America is an exceptional nation; Americans are an exceptional people. There is nothing, no matter how repellent, the left can do or say to change that.
American exceptionalism exists, and it is simply the way it is.
It exists in yet other ways, actually. Again historically, America is exceptional in that our nation was the first in which the people who founded the nation arranged to put the people of their new country in control rather than they, themselves, or royalty.
This was unheard of in the rest of the world at the time of our founding.
These remarkable men also, and this was perhaps the most remarkable of its kind at the time, "grounded the rights of the people in God while still guaranteeing religious freedom and avoiding religious persecution."
That was not only exceptional, it was the first and only time in the history of nations that something so remarkable was ever achieved.
The Founding Fathers who achieved this multi-faceted miracle were an extraordinary group of men, and they were equally remarkable individually. They were not of an equally philosophical bent, however. George Washington, for example, was the ultimate pragmatist, while Thomas Jefferson was much more cerebral.
Dr. Franklin was a man of so many talents and bents that he was always an original, and John Adams was always the brilliant and irascible curmudgeon. The wonder that was Alexander Hamilton was also brilliant, and flamboyant in his behavior, and an equally flamboyant, though in a different way, Governor Morris was always the great wit, bon vivant, writer and patriot.
In one thing they all agreed, however, and that was in the significance of what they were doing.
They each comprehended that what they were doing in creating the United States of America to provide for the first time in history the true freedom of man, based not only on the revolutionary ideas of 17th and 18th century British philosophers and writers, along with the great 18th century French philosophes, but also on the deep longing of each of these great men to live as free men, and to provide that freedom in perpetuity for their descendants.
In so doing, America would become a great country, and unique in the freedoms it would provide.
As George Washington said in his farewell speech in September, 1796: "It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no great distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."
That is what was achieved at our founding, and what the left is working so hard to destroy by rejecting the historical fact of American exceptionalism.
Susan Smith Mellody has been a magazine columnist, speechwriter, and reporter. She specializes in residential property. For more of her reports — Click Here Now.