The United States is an exceptional nation. Most Americans would not regard that as a controversial statement. And there is a good reason for that: it is true. The U.S. is the world’s oldest and most stable capitalist liberal democracy, older even than Great Britain, which did not become a mass democracy until the late nineteenth century.

It was the first nation founded in an act of rebellion against a colonial power. It was the first nation founded on the belief that the rights of man are inherent and God-given, and that the powers of the government derive from the consent of the people. It was, therefore, the first nation to recognize that the state must be limited to the powers granted by the people, and to recognize explicitly that the state was founded to secure their rights. It was the first nation to be based on a separation of powers, and on the clear subordination of the military to civilian rule. And it was the first nation to state all of this in a constitution that was publicly debated and democratically accepted.

Other nations – Britain, most notably – share in some of these traditions, and that is not surprisingly, because the United States was deeply influenced by ideas born in England in the 17th century. But precisely because the U.S. was founded – whereas Britain evolved – the U.S. exemplifies these virtues in their purest form. That is why it is exceptional. And that is a fact that has been recognized by Europeans for centuries.

Many of the great works of American interpretation – from Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, to Tocqueville’s great Democracy in America, to Lord James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, were written by foreigners who accepted that America was exceptional, and wanted to understand why. And hundreds of other eminent Europeans – from Charles Dickens to Charles Dilke – visited the U.S. for the same purpose: to understand a place that was like nothing else in the world.

By and large, the conservatives disliked the U.S., and the liberals liked it. There was a good reason for that: the U.S. was founded on liberal values, and in its acceptance of modernity, its everyday equality of manners, the freedom of movement within it, its mix of immigrants, and the protections and praise it gave to property-holding by all classes, it was, in the terms of the nineteenth century, a profoundly liberal country. Of course, as European observers realized, it was also deeply conservative in its attachment to the order established in 1776 and 1787. But that core of conservatism, the more perceptive among them concluded, was precisely what made it possible for it to sustain its liberalism, what prevented it from breaking down as the traditionalist European conservatives hoped it would.

American scholars agreed with the liberal Europeans. Much of American scholarship was devoted, in one way or another, to explaining why the United States was exceptional. The effort reached a peak with Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier, but it continued well into the 20th century. After World War II, indeed, it led to the creation of American Studies, an entirely new academic discipline founded on the argument that, now that the U.S. was a world power, we needed to understand ourselves, and explain our unusual ways to others, with greater clarity.

Those ways were, indeed, unusual. Most Americans believe the U.S. is exceptional, but we often forget just how unusual a country this is. The U.S. has a remarkable free speech tradition, which given tremendous protections to the press and to those accused of libel. It separates church and state in a way that is still rare, even in Europe. It gives rights to those accused of crimes that are unparalleled in history, or elsewhere in the world. It has a more open government than any other nation, one that gives citizens unprecedented access to its doings.

And, while like all nations it controls its borders, it has welcomed more immigrants from more places than any other nation in the world. Indeed, the popularity of the U.S. as a destination for immigrants is the ultimate proof that it is, indeed, exceptional. Emigration is the greatest and most democratic election in the world, because it is based on the individual decisions of millions. The U.S. has been winning that great election since it was founded.

In some ways, such as its very liberal abortion laws, the U.S. is exceptional in ways that conservatives dislike. But by and large, conservatives today celebrate American exceptionalism. That is curious, in a way, because so much of what makes the U.S. exceptional is liberal in origin. But that simply goes to make Tocqueville’s point: the U.S. has a liberal tradition and a conservative attachment to it.

Now, wipe all that from your mind. Forget the history, forget Tocqueville, forget generations of scholarship, forget the existence of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, forget the heroes like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy who testified to it, forget the fact that we are all the children of immigrants, and forget the evidence of your own eyes. In the American academy today, and in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, the claim that the U.S. is exceptional is viewed with skepticism, or with scorn.

