One key historical item that Republicans love to ignore...

is that the US economy didn't really get going until the Rockefeller and Morgan trusts were busted.

It was when all that competition was let loose on a country begging to work, begging for the dream that they believed when they sailed into the New York City harbor, that was when the dream was acknowledged and set loose to create the US domination of the 20th century and all that brought with it that the United States gelled into modern times.

That, to me, is the exceptional part of our country. The belief that laws should and would reach high when they had to in order to serve the greater good. It is in these times of exceptional actions are taken that proves the myth of American Exceptionalism.

The right will have it that this country of ours was always exceptional and that we were destined to be blessed by this myth. It wasn't. Not when Slavery was allowed to continue, not when half of the population had no say in how they were governed, not when everyone was left on their own to thrive, survive or waste away without a thought to it. That wasn't exceptionalism it was brutal survival of the fittest which sets us smack in the middle of animal kingdom.

Until we embraced equality as reality and not a myth that the United States became and Exceptional entity.