I recently reread for the first time in a long time President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring inauguration speech. When you read the speech, the fact that Kennedy believed America is a nation unlike any other jumps off the page at you. President Kennedy never uses the term American exceptionalism, but his view of America as a place with a meaning and a mission of redemption is unmistakable:
We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning—signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
It’s hard to imagine a Democrat president voicing these sentiments today. Harder still, imagine him or her meaning them. Too often we hear from the left a different spin on American exceptionalism—a view that America is somehow worse than other countries, that it is hypocritical about its ideals, falls short of its responsibilities, and is forever in need of correction. This has been the main thrust of President Obama’s speeches on the world stage since assuming office in January 2009.
I think ordinary Americans are tired of Obama’s global apology tour and of hearing about what a weak country America is from left-wing professors and journalists. That’s why America yearns for a return to national leadership of the kind exemplified by Presidents Reagan and Kennedy: leaders who are not embarrassed by America, who see our country’s flaws but also its greatness; leaders who are proud to be Americans, and are proud of her every day, not just when their chosen ones are winning elections.
What makes America exceptional? The answer certainly begins with the American values of individual freedom and equality before the law that we’ve already discussed. The historic gift of our founding set the stage for our exceptionalism as a country, but it has been the American people putting that heritage to work by raising our families, building our communities, creating our prosperity, and defending our freedom that has truly made our country special.
As an Alaskan, I’ve always believed that one of the keys to American exceptionalism is a part of the Constitution we’ve touched on but haven’t fully discussed yet: the Tenth Amendment. Here’s how it reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Nothing could be more simple and straightforward. There, in a single sentence, is the entire spirit of the U.S. Constitution: The federal government’s powers are limited to those listed in the Constitution. Everything else belongs to the states and the people. We give you the power; you don’t give us the power. We are sovereign.
In practice, I’ve always interpreted the Tenth Amendment to mean that the best government is government that is closest to the people. We Alaskans have good reason to believe in this principle. Much of the motivation for the drive for statehood back in the late 1950s was because of the way the feds ran the territory from Washington, D.C. Without representation in Congress, and all the things that statehood affords, there were laws made by the other states that hindered Alaska’s development. For instance, when Alaska was just a territory, a law was passed called the Jones Act, which requires that goods shipped between U.S. ports be carried in U.S. vessels. This restriction has greatly increased the cost of goods from the Lower 48 for Alaskans.
This experience of being ruled by elites in a distant capital—in violation of both the spirit of the Tenth Amendment and Tocqueville’s observation that our preference for local self-government is a crucial part of our exceptionalism—has had a lasting impact on my career in public service.
There’s an excellent speech that Ernest Gruening, a Democrat who was a territorial governor of Alaska and a U.S. senator, gave at the Alaska Constitutional Convention in 1955 that is relevant for the whole country today. Gruening laid a foundation that many public servants, myself included, could build upon in our quest for maximum self-determination. His speech compared Alaska’s fight for statehood to America’s fight for independence. Gruening made the case that Alaska’s rule (and taxation!) by Washington without representation was akin to “colonialism” and that it had to end.
For our nation was born of revolt against colonialism. Our charters of liberty—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—embody America’s opposition to colonialism and to colonialism’s inevitable abuses. It is therefore natural and proper that American leadership should set its face against the absenteeism, the discriminations and the oppressions of colonialism. It is natural and proper that American leadership should lend such aid and comfort as it may to other peoples striving for self-determination and for that universally applicable tenet of American faith—government by consent of the governed.
Those Alaskans who fought for statehood were kindred spirits in some ways to our nation’s Founding Fathers because, like our Founders, they had their own “fight” for independence from a remote power.
And isn’t that basically what many Americans are doing today? We’re demanding to be heard by a remote power in Washington that seems to ignore our wishes as it thwarts the will of the people with Obamacare, private-sector-industry takeovers, a lack of law enforcement on our porous borders, deficit spending, and debt accumulation.
