Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

From the very beginning, there was also a conviction that this new nation would be different from others. Thomas Jefferson believed that democracy in America would succeed, even when it had failed in France, because the unique history and experiences of Americans had prepared them for it. He thought Americans, “impressed from their cradle” with the belief in democratic self-government, were special precisely because they were isolated from Europe and its cycles of history—“separated from the parent stock & kept from contamination.” Others, from de Tocqueville to Reagan, reinterpreted this “exceptionalism” to mean different things. But what really made American patriotism unique, both then and later, was the fact it was never explicitly connected to a single ethnic identity with a single origin in a single space. Reagan’s 1989 “shining city on a hill” speech, remembered as the peak moment of “American greatness” and “American exceptionalist” rhetoric, clearly evoked America’s founding documents and not American geography or an American race. Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution: “As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.”