there is one thing that defines Americans—one thing that makes us exceptional—it is our belief in Cassius’s idea that we are in control of our own fates. Our country was founded at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution by religious rebels who had seen that the free flow of ideas had helped to spread not just their religious beliefs, but also those of science and commerce. Most of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation—our ingenuity and our industriousness, our arrogance and our impatience—stem from
