"Only in America !"

So very American !


by Andrew Taylor


I find it quintessentially American that US theorists continually try to re-invent America de novo and ex nihilo. Since Cotton Mather America's theorists are always busy proclaiming and re-packaging their 'beacon set upon a hill' - a place utterly unlike old Europe and the weight of its sinister history. American Protestant Restorationism was one of the powerful US theories, one where the pristine primitive church was to be 'born again'...(where else?) in America. And many political theorists from the USA have propounded "american exceptionalism" in various nuances and from all shades of the political spectrum... Sam Webb of the CPUSA recently wrote that the 'new socialsm'(never described and never explained)was "not tied to a universal “model” imported from the 20th century"... Every thing corruptible is unacceptable in the ever-new preminent nation?... And how bizarre it strikes one that just 9 years out of the 20th century the American centre-Left is already speaking as though incalculable light years of history separated America from that dark lost world! So once again "The Great Instauration" raises its head in US political culture - always fascinating to non-Americans, always astonishing!