KidEpicurus🌻

Happy Fourth of July to you too — but I don’t think you’re being fair here. Reducing America’s “outputs” to processed food, social media, and war is not a serious balance sheet. It’s like looking at the history of fire and saying, “Mostly arson, by that jerk Gary.” Sure, we all know Gary is an arsonist, but we’re talking about the history of fire here. “Processed food” is doing a lot of work here. Are we talking about ultra-processed junk food? Would not recommend living off of it, but I do love Twinkies. But shelf-stable food? Refrigeration? Fortification? Food logistics? Mass agricultural productivity? That stuff was a godsend. Fresh food is better than boxed food. You know what’s worse than boxed food? Starving. Historically very common. Terrible reviews. And America didn’t just export Doritos. It helped revolutionize food production, storage, transportation, and abundance. The country blamed for processed food also helped create the conditions under which ordinary people could eat better than aristocrats did for most of human history. Also, I assume you’re leading the organic/local/farm-to-table movement now? Because that too is largely a luxury of abundance. On social media: yes, it has downsides. I co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind. I am not exactly Captain TikTok. The same technological ecosystem gave us the Internet, search, email, online education, citizen journalism, dissident networks, and instant access to more knowledge than any emperor, pope, or king in history ever had. Does that come with real harms? Of course. So did the printing press. It gave us science, mass literacy, religious war, propaganda, and eventually liberal democracy. No major technology arrives with only benefits. Progress is not a spa day. And “violence and wars”? Come on. The American record is mixed because history is mixed. Some American wars were tragic mistakes. But pretending America’s military history can be summarized as “wars and bad feelings” is dorm-room geopolitics. The Revolutionary War produced the first large-scale democratic republic. The Civil War ended slavery in one of the largest slave societies on earth, at horrifying cost. The U.S. helped prevent Imperial Germany from dominating Europe in World War I. In World War II, the Soviet Union bore the main ground burden against Hitler, absolutely — but without American industry, Lend-Lease, air power, naval power, and the western front, Europe’s “liberation” could easily have meant swapping one totalitarian nightmare for another. Stalin was not exactly waiting at the Elbe with a basket of civil liberties. And in the Pacific, the United States was the central force that destroyed the Japanese Empire, which was al trulybrutal empire that was replaced with an amazing and dynamic free Japan. Later, the U.S. helped free Kuwait and intervened in Kosovo to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Were all these decisions pure? No. Was every intervention wise? Obviously not. But war is hardly something America invented, and some of them really were worth fighting. The actual story is harder and more interesting: America is powerful, inventive, chaotic, self-critical, and open. That openness produces junk food and Nobel Prizes, Twitter mobs and dissident speech, Hollywood nonsense and world-changing art, terrible wars and the defeat of even worse regimes. So yes, criticize America. Please. It’s practically an American duty. But if your critique can’t distinguish Lunchables from famine prevention, Instagram from the Internet, and Iraq from stopping fascist empires, then the problem isn’t American exceptionalism. The problem is an audit that only counts the liabilities.

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing. I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at: • The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty. • A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere. • The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. • Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.) • Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight. • The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there. • The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius. • The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world. • Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life. • Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives. • Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe. • Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American. That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it. What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