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I’ll stick to one each.
The most credit: Without hesitation, I think the United States is the birthplace, and still the staunchest supporter, on government based on liberty and civil freedom. These principles guided us through not only our own revolutionary war, but into and through the civil war, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the fight against communism. The strength of those principles gave the world Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., and yes, even Reagan. If our critics bray so loudly, it is only because our failings are measured against the height of our ideals. The pantheon of those who championed freedom over tyranny, equality in the face of discrimination, and liberty over bondage is strongly American. Because America is a place uniquely suited to self-correction, the pages of our history are filled with those who stood on mountains, and called us back to our founding principles. And the echoes of that call resounded far beyond our borders.
America demonstrated the possibility of the democratic experiment. It demonstrated the necessity of sexual equality. It demonstrated the just cause of civil rights. It demonstrated the resilience of a culture and an economy that rewards achievement, and voraciously protects the freedom of the individual to strive for that achievement.
The least credit: we are a nation that is becoming morally paralyzed. In the wake of post-modernity, in the fall-out of moral relativism, we have lost whatever native skills are common to humanity in understanding morality. I’m not saying that we’ve merely lost some sort of common set of moral codes; I’m saying we’ve lost the language and the tools to even discuss the questions in a meaningful way. We have confused individual liberty with moral parity. We have devolved free expression into a sanctification of opinion. We have lost the ability to look at a situation, or a choice, or even a lifestyle, and speak of its moral import without appeals to either tradition or common liberty.
The fallout of this is seen everywhere. DOMA is argued on the basis of either traditional values, or common liberty. Few people are making, and fewer still understanding, a robust moral argument either way on the issue. We are incapable of distinguishing between the moral necessity of free political speech, the interchange of ideas, and the regulation of commercial speech, the entertainment of the masses. Can we not make a moral distinction between the two? We discuss the American occupation of Iraq and the German occupation of Poland as if there is parity between the two. Have we become so paralyzed that we cannot understand the meaning of “better” in a political, or economic, or cultural sense?
So there it is. I love this country dearly, more often for its ideals than its realities. I have great hope for our future, and I think that the strength of the American idea, powerful enough to shape the last 200 years, will be strong enough to shape the next 200.
-sm
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