This is a difficult fact for most Americans to accept, or to believe, but for these elites, the word ‘exceptionalism’ is criticism, not praise. In the academy, where I spent more than twenty years, ‘American exceptionalism’ is treated, at best, as a myth born of self-righteous national chauvinism. At worst, it is a badly-disguised code word for knuckle-dragging reactionaries and closet fascists. Nothing pinpoints you as a conservative in the American academy faster than referring to American exceptionalism without a sneer, and nothing ingratiates you faster than dismissing anyone who believes in it as a dangerous right-winger and an historical ignoramus.

President Obama was educated in this academy – BA from Columbia University, JD from Harvard Law – so it is no surprise that he shares its dismissive attitude towards ‘American exceptionalism.’ When asked by a reporter in France if he believed in it, his response was characteristic: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

It is one thing – and it is quite right – for an American president to recognize that other nations have their own patriotisms. Americans are not shocked by this: in fact, they are only shocked when citizens of other countries are not proud of their homelands. But it is quite another thing for an American president to make American exceptionalism into a statement of personal opinion, into something that is as valid, or invalid, as any other opinion.

All nations may be special to their citizens, but the United States, historically, is unique. If the President of the United States cannot bring himself to make this claim, which is both true and a basic part of fulfilling his duty as the leader of the nation, then he has aligned himself with the claim’s opponents, albeit it with the gentler ones. That is something that no previous president, from either party, has done.

And that pattern has carried through in the President’s nominations. The foremost example is Harold Koh, the former Dean of the Yale Law School , nominated as Legal Adviser to the State Department. Koh recognizes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation. For him, this is a serious problem, one the American judiciary needs to redress. For example, in a 2003 article “On American Exceptionalism,” published in the Stanford Law Review, Koh acknowledges that the U.S. affords far greater protection than most countries to speech and the press. For Koh, this is cause for a measure of concern:

On examination, I do not find this distinctiveness too deeply unsettling to world order. The judicial doctrine of “margin of appreciation,” familiar in European Union law, permits sufficient national variance as to promote tolerance of some measure of this kind of rights distinctiveness.

So, the U.S.’s differences from the rest of the world are not “too deeply unsettling” and, thanks to EU law, can be tolerated to “some measure.” But how far, exactly, should they be tolerated? In a footnote, Koh gives his answer: the courts should reinterpret the U.S.’s free speech tradition so it does not cause problems abroad:

in a globalizing world, our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet. In my view, however, our Supreme Court can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation.

And that is not an isolated example. For Koh, all American exceptionalism is bad: the only relevant question is which part of the tradition is the worst. Koh concludes that:

I prefer to distinguish among four somewhat different faces of American exceptionalism, which I call, in order of ascending opprobrium: distinctive rights, different labels, the ‘flying buttress’ mentality, and double standards. In my view, the fourth face – double standards – presents the most dangerous and destructive form of American exceptionalism.

The least dangerous are America’s distinctive rights, such as free speech: these can be tolerated to some extent, though they should be reinterpreted if they pose problems. The ‘different labels’ problem is Koh’s attack on the American refusal – as he sees it – to use internationally-recognized terms to describe practices that the U.S. rejects. According to Koh, this is a perverse relic of history, “a quirky, nonintegrationist feature of our cultural distinctiveness (akin to our continuing use of feet and inches, rather than the metric system).”

More accurately, it is a result of the fact that the U.S. is a federal nation, and the various states have the power and the right to report statistics using terms of their own choice. Similarly, the national government is ultimately responsible to the American people, not the preferences of international organization – though Koh would not accept that point. What matters is that the government is following its own laws, which prescribe certain terms.

The other facet of the ‘labels’ problem, as Koh sees it, are America’s “exclusionary treaty practices – e.g., nonratification, ratification with reservations, and the non-self-executing treaty doctrine.” In other words, if the U.S. decides not to ratify a treaty or to ratify it partially, or if it argues that treaties must be backed up by Congressional passage of supporting legislation, this too is exceptionalist, and a problem. It is not as serious a problem as the ones higher on his list, but, yes: the simple fact that the Senate has exercised its constitutional right not to ratify a treaty is, according to Koh, a worrying piece of American exceptionalism.

