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Posted on 07/04/2008 8:40:06 PM PDT by Salem

Independence Day 2008 finds the United States too dependent on foreign oil and in a surly mood about the president, Congress, food prices, home values and much else. Americans need to reassert a national character trait to put the country back on a more productive path.

That trait is American exceptionalism, the product of mixing individualism, freedom and national vision. This virtue, first identified by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 treatise "Democracy in America," has led to unrivaled private and public accomplishment: from the westward expansion that built a continental nation to NASA's mission to colonize the moon; from private railroads that linked both coasts in the 1800s to the software firms that have linked all of our computers today.

Yet many Americans now disdain this exceptional heritage. They say it has produced a nation that uses up too much of the world's resources, imposes its culture on other nations, and expresses exceptionalism too often with the U.S. military.

Newsweek international editor Fareed Zakaria, touting his new book, "The Post-American World," went so far as to declare in a May interview that "the era of American exceptionalism is over."

But such arguments gloss over the fact that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, is responsible for 25 percent of world economic output; that American culture is not forced on others, but eagerly sought out; and that America's military power exists to protect a precious commodity: freedom.

And to Zakaria's contention, American exceptionalism will exist as long Americans preserve and employ its essential elements. Those elements, distilled from Tocqueville, are a responsive government, and the ability of free individuals, equal in the eyes of the law, to profit in a free market.

These ingredients of American character are in low supply today, and much of the blame can be laid at the government's doorstep. Approval ratings for the president and Congress are at all-time lows -- a sign that government has become unresponsive. Equality is called into question when a mortgage company's VIP program called "Friends of Angelo" includes members of Congress. And elected officials regularly lambaste the decisions made by free individuals operating in free markets, from the cars Americans choose to drive to the profits made by the companies that fuel them.

Free individuals and free markets will answer the challenges that now confront the nation, many of them driven by the price of oil. Individual ingenuity will develop the inventions that move the nation to new fuels. Free markets and the possibility of profit are historically the strongest motivators in encouraging such innovation. Government might provide financial help for the most promising fields of research, but it can help most by staying out of the way.

Freedom and free markets do not promise equal results for all. They merely afford an equal opportunity to succeed. The inequality of wealth that sometimes results is difficult for some to accept.

But freedom is what defines the American difference. And rekindling a respect for freedom -- not just personal liberty, but the economic structures necessary for liberty to thrive -- will keep America an exceptional place.

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