This was a BIG-DEAL with Obama… but no biggie for Republicans supporting Trump? Trump is an idiot. “American Exceptionalism” is not a monetary standard! “American Exceptionalism” is not able to be placed into a spreadsheet! Here is a decent article about what we are seeing today in this 2016 election cycle. The article is entitled: “What Are Trump and Sanders? They Are the End of American Exceptionalism”
…Among other things, that America is simply different from other nations. It is a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth, a nation bound not by ancestral blood but by revolutionary ideas and beliefs brilliantly articulated more than two centuries ago in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The founding of the United States ushered in the modern democratic experiment, along with new concepts of freedom and human rights. In the 20th century, the Greatest Generation fought for the survival of that experiment against its totalitarian enemies, Nazi, Fascist, and Communist alike. Today, the challenges posed by Islamic totalitarianism test a new generation.
America has been a uniquely productive nation: a font of invention, creativity, and economic dynamism. In America, tens of millions of people have risen from poverty. The United States has been a singularly generous, if not always effective, provider of assistance to other countries, including those where Americans are not popular.
But, most of all, exceptionalism implies that the responsibility for global leadership rests on America’s shoulders, not because Americans hunger for power but because there is no good alternative….
All that being said… here is a great video intro by Charles Murray to his book, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History (Values and Capitalism), But this cogent understanding of history and “what” America is DEVOID of anything “the Donald” espouses.
Conservapedia has this:
American exceptionalism is an intuition about the United States, a country that occupies a special place among the nations of the world primarily because of its unique origins. The concept of “American exceptionalism” may be defined as the notion that the United States, by virtue of its origins and ideals, its struggles and accomplishments, stands apart from — and, in some eyes, above — other nations.
Dinesh D’Souza wrote:
- The notion that in many respects America is unique in the world in called American “exceptionalism.”
[….]
Alexis de Tocqueville is commonly cited as the originator of the phrase, and once said that the United States held a special place among nations because it was a country of immigrants and the first modern democracy. He specifically cited the American Founding as the basis of this exceptionalism. Tocqueville wrote:
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people. Many important observations suggest themselves upon the social condition of the Anglo-Americans, but there is one which takes precedence of all the rest. The social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the Colonies, and is still more strongly marked at the present day.
Edmund Burke, who is sometimes referred to as the Father of Conservatism, wrote about what made Americans truely exceptional. He said: “They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” What he means is that early Americans did not wait for government to hurt them, they kept an eye out in advance. Patrick Henry told Americans to “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel”, and Burke confirms that they did exactly that.
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.