America's Special Grace

I read this this evening in the TIA Daily published by Robert Tracinski. http://www.intellectualactivist.com/

After listening to so much bad news and bad politics, this was a pleasure that had to be shared. It captures the essence of America's greatness although it attributes it to theist reasons rather than the Enlightenment one of the freedom of the individual mind - that solitary organ where thought, discovery and resulting knowledge that improves mankind's lot occurs. SCB

"America's Special Grace," "Spengler," Asia Times, July 8

Violent antipathy to America measures the triumph of the American principle, and the ascendance of America's influence in the world. America's enemies make more noise than her friends, but her friends are increasing faster than her enemies. America's influence in the world leapt as result of her victory in three world wars, including the fall of communism in 1989. Arguably, America is ascending even faster today, despite the reverses in its economic position and the strains on its military resources….

If America has been given a special grace, it is because its founders as well as every generation of its people have taken as the basis of America's legitimacy the Judeo-Christian belief that God loves every individual, and most of all the humblest. Rights under law, from the American vantage point, are sacred, not utilitarian, convenient or consensual….

It is an irony that globalization itself has provided the means to a handful of endangered ethnicities to assert themselves, sometimes in the most grotesque fashion…. We hardly need talk in this context of radical Islam, whose existence in the absence of the global oil market is unimaginable. Without America's global success, the undead of traditional society could not give voice to their rancor—much less finance it.

To love America is to acknowledge its special grace, namely that a nation founded not on ethnicity, language, or culture but rather upon the sanctity of individual rights will prevail, while the remains of traditional society are borne away by the current….

The coherence of traditional society imposes a structure on life, a structure so rigid that such societies cannot adapt to change and must crumble before encroaching empire. In return for the sanctity of individual rights, Americans are freed from the constraints of traditional society and made responsible for their own actions. For an American presidential candidate [Obama] to refer to traditional society as the model for the solution to American problems has no precedent. It is one thing to denounce American errors while upholding American principles. Never before has America considered electing a president who prefers the alternative, and that might just be the most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since its Civil War.