the “last best hope of earth,” and warning that the entire world would suffer if we failed to hold together a Union based on freedom.

During the twentieth century, America emerged triumphant from terrible struggles in which we spent trillions of dollars and lost hundreds of thousands of lives. Recall our various enemies: Germany under both the Kaiser and Hitler, Imperial Japan, worldwide Communism, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and currently, radical Islamism. Now consider this: did any of our foes engage in war to secure equality and individual rights? They might declare the superiority of their race or social class, or demand that all must submit to their religion. But never did one of our foes fight for the simple, self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was for this principle that so many Americans made the ultimate sacrifice. And it is our duty to honor and remember them—and the ideals for which they fought.

AMERICAN CITIZENS OF BRITISH LIBERTY

The Declaration encapsulated the Founders’ ideas about politics, history, and philosophy, all of which were highly influenced by British thinkers. Most of the Founders were born in Britain’s North American colonies, though a few hailed from Britain itself or its other colonies. They considered themselves British, but emphasized their status as free and equal citizens and as beneficiaries of a British tradition of liberty, rather than as subjects of monarchical authority. As Bernard Bailyn writes, “The colonists’ attitude to the whole world of politics and government was fundamentally shaped by the root assumption that they, as Britishers, shared in a unique inheritance of liberty.”,²

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This inheritance was a special source of pride for most Englishmen, as historian Gordon Wood observes:

Englishmen everywhere of every social rank and of every political persuasion could not celebrate [the British Constitution] enough. Every cause, even repression itself, was wrapped in the language of English liberty. No people in the history of the world had ever made so much of it. Unlike the poor enslaved French, the English had no standing army, no lettres de cachet; they had their habeas corpus, their trials by jury, their freedom of speech and conscience, and their right to trade and travel; they were free from arbitrary arrest and punishment; their homes were their castles.³

The “liberties of Englishmen” were bedrock for the colonists, but they were keenly aware these rights were hard-won, unevenly applied, and if history was any guide, impermanent.

In Britain, natural rights were assumed to be an integral part of the unwritten English constitution. Beginning with the Magna Carta (Great Charter) in 1215, Britain had slowly and steadily limited the government’s powers and expanded the rights of its citizens. At Runnymede, in return for monetary payments from his barons, King John conceded that the barons had certain rights that he would not violate—an early step toward recognizing the principle of no taxation without re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART I - REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE
• PART II - DEFINING AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
• PART III - AMERICA RISING
• CONCLUSION
• Acknowledgments
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page