The third aspect of American exceptionalism – and this is where Koh’s anger begins to mount – is its “flying buttress mentality.” In other words, the U.S. claims to be a pillar of human rights, but it is really a flying buttress: it is “willing to stand outside the structure supporting it, but unwilling to subject itself to the critical examination and rules of that structure.” Koh refers here explicitly to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a thoroughly destructive but widely-ratified treaty, though he could easily adduce others, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, that fall into the same pattern.

Koh is making the claim not that the U.S. is a serial abuser of children, but that failing to ratify treaties that other nations have signed, regardless of how good or bad the treaty is, or how serious or frivolous the signatures of the others are, is an example of a “promiscuous failure.” Indeed, in a May 8, 2001 op-ed in the Washington Post, Koh attacked the U.S. for failing to ratify treaties that “far less law-abiding countries” have signed.

This is a startlingly naïve claim. It does not appear to have occurred to Koh that the fact that many “far less-law abiding” countries have signed a treaty might be a valid reason for the U.S. to refuse to sign on: if the other signatories are not law-abiding, the treaty is worthless, because the signatories will not obey it. More broadly, Koh ignores the fact that the reason why the U.S. has refused to ratify many treaties is because he, and his supporters, have driven the train of international treaty-making so fast that the wheels have come off: treaties have become unenforceable expressions of aspirations, not serious national commitments. In those circumstances, the U.S. is being responsible, not irresponsible, by refusing to ratify.

Finally, there is Koh’s fourth area, “double standards,” when “the United States actually uses its exceptional power and wealth to promote a double standard.” By “double standard,” Koh does not mean what most people do by that term: that the U.S. does one thing but encourages or forces other to do another. He criticizes the U.S. for declining to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, but this is not a double standard: it is simply an example of the U.S. not ratifying a treaty of which Koh approves. Other nations remain entirely free to ratify, or not to do so.

For Koh, in short, “double standard” means that the U.S. is doing something different, and something he dislikes, from other nations. But that is inherent in the right of self-government, which is the fundamental part of the American exceptionalist tradition. Even for those who want the U.S. to ratify all the treaties to which it is not currently party, it should be infinitely more important for the U.S. to retain the right of self-government, which includes the right to accept or reject treaties. Those treaties, important though they are – and as bad as conservatives correctly believe them to be – are ultimately unimportant compared to the right of self-government that Koh is denigrating with his attack on the hypocrisy of the U.S. for exercising it.

The problem that liberal elites today have with American exceptionalism is simple to sum up. Before the mid-1960s, most liberals believed in it. But then 1968 happened, and the New Left took over the academy and the intellectual leadership of the Democratic Party. The New Left was not rebelling against American conservatism, which in the mid-1960s was still nascent. It was rebelling against American liberalism, and – among much else – against its belief in the basic goodness and exceptionalness of America. American conservatism is, really, a rebellion against that rebellion, fortified by the neo-conservatives who split away from American liberalism when they realized it was being taken over by the radicals.

The more moderate Democratic leaders – Bill Clinton, preeminently – have resisted the New Left, but the tendencies of the party’s activists and elite are fundamentally opposed to American exceptionalism. It is in their hearts, and they can do no other. For the post-war liberals, the U.S. was liberal and modern. For the New Left, it is Europe that holds that crown: to believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that the U.S. should not be Europeanized.

And it is from those activists and from that elite that Barack Obama springs. His dismissive treatment of American exceptionalism places him more quickly and accurately than anything else he has said. Bill Clinton was heralded as the first Baby Boomer President, but if the Baby Boomers were the Generation of 1968, that title more accurately belongs to Obama. The realities of governing, as he is painfully discovering, will pull Obama one way, but his instincts – as reflected in his nominations, and his public remarks – will pull him the other, in a direction that Truman and Kennedy would have scorned.

This will be – indeed, it is being – hailed as the triumph of liberalism. But in reality it is an attack on it, and on the tradition of American exceptionalism that embodies it. It is equally an assault on the conservative belief that the United States must uphold the source of that exceptionalism, the legacies of 1776 and 1787. For the first time in its history, the United States has a president who has broken with the bipartisan tradition of his predecessors by refusing to state, proudly, that the nation he leads is exceptional. He has nothing to gain from refusing to state this, so he must believe it. And that is a somber reflection for Memorial Day.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.