The fact that early Americans needed to be bailed out by others also doesn't seem to do anything to dampen either the mythology of American exceptionalism nor their "can-do attitude".

Do some of these same types of stories and mythologies also erase the harm of an over-armed populace with respect to the lack of appropriate gun control and mass shootings versus gun rights in America?

As a country our gun mythology is stronger than our desire to act to improve our (collective) lives....

This adds additional weight to the concept of "city upon a hill" which was highlighted in a speech by John Winthrop.

The largest swaths of taught American history have propagated the idea of American Exceptionalism rather than actual truth.

In Chapter 1: American Exceptionalism of Myth America (Basic Books, 2023) historian David A. Bell indicates that Jay Lovestone and Joseph Stalin originated the idea of American Exceptionalism in 1920, but in Democracy (1880, p.72) Henry Adams seems to capture an early precursor of the sentiment:

"Ah!" exclaimed the baron, with his wickedest leer, "what for is my conclusion good? You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience. I have lived seventy-five years, and all that time in the midst of corruption. I am corrupt myself, only I do have courage to proclaim it, and you others have it not. Rome, Paris, Vienna, Petersburg, London, all are corrupt; only Washington is pure! Well, I declare to you that in all my experience I have found no society which has had elements of corruption like the United States. The children in the street are corrupt, and know how to cheat me. The cities are all corrupt, and also the towns and the counties and the States' legislatures and the judges. Every where men betray trusts both public and private, steal money, run away with public funds.

• Adams, Henry. Democracy : An American Novel. Leisure Hour Series 112. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1880. http://archive.org/details/democracyanameri00adamrich.

Had a flavor of American Exceptionalism been brewing for decades before Stalin's comment?

Rank, Mark Robert, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Reading as part of Dan Allosso's Book Club

Mostly finished last week, though I managed to miss the last book club meeting for family reasons, but finished out the last few pages tonight.

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The US penalizes those who don't complete high school to a higher degree than other countries and this can tend to lower our economic resiliency.

American exceptionalism at play?

Another factor at play with respect to https://hypothes.is/a/2uAmuEENEe2KentYKORSww

There is a variety of confounding myths in America which tend to hold us down. These include economic mobility, meritocracy, poverty, and the land of opportunity.

With respect to the "land of opportunity", does positive press of a small number of cases from an earlier generation outweigh the actual experience of the majority?

There was a study on The Blitz in London and England in general in World War II which showed that despite high losses in general, enough people knew one or more who'd lost someone or something to the extreme but that the losses weren't debilitating from a loss perspective and generally served to boost overall morale. Higher losses may have been more demoralizing and harmful, but didn't happen. (Find this source: possibly Malcolm Gladwell??)

Is this sort of psychological effect at play socially and politically in America and thereby confounding our progress?

DRD4-7R is the specific gene that Peter implicates in migrants who are adventurous enough to come to America. This is associated with the "can do" perspective that has propelled America into a world leader but also drives America reflexively into the future...on autopilot.

A stunning little essay on a small section of the massive problems we face in America viewed through the lens of our teeth.

the United States is a meritocracy

We've liked to tell ourselves this myth, but it's demonstrably untrue.

What a fantastic sentence!

I'd be curious to see Miller take his high school textbook and point to specific phrasing to back this up. Even now most US History textbooks are espousing American exceptionalism.

This is not wrong, but I wanted to flag somewhere that Britain actually possessed a representative government (Parliament) at the time. George III did his best to ignore it, but it existed. It just didn't include representation for colonies.

I'm not tagging this "these people are stupid" because that's not the issue; they are attempting to make US representative government look more innovative than it actually was.

• There were many American peoples. None of them were White.
• "those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning the independence they had asserted as their right" - OK no. Quite a lot of people did not have the autonomy to "declare themselves" part of a people, and indeed were not recognized as such. There were also loyalists. And this idea of "a people" is...really complicated.
• While it's true that the first citizens of the United States were former British subjects, it is worth noting that a lot of other people lived in the current United States at the time who were tribal citizens, French colonists, Spanish colonists, and enslaved people who weren't considered citizens of anywhere.

We gotta do this clause by clause:

• "its people have shared a history of common struggle and achievement" - no. Aside from the long history of dispute about who born in the United States really "counts" as an "American", there has never been a common struggle.
• "carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness" - no. As of this writing I have finished reading the first half of the document and there has, as yet, been no mention of Indigenous peoples. (Also, see the vast literature on the relationship between expansionism, the "frontier", and American exceptionalism.)
• "winning independence and forming a new government" - dramatic oversimplification. Interesting fact about this document: in contains almost no references to state government.
• "wars, industrialization, waves of immigration, technological progress, and political change" - not highlighting this because it's wrong, but because it implies a strictly linear progress of history that is typical of American exceptionalism and intellectual arguments for racism, colonialism, etc.

All in all, what Luke said.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA crack a book, y'all.

We are not going to do an accounting here of whether "America" (hi, America is two continents, we're talking about the US) has on balance done more good than harm. That is disingenuous. The fact is that the United States has done great harm that is not erased by its good, and it is more urgent to deal with the harm than to pat ourselves on the back about the good.

This line, associated with Reagan, is from a sermon by John Winthrop, a Puritan immigrant who was primarily interested in establishing a theocracy. It is emblematic of the idea of "American Exceptionalism", which you are about to be beat over the head with. See further https://www.neh.gov/article/how-america-became-city-upon-hill#:~:text=That%201630%20sermon%20by%20John,center%20of%20his%20political%20career.

Is this a veiled attempt at American exceptionalism?