Uniquely Disgraceful, Or A Good Place To Live?

The responses to my RealClearPolitics essay on American goodness and greatness (“East of Eden, but Better than Russia”), from Dr. Bonilla and Dr. Seagrave, contain much of value but fail to debunk my argument. Both replies are elaborations upon what I freely concede to be the major American weakness: our history of racial conflict and oppression. While both are skillfully written, they break down, like most such arguments, to this claim: “The USA did evil things which many other countries did, sometimes to a slightly greater extent. This is uniquely disgraceful, given our claims of moral superiority.” But this is not an effective argument against American goodness.

Most readers would agree that it is better to be an occasional hypocrite than openly evil, and those were basically the two options that nation-states faced historically. The United States, and some other Western countries such as France, engaged in ancient evils like slavery while simultaneously giving birth to influential movements opposing these vices, and indeed while attempting to eradicate them globally. Most other great human societies, from the Ottoman Empire to the magnificent Aztecs to the serf-breaking Russians to the ancient Spartans, engaged in these practices, too, while debating them rarely, if at all. Logically, it makes no sense to describe the second approach as morally superior to the first.

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