More on this essay on American exceptionalism in due course, but first Conor Friedersdorf:
In a post on President Obama and American exceptionalism, Victor Davis Hanson explains why he thinks our nation is different from all the others: Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants. Odd that a historian should forget about American slavery!
Quite.
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