In the past year, I often wondered what makes America so special. I often hear bromides about how terrible or exceptional America is. However, I rarely hear a nuanced argument from either side.
On both the conservative and progressive side, we can find figures who say that America is not a great nation. On the left, writers and pundits claim that America was and still is a racist, misogynistic, and bigoted country. Prominent believers of American “un-exceptionalism” include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X Kendi, and countless others. On the other hand, some social conservatives claim that American society has become morally decadent and hedonistic. Think of Jerry Falwell Sr. and the Moral Majority as prime examples of this thinking,
As a conservative, I have questioned how I can support a country that has aborted over 60 million babies since the 1970s. Similarly, family values in America have disappeared in recent decades. Divorce rates, cohabitation, and unmarried childbearing have become the norm rather than the exception in the last fifty years. With all of these disturbing trends, I wondered if I can honestly consider myself a proud American anymore.
Fortunately, D’Souza’s book What’s So Great About America showed me why everyone should all love the United States of America. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a compelling argument about American exceptionalism.
Here are some of my most important takeaways from the book:
My Takeaways:
1. The three key reasons for America’s success: democracy, science, and capitalism.
For most of human history, people have suffered under tyranny and material depravity. However, the embrace of democracy, science, and capitalism in Western civilization changed the story. These three key elements have allowed Western Civilization/America to become the freest and most prosperous civilization/country that the world has ever seen. Add in Judeo-Christian values as the foundation of our civilization/nation, and we essentially get the closest to “heaven on earth” that we can accomplish with human nature’s severe flaws.
Certainly, America has refined democratic practices such as free elections, peaceful transitions of power, representative government, and checks & balances (all without the threat of the “tyranny of the majority” by implementing a republican form of democracy). We often take these democratic practices for granted. A strong understanding of human history shows us just how special America’s style of government has been in the human experience.
Nonetheless, D’Souza shows us that combining the scientific method, political freedom, and economic freedom is what has allowed America to become a bastion of individual liberty and material improvement for all its citizens.
2. A society based on freedom produces more virtuous people than a society based on coerced virtue (i.e. America vs Islamic nations)
D’Souza wrote this book in the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At that time, many Muslim writers and scholars had levied heavy criticisms of American society as decadent and immoral. They claimed that Islamic societies created more virtuous people than American society did. In his book, D’Souza’s counter-argument was that a free society produces true virtue. Coerced virtue is not truly virtue. For instance, the author brings up the virtue of modesty. Modesty is enforced in much of the Muslim world. Forcing women to wear the veil in the Isalmic world is not true modesty in D’Souza’s opinion. Instead, American society has produced some of the most generous and virtuaous people that the world has ever seen.
I don’t think that D’Souza believes that America should not foster virtue. Instead, he is saying that giving people the freedom to do the right thing is more preferable than forcing people to do the right thing. The American way of thinking seems to fall more in line with the concept of free-will in the Judeo-Christian tradition than it does with the practices of the Islamic world.
3. The Founding Documents did not condone or support slavery
Many critics of the United States claim that the Founding Documents—specifically the Constitution—supported slavery. Their logic is generally based on two reasons. First off, the Constitution does not ban slavery in any of the amendment or articles. Secondly, the three-fifths Compromise in Article 1 of the Constitution degraded slaves as less than a human being.
D’Souza’s response to these claims is probably the most beneficial part of the whole book. Firstly, D’Souza points out that the Constitution did not endorse slavery. Curiously, the term “slavery” does not come up once in the original Constitution—not until the passage of 13th Amendment in 1865 that got rid of slavery. Moreover, other parts of the document show that the slavery was not a favored practice by many in the United States—such as in Section 9 of Article 1 in the Constitution. This Constitutional clause banned the importation of “captive” persons by 1808—effectively outlawing the slave trade in the United States.
Concerning the second criticism of the Constitution, the three-fifths Compromise actually undermined the institution of slavery. In fact, the Founding Father who proposed the three-fifths Compromise was an abolitionist. The Abolitionist delegates from the Northern states compromised on this clause because counting slaves in the would give Southern slave-owning states more power in the House of Representatives. Since representation in the US House is based on population size, the slaves states actually wanted slaves to count as part of the US Census’s calculation for total population. In short, the 3/5 Compromise had nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of slaves. It actually hurt slaves states by giving them less Representatives in the House.
Overall, D’Souza’s overarching argument in support of the Constitution was that the Founders knew that America would not have existed if slavery was outright banned in the 1780s. Of course, slavery was and still is an evil institution. Nonetheless, forcing states to give up slavery in the 1780s was against the democratic principle of the Constitution. The Southern states would not have joined the Union if the Northern states—which all banned slavery by the early 1800s—had forced them to.
In the 1860s, the Republican party under Lincoln used a democratic process—the Amendment process—to end this evil institution (i.e. through the 13th Amendment). It took a bloody civil war and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to achieve the promise that “all men are created equal”.
4. America has many unique freedoms that do not exist in the rest of the world
This takeaway comes from D’Souza’s own experiences as an immigrant to the United States. Throughout the book, he uses his perspective as an original native of India to show why he believed that he was improving his life by coming to America. One example is that Americans can choose their own career path—provided one has the proper competence and skills. That is not the case for most of the world. In India, your lot in life is basically decided by birth. If you came from the lowest caste in society, then you can’t become a successful businessman or politician. In America, we are blessed with the opportunity of economic mobility.
I hope that you learned something today. Dinesh D’Souza is an excellent writer, and I recommend that you read his book.
-Tin Can Conservative