Sometimes it's hard for me to decide whether liberals/progressives are well-meaning but misguided, or intentionally insidious. In any case, I was recently exposed to another chart-dense article attempting to demonstrate that the American dream is in fact an illusion. The argumentation style is overtly negative, but thoughtful in the sense that it at least attempts to set up straw men for conservative thought before blowing them away with fallacies. So should I adopt a charitable tone in exposing the illogic? I suspect it will change as the level of insidiousness becomes more and more annoying.
So David Morris, longtime community organizer and anti-conservative agitator, as well as founder of a wannabe think-tank activism foundation, writes a column on AlterNet entitled: We're #1--Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional. A liberal Facebook friend linked to it and sadly, I took the bait. I swear, I'm going to swear off these liberal blog sites entirely one day. But the truth DOES need to be defended, does it not? Especially where it's been warped in a way that could otherwise be so positive.
What is American exceptionalism? The question, facetiously asked, serves as an opener to which no conservative authority is cited. Instead, Mr. Morris aims right for a liberal reporter's condensed definition: "it is the belief that America 'is inherently superior to the world’s other nations'". I don't know how one might pretend to objective analysis from such an overtly biased starting point as this--not to mention the fact that it's just plain wrong--but Morris attempts to explain why Republican leaders apparently believe this (they don't).
Referencing a Brookings Institute (yup, another dead giveaway, if I had any sense) report, Morris proceeds to demonstrate that the US is not really exceptional for what it claims to be most exceptional about--apparently social mobility of the "American Dream" type is harder in America than in a number of comparably industrialized, but decidedly more socialist nations. And then he further attacks the nation for the exceptionalism he believes still stands: that of the exceptional way in which it has squandered the exceptional advantages over other countries it has enjoyed since its founding.
The study is actually the product of the work of a constellation of think tanks, the Heritage Foundation included (which does some SOLID conservative work that I'm delighted to have access to), entitled: International Comparisons of Economic Mobility. While I have no beef with the raw data, there's some huge methodological issues which call into question the validity of the conclusions drawn in the study. For example, the money claim which Morris touts about several European countries allowing for better upward economic mobility than America does, is tainted by only measuring it by comparing parents' inflation-adjusted incomes to the income of their children. This is a methodological taint because the system is not as static as such a measurement implies. In a fully industrialized society such as ours, children can choose occupations with much less income, and still make more than enough for their needs and wants in absolute terms. And in absolute terms, the US beats all other nations hands down in growth of salaries, and in sheer dollars generated in the economy. To be fair the study also notes that relative comparisons like this don't factor in real growth of the national economies over time, so adjustments for a better metric may still put the US out in front.
Morris attempts a history of how American came to be born so rich, and settles on the fact of cheap land, moderate climate, and abundant low cost wood providing surpluses to early American immigrants in the North, and slave-labor in the South. He manages to completely overlook the fact that their well-developed and mostly Protestant sensibilities promoted a singularly distinct culture where work-ethic met provident living and combined with a common denominator of morality high enough to succeed at national cohesion where the multiple indigenous societies without that culture, but with the same conditions of climate and land did not. He also ignores the stubborn fact that southern plantation-based economies dragged down the overall GDP of the US, as shown by the inimitable Michael Medved (who I have managed to reference twice in a day) in his excellent book: The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation.
But no matter, Morris still manages to believe only luck and exploitation characterize American success.
Morris continues to list relative geographic isolation and lack of major military defeat among the happy happenstances of American exceptionalism before coming to his true thesis, and his next string of straw men. The first salvo cleverly puts together belief in superior national traits, in divine election by God, and in a "compact" Constitution. I say clever because while no serious conservative believes Americans are superior people, and while no serious conservative believes Americans are a people chosen exclusively by God to inherit blessings He's unwilling to offer to people from other lands, every serious conservative believes that the Constitution's brevity, the limited nature of the federal government, is in fact an unavoidably key difference marking the US as exception in form of government from the pattern of monarchy and tyranny which existed everywhere else in the world at its founding, and which remains exceptional by comparison even today when other nations generally opt for some variation of the American model of democracy and republicanism.
