Bill Vallicella links to a long post by his friend Edward W. Farrell, in which the latter tells us that Americans are today divided by their view of the United States. These views are:
1) The traditionalist view: America is exceptional and a beacon to the rest of the world
2) The progressive view: America is thoroughly racist and needs to be purged top to bottom
These two views certainly exist, but the list is incomplete and the names are entirely wrong. What Farrell calls the “traditionalist view” is, in fact, the old progressive view that one nowadays most often finds in that strange and confused creature, the conservative admirer of Abraham Lincoln. I will come back to this ideological Minotaur—part man and mostly bull—but will begin by saying that an “exceptional” country could not be a “beacon” because its exceptional status would make its example irrelevant to “the rest of the world.”
In any event, everyone should know that this “beacon to the world” business goes back to the Puritan fanatic John Winthrop’s claim that Puritan New England was a “city on a hill,” and that Winthrop’s words are nothing but the slogan and war-cry of violent Puritan fanaticism. Continue reading