Why the West Needs the American Founding, by Samuel Gregg

The United States has always occupied a unique place in the civilization broadly known as the West. For one thing, it is separated by an entire ocean from the West’s European heartland. America was also somewhat of a latecomer to the Western patrimony. The Americas were unknown to Europeans until Christopher Columbus made landfall on the island of San Salvador on October 12, 1492. The United States itself did not even assume a formal political identity until July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. That is a full 2,124 years after the death of Plato, widely regarded as the foundational philosopher of the Western tradition.

Curiously, however, non-Americans have usually been the quickest to grasp that America has a distinctive role to play in the history of the West. …