In response to:
I find nothing exceptional about the "collective." The USSR worked for the collective. Cuba works for the collective. They are exceptional in their failure. America is where it is because of an exceptional view of man as a f ree being, not limited by his affiliation to a group but as an individual. The left views our founding as an abomination because of the failings of slavery. Such thinking is saddening because the left has missed the whole point of the Constitution. Liberty before tyranny of the masses...see Shay's Rebellion. They provided a manner to alter the government when the political will of the country demanded it.
Last week, after the first presidential debate, I spoke at an architecture school in downtown Los Angeles. One of the questions the moderator asked was about American exceptionalism. The foam flecked to his lips at the very phrase. What, pray tell, was American exceptionalism, he asked?
I answered by referencing the Founding Fathers and the freedoms they guaranteed us via the American Constitutional System of checks and balances. What makes us unique guardians of liberty, I said, is that our system is designed to counterbalance interest against interest -- we only act together with the full power of unity when...
A new narrative should be started by a few. Marxism, Communism or whatever, should be relegated to the failed experiments through which humans have moved, as they work out so terribly, while appealing to the envious. If we did not have Cuba, Venezuela or the failed Soviet, we could be excused for clinging to the Religion they express. What joy was in the East Berliner kids, as they tore down the wall. They had lived with it. I wish they could speak to the OWS useful idiots.