Not just Alaska, of course, but every state in the union has a unique history, people, and perspective. The thing that makes this all work—that brings all of it together to unify a nation—is the spirit of the Tenth Amendment. It’s this principle that restrains government and maximizes freedom, allowing a diverse country not just to survive, but to thrive. Thomas Jefferson put it this way in 1791, just as the Bill of Rights was being ratified:
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That “all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. (emphasis mine)
A “boundless field of power”—sounds like it could be a description of the current flood of legislation coming out of Washington. What we’re seeing today is the inevitable result of national leaders who have forgotten the fundamental wisdom of the Tenth Amendment. Just as Mr. Jefferson warned us, as soon as we as a country disregarded the fact that the federal government’s powers are limited, and that we as states and individuals hold the balance of the power, the floodgates were opened to the torrent of federal power grabs we’re seeing today. Take the federal income tax, for example. We tend to think there are two constants in life: death and taxes. But America hasn’t always had an income tax. The first federal income tax on individuals was imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. But the tax was never meant to be permanent, and Congress repealed it ten years after it was enacted. It wasn’t until 1913 that the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and the individual federal income tax that we know today was created.
What is most dangerous about these p
ower grabs is that they’re usually done in the name of a good cause—insuring the uninsured, for example—and have a big wad of cash attached to them.
The Obama administration’s mammoth $787 billion stimulus package is a good example of this tactic of bribing the states to surrender their rights. As governor of Alaska, I angered a lot of state bureaucrats and their allies in Juneau when I turned down a chunk of the federal money slated for Alaska in Obama’s stimulus bill. I accepted the money that would go to create real private-sector jobs through construction projects and provide needed medical care to the disadvantaged, but I said “no, thank you” to dollars that had fat federal strings attached to them. The Alaska legislature warned me they would join with other states led by conservative governors and find a way through litigation to go around the governor’s office to accept the federal funds. But I stuck to my guns because the cost to our Tenth Amendment freedom was just too high. Not just in Alaska but in every state of the union, the debt-ridden, unsustainable stimulus scheme disrespected the Tenth Amendment by attempting to bribe the states with money in exchange for more Washington control. The money would have gone to fund government, not real jobs in the private sector. Embarrassingly, the Republican-controlled state legislature overrode my veto and Alaska accepted the funds. And now, to pay for them, Alaskans will have to put up with even more rule making from Washington.
I wasn’t alone in my concern that the American people and the states were being had with the stimulus bill. I remember logging on to the Internet one day after those “Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signs began appearing all over the place. I guess the point of those signs was to make us grateful for the federal dollars Washington has decided to “give” us, as if we didn’t understand that every dollar spent by Washington is a dollar that comes from us, the taxpayers, in the first place. Anyway, I logged on to a favorite website and found an interesting and hilarious “Photo of the Day.” Someone in Henry County, Georgia, had decided to have a little fun (and make an important point) with one of those signs by plastering a copy of the Tenth Amendment on it. Big, red block letters underneath the text of the amendment read, “POWER IS GIVEN, NOT TAKEN.”
The notion of states defending their power and independence under the Tenth Amendment has taken a beating in recent years. Advocates of bigger government have labored long and hard to equate any notion of “states’ rights” with the racists who evoked this cause to defend segregation during the civil rights struggle. Ending discrimination against African Americans by some American states was one instance in which the federal government rightly stepped in and forced change. But since then, advocates of increased federal authority have abused this noble cause to advance a big-government agenda. Unfunded mandates in the form of environmental regulations and the Obamacare individual health insurance mandate have rained down on the states. And rules on everything from the gas we emit to the doctors we can choose have poured out of the nation’s capital. In the process, America has come to be less a federal republic than a fifty-state colony of Washington, D.C.
We’ve lost the commonsense notion that helped make us great: that, in simple terms, we are all grown-ups and deserve to be treated as such. Hard as it is to believe, this used to be a pretty popular sentiment in America. In an old issue of the magazine The Freeman, I found the text of a resolution adopted by the Indiana state legislature in 1947, after the scope of the federal government had grown exponentially during World War II and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The words of this short resolution show a spark of independence and self-sufficiency that desperately needs rekindling today:
Indiana needs no guardian and intends to have none. We Hoosiers—like the people of our sister states—were fooled for quite a spell with the magician’s trick that a dollar taxed out of our pockets and sent to Washington will be bigger when it comes back to us. We have taken a good look at said dollar. We find that it lost weight in its journey to Washington and back. The political brokerage of the bureaucrats has been deducted. We have decided that here is no such thing as “federal” aid. We know that there is no wealth to tax that is not already within the boundaries of the forty-eight states.
