The American Experiment

Am reading a great book right now: Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About America. There are so many passages I'd like to reproduce here that I'd risk copyright infringement, so I'll try to be brief. This book comes with my highest recommendation.

D'Souza brings a uniquely personal perspective to his theme. He was a native of India, but became a U.S. citizen by choice in 1991.

America, he points out, is not a place. It is an idea. People come to America because of a dream.

I first became acquainted with this notion in a book by John Warwick Montgomery nearly thirty years ago. The Founding Fathers really did create something original in the American experiment. Democracy, science and capitalism have been woven together into a culture without peer in today's civilized (or uncivilized) worlds.

Another facet of our achievement is the notion that history is not a purposeless and meaningless sequence or random events. Americans dream of progress. If I don't make it, my kids can make it.

Certainly we see this played out in myriad ways in our various personal histories. I see it in my family, my wife's famly, my friends' families. D'Souza notes that one part of the American dreams is "that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and neverending, that the future is certain to better than the past."

Of course this Utopian dream is scoffed at by many cynics and critics of all stripes. Nevertheless, it was this conviction that brought our nation to world leadership, a role that we have a responsibility to not abdicate or feel ashamed of.

The remarkable thing about the American Ideal is that we did not force the world to desire it or adopt it. We did not use guns to win the minds and hearts of our foes.

In one story, D'Souza tells how the TV media attempted to make President Reagan look bad during the "Reagan Recession" by interview the unemployed persons who had been disenfranchised, who were not experiencing the American dream. The Soviet Union showed these documentaries behind the Iron Curtain with the aim of making capitalism look bad. But the footage had the opposite effect as the cameras revealed that even our poorest poor had TV sets and cars and three meals a day.

The ideas in this book are far more vast than these piecemeal scraps. Despite its depth, it is an easy read. Find the book. His reasoned defense of America is well worth your time.