Examples Of American Exceptionalism

Donald Trump has been stress testing the American institution for more than a year now, and nobody knows how long it’ll hold before breaking down. Never has the world seen such an uninformed president \cite{1}. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty \cite{2}. This patchwork perhaps doesn't have the power to run a country, as have shown the many examples on social media. But his outrageous way of going against the norms and breaking every rule there is
It's a way of justifying a particular lifestyle that was predominant in the past. The expansion into the new frontier was justified as a mission from god to ensure that the new world doesn't backslide like the old world sinners of Europe. America was to be a land populated by exceptional, chosen people, exempt, and above the rest of the world. Secularized as manifest destiny, American Exceptionalism justifies and demands the extermination of the indigenous people of the "wilderness" (AKA Native Americans), for the sake of securing the national identity of the christian settlers. Those not willing to accept christianity were forcibly moved or eliminated. American Exceptionalism is not just a question of land, the ideology of this philosophy is inextricably woven into the fabric of history. Slavery, labor strikes, the abuses of Irish and Chinese workers who built the American Railroad system, are all justified by the lofty goal of a promised city for god's people. This explains why the average American subconsciously hates or fears someone from another race, and why Trump had so much popularity as a
When James Madison said his infamous quote, he was motivated by the concept of objectivism, which goes against what Plato and Aristotle believed. Its main tenants are reality, reason, self-interest and of course capitalism. A good government exists only to protect individual rights and stays out of people's personal lives. this led to a kind of Laissez-faire capitalism that promotes an unregulated and free market. Meaning that the wealthy people could increase their wealth by hoarding more resources and finding new ways of milking money out of people, but also that free and ingenious minds could create wealth through hard work and originality. This ideal is the core of the American Dream and is (along with the welfare state) why people were able to freely move through social classes during the Golden Age, or at least live comfortably. Yet things aren't the same