Deriding the "rugged individualism" which characterized a period in American history, Morris thinks that conservative culture celebrates the "me" at the expense of the "we". "To American exceptionalists freedom means being able to do what you want unencumbered by obligations to your fellow citizens," he writes. This could not be further from the truth, as conservatives firmly stand and vote in support of personal responsibility on every issue, since they understand that freedom is inextricably linked with it. Whether it be social issues (where they advocate for abstinence rather than abortion, for example), or financial issues (where they advocate for spending controls rather than higher taxes, for example), conservatives are consistently on the side of honoring obligations to fellow citizens, and it's liberals who advocate the opposite. Environmental issues may seem to be the exception to the rule of this general observation, but even there, liberal proponents only claim the need to regulate individual behavior insofar as it grants to government more power--it can be described as advancing responsibility only on a very superficial level.
It is this pro-collectivist stance which carries Morris on to his next attack on the quintessentially American ideal of individualism. Equating Paul Ryan's budget proposal which aims to allow people more personal control over the tax dollars their government spends on their health care with Ayn Rand's famous disdain for charity, Morris dismisses reform of any welfare initiative as inherently amoral, and thereby completely misses the point both of Rand and of Ryan, who point out that society at large does a better job of caring for its poor and needy when individuals are more free and have the means to pursue their own way of doing so. This is not to dismiss any need for a safety net, but rather to open the question of how that safety net is best managed: by unaccountable bureaucrats whose failure to grow the funds necessary doesn't affect them personally, or by individuals and the fund-managers they choose for themselves both of whom succeed or fail based on their wise cooperation? Morris's discussion of America's deplorable lack of government-provided health insurance also falls under this argument, but here he cites statistics about the infant mortality rate in the US without realizing that the statistic wildly mis-characterizes the state of of health care in America. Yes at first glance almost all other industrial nations have lower infant mortality rates, but that's because no other nation counts all those it could have saved in the statistic--premature babies are left to die off the books in Norway, for example, under conditions that require US doctors to continue fighting to help them stay alive. The simple fact that when treatments don't go well in any other country in the world, patients come to the US for the best treatment belies all of Morris's silliness on health issues.
Finally, in the only actual list of 10, Morris provides 10 simple charts intended to show how evil America is. I'll offer a quick summary rebuttal to each in turn, doubling up on only a few:
1. The multiplier of CEO pay to average worker pay is off the charts compared to many countries, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris how high the average worker pay is, or how bringing that number down could possibly help anyone else.
2. Percent of total income received by the richest .1% of the population in the US is more than double that of its nearest comparable country, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris how the bottom percentages compare, or how bringing that percentage down could possibly help anyone else.
3. US Military expenditures dwarf other countries, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris how that benefits our trade, our way of life, our freedom, and even the security and well-being of other countries he cites.
4 and 5. Prisoners and Murders per 100k of the population shows the US way out ahead, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris how the lack of freedom to commit crimes in other countries comes with a similar lack of freedom to produce good and socially beneficial outcomes.
6. Health costs as a percent of GDP shows the US a few percent ahead, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris how much more successful the US is at curing almost everything, how cutting edge our technology is, and how rapidly patients move from assessment to treatment compared to those same countries with socialized medicine.
7. Infant mortality - see above.
8. US Social spending for families as a percent of GDP is down around .5% with the UK and other European comparisons all above 2%, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris the critical context that average income and absolute GDP dollars is so much higher as to render the government expenditures less necessary.
9 and 10. Percent of children living in poverty and percent of population experiencing homelessness both capture the US with alarmingly out of proportion bars on the graph, but we'll never get from Mr. Morris the actual dollar amounts, or other metrics of purchasing power used to define the poverty line (which is much higher in the US than it is in the other countries), and we'll also never have homelessness clearly defined with climate factored in.
America is exceptional, but it has never been about the people themselves. It has instead been about the liberties which their form of government reserves to them rather than to itself. Freedom, used wisely, produces prosperity. It's a natural consequence. Freedom, used poorly, also yields suffering and ultimately loss of freedom. But in an environment where that freedom is present as a foundational principle is more apt to produce prosperity than any other political-economic system. Even the freedom to misrepresent both data and the beliefs of one's political opponents.
I think Mr. Morris needs a few months in Africa...
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