American Exceptionalism
On July 4th, New York City Mayor and Ugandan immigrant Zohran Mamdani criticized the USA with Marxist bromides and claimed that “America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”
IN FACT, America’s exceptionalism is rooted in fixed principles that are obstacles to Mamdani’s socialist agenda, which fueled poverty in his homeland and throughout the world. Here are the specifics:
- On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani repeatedly disparaged the USA and alleged that it is a “nation of contradictions” where “children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” and people with “soft hands” have “immense wealth” that was “built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands.”
- Similarly, Karl Marx, the author of the Communist Manifesto, wrote that the “history of all” human societies is “class struggle” and that the “accumulation of wealth” by “capitalists” causes an “accumulation of misery” and “poverty” for the “working class.”
- Across both time and place, the masses of people in capitalist nations have dramatically higher standards of living than in socialist nations.
- In the United States, 1% of people live below the international poverty line, as compared to 60% in Mamdani’s homeland of Uganda, which was one of East Africa’s “most prosperous” nations “until the 1960s” when it was ravaged by socialism, corruption, a lack of property rights, and political instability.
- In the 1980’s — while the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was asserting that their “progressive-minded people” cared for the “interests of the working class” by creating a “socialist way of life” on the “basis of social justice” and “scientific foresight” — the living standard of the “Soviet people was roughly one third that of the United States.”
- Throughout its 69-year history, the Soviet Union was wracked by degrees of famine, starvation, bread lines, and food scarcity.
- In the United States, 99% of U.S. households with children don’t have even a single child who experiences hunger at any point of the year.
- Per Harvard economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Marx fundamentally misunderstood that economic value is created not only by labour, but also by entrepreneurship, saving, and technological progress. Marx’s most deadly legacy, indeed, was the interpretation that gaps in income between rich and poor are caused by exploitation rather than differences in productivity.”
- Wealthy people like Musk place their money into investments that increase productivity, which is the primary driver of living standards and one of the main reasons why middle- and low-income Americans are richer than their counterparts in every other nation of the world.
- Although Mamdani says he isn’t a “communist” but a “democratic socialist,” the founders of the Soviet Union called themselves “Social Democrats,” the Law of the Soviet State refers to the Soviet Union as a “socialist democracy” more than 40 times, and Mamdani’s agenda mirrors the defining economic policies of the Soviet Union.
- Like the Soviets, Mamdani has called for government to seize the means of production, abolish private health insurance, nationalize the medical supply chain, take over the housing market, and create a network of government-owned grocery stores that won’t “pay rent or property taxes,” thus driving out private supermarkets, which have average profit margins of just 1% to 3%.
- Even further to the left of the Soviets, Mamdani has called for “permanently” eliminating the “fare on every city bus” and banning “all guns.”
- Most of those policies require violating the Bill of Rights, especially the Fifth Amendment’s ban on government taking “private property” for “public use, without just compensation” and the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear Arms.”
- In his July 4 speech, Mamdani lauded America as “exceptional” but said it is not because “we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else” but because “here, nothing is fixed into place.”
- Like the Communist Manifesto — which calls for winning “the battle of democracy” so that government takes control of all “communication,” “property,” “transport,” “factories,” “credit,” and “agriculture” — Mamdani is a self-described “proud member” of the Democratic Socialists of America, which calls for using “democracy” to “collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.”
- In stark contrast, the founders of the U.S. explicitly rejected “a pure democracy” where a majority can seize private property and use the power of government to do most anything they want because nothing is fixed into place.
- As explained by James Madison — the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights — “such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
- In order to prevent abuses of democracy, the founders of the U.S. developed an exceptional system of checks and balances on the powers of the government they formed, including the separation of powers between the states and the federal government, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the Senate and the House, as well as the Electoral College and, most significantly, a constitutional amendment process that requires three-quarters of the states to approve any changes.
- The U.S. Constitution, which codified the exceptional doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, has become the world’s longest-standing written constitution and empowered the U.S. to become the most powerful, most prosperous, and most charitable nation in the world, as well as the leading bulwark against Nazism, fascism, Communism, and other totalitarian ideologies.
In summary, America is exceptional because its founders fixed into place transcendent principles that are antithetical to Mamdani’s agenda.
