Korrekturen

Please correct me!

• "American Exceptionalism and the fall of an Empire" American exceptionalism is something more than an exalted patriotism, it has become an omnipotent political weapon which is key to understand the American politics abroad and its repercussions in the world.

• This belief affirms that the US is different and superior to any other nation because of its unmatched history and its exceptional moral virtues; therefore it has the moral duty to spread the exceptional values of its political and economic system around the world.

• We can trace this ideology back to the puritan era: when the US didn’t even exist, John Winthrop refers to New England in A Model of Christian Charity as a “city upon a hill”, a place that will be a moral example for the rest of the world.

• Subsequently with the American Revolution, which was very influenced by liberalism and republicanism; the ideals of freedom, equality and democracy were settled as essential features of the unique American identity and politics.

• Letting aside exaggerations and patriotism, the US did has a time when it was considerably exceptional; Godfrey Hodgson in his book The Myth of American Exceptionalism says: […] Nowadays this idea of uniqueness is due to a mix of propaganda and the well-spread ignorance about the origins of American culture, that make American people think of the US as something completely different from the rest of the world.

• Many of these patriots try to disassociate the US from Europe, even though their country is the direct result of the European political and philosophical history; as we can see, even the most basic notions of the Declaration of independence (All men are created equally and the consent of the governed) came from the ideas of the Europian Locke Hobbes.

• The arrogance of the US is not something new: it behaves like all the other big European Empires that have ever existed, trying to get economic and political control overseas; in this case not by creating colonies, but military bases.