Neocons Love July 4th

Gary J. Schmitt, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and card carrying neocon, writes:

As was obvious to both the Founders who drafted and approved the Declaration, and the monarchies and despotisms that ruled the vast majority of the rest of mankind, the American declaration of...principles was a revolutionary moment not only for a sliver of the North American continent but, potentially, for the rest of the world.

The United States, initially weak relative to the other great powers in the world and, as such, disinclined to involve itself in the their conflicts, set itself inevitably on a course that is aptly captured in the title of Robert Kagan’s history of early American statecraft, “Dangerous Nation.” 

Here, for the first time in history, was a government whose legitimacy explicitly rested on the claims of human nature and not on common blood, soil, language, religion or ancient tradition.

This is the true root of American exceptionalism... It is the creed, the principles, of the Declaration that define the United States — not our successful break from British rule...

July 4 is a day to celebrate America’s birth. But Americans can proudly, and justly so, celebrate that July 4 is also the day the Americans gave birth to a set of ideas that not only transformed their own polity but that of the world at large. 

So fire off a few bottle-rockets, light as many sparklers as you like, and know that the United States of America is, indeed, exceptional as no other nation in the history of the world has been.