The founding documents, The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, these are what makes America exceptional.They are also what allows Americans to be exceptional if they choose to be.
Putin recently made a statement part of which said that America is no more exceptional than anywhere else. That Americans are no more exceptional than anyone else. He is wrong.
Well, he is partly wrong.
America was founded based in recognizing the individual. This is a dramatic departure from almost everywhere else in the world where governments hold that individuals exist to serve the collective or the state.
Not in America though. It is spelled out in so many ways that America is built on a bedrock of rugged individualism. Every person has the same rights as any other person and no single person more valuable than any other person. No one is inherently above the rest.
The Constitution was written specifically to unite the various states and specifically limits the authority of the new federal government. The main concept being that the government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
The Bill of Rights, though I personally believe was unnecessary, spells out those rights that exist here, in this country for every individual. Not classes of people. Not castes of people. Individual persons.
Even when many of the people did not want to share those rights with others and conspired and actively worked to deny other people from having those rights, to the point of denying that they were even a person.
The basic principles prevailed. Those founding documents won out over greed and hate. People like Martin Luther King and Standing Bear wanted only to be seen as every other person, having the same rights as every other person.
America, as represented by those Founding documents, is highly exceptional as that over time, the intent to deny some people but not others, those rights as individuals was defeated. To this day, there are some who would still make the effort to deny those rights to other people based on ignorant and stupid thinking. The fight of those who are denied is carried on though and the point is always made again. America is for every individual citizen.
Today, there are too many who either have forgotten or or purely in denial of the focus on individuals in America. They want to push the collective and the state. They seek to have everyone conform to the group instead of affirming their rights as individuals.
They deny people the right to not only take their own risks to succeed but to accept the consequences of those risks which includes failure. The state has no place in attempting to mitigate or promote success or failure for any individual.
The government exists to make sure that individual citizens are able to do for themselves. To protect themselves. to make their own living and to worship, if they do, as they choose.
To try to force people to do things for the collective good or any other reason is beyond the original scope of the government. Yes, the government can work to make sure that one person or group of people is not doing something that will harm or inhibit another person or group of person's rights. Protecting clean water sources so that everyone has access to clean water and not one person or group is hoarding it or making it unusable by others, that is the kind of government regulation they were put in place to do.
America is exceptional because it ensures for individuals to attempt to do exceptional things with their lives. Few other countries at that time or even now exist in that capacity. America exists to serve the people, not for the people to serve it.
Too many people now don't understand, appreciate or respect that.
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