Who Killed Horatio Alger?

From Luigi Zingales, at City Journal:

The title character of Horatio Alger’s 1867 novel Ragged Dick is an illiterate New York bootblack who, bolstered by his optimism, honesty, industriousness, and desire to “grow up ’spectable,” raises himself into the middle class. Alger’s novels are frequently misunderstood as mere rags-to-riches tales. In fact, they recount their protagonists’ journeys from rags to respectability, celebrating American capitalism and suggesting that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. The novels were idealized, of course; even in America, virtue alone never guaranteed success, and American capitalism during Alger’s time was far from perfect. Nevertheless, the stories were close enough to the truth that they became bestsellers, while America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism. According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. If the drifting continues, the result could be a breakdown of popular support for free markets and the demise of America’s unique version of capitalism.

Continue reading.

RELATED: I dealt with some similar issues here: "Decline of American Exceptionalism?"

Decline of American Exceptionalism?

Charles Blow, at the New York Times, draws the wrong conclusion from the recent report at Pew Research indicating that less than a majority of Americans (49 percent) agreed with the statement that "our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others." See, "Decline of American Exceptionalism":

Even if you put aside the somewhat loaded terminology of cultural superiority, Americans simply don’t seem to feel very positive about America at the moment....

We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism. We must answer the big questions. Was our nation’s greatness about having God or having grit? Is exceptionalism an anointing or an ethos? If the answers are grit and ethos, then we must work to recapture them. We must work our way out of these doldrums. We must learn our way out. We must innovate our way out.

We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you.

And that means that we must invest in our future. We must invest in our crumbling infrastructure. We must invest in the industries of the future. We must invest in a generation of foundering and forgotten children. We must invest in education. Cut-and-grow is ruinous mythology.

We must look out at the world with clear eyes and sober minds and do the difficult work as we’ve done time and time again. That’s how a city shines upon a hill.

Blow's understanding of exceptionalism is not based in history, values, nor institutions. His view is in the things we do (like work hard to expand government and "invest" in the future) not what we stand for. He's a classic progressive that sees higher taxes and spending (for "infrastructure") as the means to buffing up that "City on the Hill" image. But Blow's meaning misconstrue's John Winthrop's famous sermon, where he evoked the Christian metaphor that the United States was a light unto the world. But not only that. Looking back over at that Pew study we see this data at the table embedded below. Part of our exceptionalism is the belief in individualism, that the individual is basis of the good society and that the political order is established to preserve individual liberties. Progressives continually downplay individualism in American exceptionalism because it conflicts with their big-government nanny-statism. Charles Blow wants to continue building the big nanny state. When he says we must "invest" in all those things he's really saying that we must spend more on the traditional progressive programs that are bankrupting the nation. But the way to invest again is the restore economic liberty and unleash individual potential and entrepreneurialism. To do otherwise will do nothing but turn us into a dependency society like all of the truly crumbling European states highlighted by the Pew data:

Via Astute Bloggers, "PEW POLL REVEALS CORE PROBLEM AFFLICTING THE WEST: MOST EUROPEANS NOW FAVOR A NANNY STATE."

'Exceptionalism' Argument May Prove Potent for Republicans

At New York Times:

Few themes have recurred more regularly in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination than American exceptionalism, and few are as potentially powerful — or divisive.

The idea that the United States is inherently special is well established in American politics, if a bit vaguely defined. By and large, Republicans have used the concept over the years to mean strength and to signal resolve. Democrats have tended to cite it when talking about values and the ideals of American democracy.

In the context of the 2012 campaign, however, it has taken on a much more partisan edge, invoked by Republicans as a way to define President Obama as weak, lacking in core American values and almost unpatriotic.

It is easy to dismiss as election-season jingoism, the political equivalent of a “We’re No. 1” chant from the cheap seats. But the exceptionalism argument offers some voters a reassuring counternarrative to persistent joblessness, a long-term hollowing out of the middle class and a sense that the nation’s best days are past. And it intensifies the pressure on Mr. Obama to avoid sounding defensive about the difficult challenges he has faced as president and to articulate a positive story for why he deserves another four years.

“We have a president right now who thinks America’s just another nation,” Mitt Romney said last Saturday, at the most recent debate. “America is an exceptional nation. We have a president who thinks that the way to conduct foreign policy is through his personal effects on other people. I believe the way to conduct foreign policy is with American strength.”

At a Values Voter convention in October, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said that “those in the White House today” do not believe in American exceptionalism and would rather emulate Europe.

“The answer to our troubles lies in a positive, optimistic vision, with policies rooted in American exceptionalism,” Mr. Perry said. “See, American exceptionalism is the product of unlimited freedom. And there is nothing troubling our nation today that cannot be solved by the rebirth of freedom — nothing.”

Conservatives have used the concept as part of a broader indictment of liberalism in the age of Obama. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in September, the author Shelby Steele suggested that Mr. Obama’s upbringing in the 1960s shaped him into the embodiment of an anti-exceptionalism world view.

“In this liberalism,” he wrote, “America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil — an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.”

In Mr. Obama, wrote Mr. Steele, “America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.”