At The Spectator, Christopher Caldwell makes the case that America is great because it inherited the best parts of England. He writes:
Lyndon B. Johnson had similar thoughts. “The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources,” he said in the mid-1960s. But that’s not true, either. Culturally speaking, the US is a varied place – at least during its periodic bursts of uncontrolled immigration. But as a constitutional matter it is not diverse at all. What makes the US great is a very specific set of institutions, intuitions and cultural habits that it inherited from one country: England.
Constitutionally, America is still an English place: Lockean in peace, Hobbesian in war. That is why it has managed to last for 250 years while both infuriating other western nations and inciting their envy. The English are an outlier among European peoples, especially in their idea of liberty, which was until quite recently as absolutist as ours and difficult for other quite advanced civilizations to understand. (This was before Keir Starmer began sending armed constables to arrest senior citizens for their Facebook posts.)
Read more here.
