American Exceptionalism Isn’t Just a Romantic Idea Pushed by Americans—2,500 Years of History Prove It

The Left is fighting mightily to make America more like socialist Europe, which we know doesn’t produce greatness. The Right, therefore, must fight harder to preserve what is special about America.

Though it is popular within the Left and its media sycophants to demean America and the idea of American Exceptionalism, 2,500 years of world history proves there is something unique about America. My case for American Exceptionalism arose while I was reading Johan Norberg’s excellent, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages. In the book, Norberg uses seven instances in human history in which golden ages were achieved. These were: Athens, Rome, the Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, the Renaissance, the Dutch Republic, and, what he terms, the Anglosphere (Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution plus the American Founding). In chewing on his book, it occurred to me that no single entity produced MULTIPLE Golden Ages; rather, Golden Ages were mostly scattered around the Fertile Crescent (Athens, Rome, Baghdad, Florence, Amsterdam, and London), with China and America tucked in.

During the chapter on Athens, Norberg casually notes that there was a moment in time in which a walk through Athens could have resulted in you crossing paths with some of the greatest minds in human history. Specifically, these men all lived at the same time and in the same place (or were connected to each other):

• Socrates

• Plato

• Aristotle

• Euripedes

• Aeschylus

• Pericles

• Sophocles

• Protagoras

• Herodotus

• Thucydides

These nine men were philosophers, historians, politicians, and playwrights. The element that struck me about them was that we still talk, read, or learn from them today, nearly 2,500 years later. Think about how remarkable that is. Not only did what they do survive the destructive hand of history—war, floods, fires, translations, etc.—but it was important enough that they remain relevant today.