Public option would mean the end of American exceptionalism

If Congress were to pass, and President Obama ultimately to sign, a health care reform (excuse me, health insurance reform) bill, it would mean the end to American exceptionalism. American would then only refer to the continent we live on. We would have become only another socialist democracy. Of course, this is the unstated goal of the proponents of health care reform.

This health care fight is not about the monetary costs. Even if we had the money, the costs to individual freedom would still be too high.

This fight is not about snitch lists, "un-American" protests, attacking the American people as racist and unpatriotic, Obama's doublespeak, dissimulations and equivocations. Even though that's a fun fight to engage in because the targets are so irresistible.

This fight is about the fact that personal decisions about health care are not appropriate subjects for the body politic.

The term "American exceptionalism" was coined by Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 book Democracy in America:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.

Over the next century and a half, the term American exceptionalism has taken on a broader meaning. Wikipedia explains:

The basis most commonly cited for American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States and its people differ from other nations, at least on a historical basis, as an association of people who came from numerous places throughout the world but who hold a common bond in standing for certain self-evident truths, like freedom, inalienable natural and human rights, democracy, republicanism, the rule of law, civil liberty, civic virtue, the common good, fair play, private property, and Constitutional government. The term is also used by United States citizens to indicate that America and Americans have different states of mind, different surroundings, and different political cultures than other nations, and still others use it to refer to the American dream and the slow yet continuous journey of the people of the United States, sharing a nation and a destiny, to build a more perfect union, to live up to the dreams, hopes, and ideals of its founders . . . .

This brand of American exceptionalism was recognized by Lincoln in the Gettysburg address:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Left has always been hostile to the idea of American exceptionalism, equating it with jingoism, thus explaining their earnest efforts to destroy it. In April, President Obama was, depending on your point of view, either oddly (for an American President), or characteristically (for a Leftist) dismissive of the notion:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. . . . There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

But American exceptionalism has also been used to describe the strange absence of organized socialism in America. In American Exceptionalism: A Double Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset writes:

The United States has stood out among the industrial nations of the world in frustrating all efforts to create a mass socialist or labor party. This fact has occasioned a considerable literature seeking to explain this aspect of American exceptionalism . . . . Karl Marx and Frederich Engels grappled with the "exceptional" aspects of American society. In so doing, the presented a picture of America as a unique society, not very different from the analyses of Tocqueville . . . .

The weakness of socialism in the United States has been a major embarrassment throughout the twentieth century to Marxist theory . . . .

. . . . much of the efforts by Marxists and socialists to account for the failure of the prediction [that America would be an early socialist country] stressed that from sociological and political points of view, the United States was too progressive, too egalitarian, too open, and too democratic to generate massive radical or revolutionary movements on a scale comparable to Europe.

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In analyzing the prospects for socialism in America, Marx and Engels did not limit themselves to economic factors. . . . America was a new nation and society, which lacked many of the institutions and traditions of previously feudal systems and as a result was the most "modern" and purely bourgeois culture. It was also the most democratic country.

The absence of a feudal past and consequent lack of rigid status in the United States in contrast to most of Europe was seen by the Marxist fathers, particularly Frederich Engels, as a source of the political backwardness of the American working class. Thus he wrote in 1890 that "Americans are born conservatives just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past, and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization."

For the better part of the last century, "health care," (long before it was "health care reform" or most recently, "health insurance reform") has always been the "holy grail" for those desiring to introduce socialism into the U.S. by incremental measures.

In a 1961 speech (the year Obama was born), Ronald Regan, warned:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people, has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it.

The dangers of health care reform to American exceptionalism are also obvious to some non Americans: Daniel Hannan, a British Member of the European Parliament stated recently:

You might find it slightly odd that I come here as a British politician and [extol] the virtues of the original colonial patriot leaders . . . and the people who wrote your constitution. Let me explain why I do so.

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What scares me, is that I come here, to the place where British freedoms in the traditional sense I thought were still flourishing and I see the same tendencies. . . . I see this massive encroachment of the state into not only what should be the jurisdictions of the 50 states but what should be the sphere of the private citizen. In this of all countries! If you hear a clanking sound, that is the noise of the shades of your founding fathers rattling as they look on what's been done in their name to the country they founded. A country based around the maximum dispersal of power, now seeing in the name of contingency, in the name of emergency, this huge power grab by the government, by the state machine. Nationalization, stimulus packages, bailouts, this huge squeezing of the private sector to engorge the state sector, this expansion of the state payroll . . . in this of all countries! It's extraordinary that I should have to come here as a British politician and observe this phenomenon. All of us in the world benefited because the United States has been a strong, prosperous, free country. And that carries with it some burdens and some responsibilities. And one of them is that we all have an interest in your continued success. So if you want to go down this road to British style socialism, it's our problem as well as yours, my friends. Which is why I feel that I have some place in coming here to give a British response to the tea parties.

And let me say this. The expansions of state power that we have seen under the last two presidents, to be honest, I don't want to be partisan about this, are as nothing compared to what is now being proposed in the field of health care.

Ronald Reagan also stated in his 1961 speech that the pretext of providing health care to those who might not be able to afford it was a "foot in the door," "an excuse to bring about . . . socialized medicine."

Reagan continued:

James Madison said 1788 that "Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

In this country of ours took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in world's history, the only true revolution, every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. But here for the first time in all the thousands of years of man's relation to man, a little group of men, the founding fathers, for the first time, established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the god given right and ability to determine our own destiny.

Should the public option pass, everything that makes America exceptional, will cease to exist. Maybe not overnight, but it will be the beginning of an irreversible march into socialism, that we have so far, been able to (more or less) resist.

This is the ultimate design of Obama and the Left, and don't let anyone tell you any different. The stakes could not be higher if we had armed Soviets at our doors.

To paraphrase Patrick Henry, I'd rather die from disease because I am uninsured, rather than submit to government run health care. Really.