To the editor:
I enjoyed your observations on American Exceptionalism. My wife is from France so I am familiar with many French families. I have always had mixed feelings about American Exceptionalism. While I know we generally believe in it, I have never been able to decide if we actually were exceptional. Many of the French that I know lead rather productive happy lives. Perhaps we have been blessed with a country that had so much natural richness it was just easier for us to possess wealth and be exceptional than it was and is for the more densely populated developed world.
What your article reminded me of is a concept I used to opine on quite often (nobody listens now or I would still be opining on it) which I called the “Collapse of Scope.” America once elected leaders who had a big vision for what America could or should be. They invented names for their visions: The New Deal, The New Frontier, The War on Poverty, etc. These great visions translated into dozens of programs all moving in generally the same directions. They were new and innovative. They tried approaches that had never been tried. Some were failures but others were successful. Some we stopped doing after the crisis was over and some we continue yet today. The Scope was broad and sometimes seemed unachievable (land on the moon) but they took the nation in a direction, moving forward, on to new achievements.
Now, we no longer elect such persons of vision and our political parties do not encourage their development. Our focus now is one derived from the past generation of management consultants. Our focus now is not on the great visions but primarily on “how do we do what we are currently doing more efficiently?” This focus on trying to do more with less translates into tax cuts and general distrust of government and government bureaucrats especially when they can’t produce more with less. They are cast as quasi-necessary evils. But attitudes about government are really not the point. The point is our focus is no longer on WHAT should be done but is more on HOW we do it. So we end up focused on continuing to do what we are doing but just trying to be more efficient about it. We seldom question why we are doing these things. It is just important that we do them more efficiently. Our scope has collapsed from the big visions about what we could achieve as a people to what we are currently achieving as a people and how we can do that better.
There is still innovation, but they are innovations in efficiency. Technology has been an important tool in this. But there is danger there. Technological systems, contrary to popular belief, are conservative. Once you put them in place (at least on the scale of government) they are big, complex and difficult to replace. It is far easier to maintain them and improve their efficiency rather than to replace them with better systems or to question the need for them at all.
Our military is another good case in point. We are still operating on organizational structures developed during World War II. There is the idea of a national enemy with well-defined characteristics. We did not predict or plan for an amorphous enemy that transcends national borders. We still seem to be stumbling and fumbling around with international terrorism with only a poor understanding of it and an even worse plan for dealing with it. Our most recent innovation in efficiency: the drone. We are still doing the same thing—seeking out pockets of terrorists and killing them—just more efficiently. Vietnam should have been an eye-opener but we learned no lessons there and effectively dislodged it from the national memory.
So I think we will continue becoming less and less exceptional because our national scope has collapsed. We no longer strive to be exceptional and have lost our big visions. We now focus on more efficient ways to contemplate our navel.
— Sam Griswold, Columbia, S.C.
Europeans have long-term thinking
To the editor:
Just left London. Good schools, no litter, no potholes, extremely low homicide rate and no Gov. Haley telling us we can’t afford to be the best.
People in Paris are enjoying life. Positive atmosphere, unlike Washington or Columbia. Long-term thinking prevalent.
— Tim Moore, Barnwell, S.C.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!