So we propose henceforth to tax ourselves and take care of ourselves. We are fed up with subsidies, doles, and paternalism. We are no one’s stepchild. We have grown up. We serve notice that we will resist Washington, DC adopting us.
Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, the Senate concurring: That we respectfully petition and urge Indiana’s congressmen and senators to vote to fetch our county courthouse and city halls back from Pennsylvania Avenue. We want government to come home. Resolved further, that we call upon the legislatures of our sister states and on good citizens everywhere who believe in the basic principles of Lincoln and Jefferson to join with us, and we with them to restore the American Republic and our forty-eight states to the foundations built by our fathers.
In a speech in Indiana as president in 1982, Ronald Reagan noted that, by 1951, Congress still hadn’t acted on this resolution, so the Indiana state legislature passed another one. This one said: “We Hoosiers believe that the historic constitutional rights and responsibilities of the States must be recovered; that the tax sources of which we have been deprived must be restored; and that the Federal Government must restrict its activities to matters of the broadest national interest.” To which Reagan quipped, “Well, it’s taken over thirty years, but, I’m happy to report, your message has finally gotten through. To tell you the truth, I believed you the first time you said it.”
Only Ronald Reagan could make a joke of what so many try to portray as dangerous radicalism. But the sentiments expressed by the Indiana legislators aren’t radicalism, they’re common sense, or at least what used to be recognized as common sense: “We know that there is no wealth to tax that is not already within the boundaries of the forty-eight states.” Substitute “fifty states” for “forty-eight” and you have a rallying cry for today.
We are no one’s stepchild. We have grown up. We serve notice that we will resist Washington, D.C., adopting us.
Another aspect of American exceptionalism we are in danger of losing today is our belief in free markets and good old-fashioned American hard work and ingenuity. Particularly in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, we hear a lot about how America needs to become more like Europe, with free health care, a month of paid vacation every year, cradle-to-grave government benefits—and the permanent double-digit unemployment and bankrupt national treasuries that go along with it. Unbelievably, at a time when countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain are going broke, the current administration wants us to become more like them, not less.
This is another example of the gaping disconnect between the utopian schemes of the self-proclaimed elite and the wisdom of the American people. America is and always has been a nation of strivers—people who want not just to get by but to get ahead. Our prosperity has always depended on the fact that we’ve had the economic freedom to pursue our dreams. It’s one of the reasons why the sort of attempts at class warfare that work so well in Europe—pitting the less financially well off against the better off—don’t usually work in America. We all want to be better off. We want a better life for our children and grandchildren and we know that working hard and taking advantage of opportunities when they present themselves are the way to do it.
Wisconsin congressional representative Paul Ryan said it best: “Americans don’t want a government that says, ‘This is your lot in life. Accept it and we’ll help you cope with it.’ Americans want a government that allows them to seek a better lot in life.” We can and should provide a safety net for those who stumble and fall. But we want the freedom to succeed, not the excuse never to have to try. We believe passionately that Abraham Lincoln was right when he said, “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself
, and next year will hire others to labor for him.” That’s the American dream.
This is a dream that has lifted more people out of poverty, made more millionaires, and produced more innovation than any other in history. It’s a dream that doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or gender. It is open to all who want to work hard and take a chance.
Our history is full of examples of how hard work, entrepreneurialism, and economic freedom came together to produce miracles. One of the most inspiring to me personally is that of Chris Gardner, whose story was told in the remarkable film The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith.
I defy you to watch this movie without first crying and then shouting for joy. It is the story of a man who had a dream to fulfill and a responsibility to uphold in the form of his young son. Destitute and on the brink of homelessness, Gardner accepts sole custody of his son, even though the flophouse he is living in won’t accept kids. The movie tells the story of Gardner’s relentless fight to succeed—to pursue “happiness”—while fighting just as hard to take care of his son. The two were secretly homeless while Gardner went to work in a low-paying stock broker training program. He struggled to find a place for them to sleep each night, even resorting to finding shelter in a locked bathroom in the San Francisco train station. Meanwhile, he went to work every day to build a better life for both of them. He never gave up on his dream and he never left his son. Today, he is a successful businessman, motivational speaker, and philanthropist.