I am pretty good until I get to the " 'stans", very new to me, and rather confusing.
America is exceptional.
France is exceptional.
Britain is exceptional.
Japan is exceptional.
Canada is exceptional.
Should I go on?
Well the question in that survey was whether the respondent thought they lived in the best country in the world. I think that’s ambiguous between objectively and subjectively the best.
That is to say, I might consider X country the best because of the things that I personally take to be important, while understanding that other people can value other things and come to a different conclusion. America #1 is more about making the claim to be objectively the best.
So I wonder about how that question would be translated, and understood, in different languages. In English, as I say, it’s ambiguous.
That said, I don’t want this to seem like rejecting uncomfortable data. I’m happy to concede that something like American exceptionism likely exists in some other countries.
It’s a thread about the belief of being the best country though. So if you don’t believe that military might would decide that, all else being equal, there was no reason to mention it.
So your map shows the US has the highest rate of thinking their country is the best, confirming my point. Thank you,
I am not engaged in a game of top trumps. I’m not sure what you’re doing. I would note that WRT nukes, both sides have actually scaled back their arsenal significantly. Due to the taboo and risk, nukes aren’t useful for most realistic military purposes, you only need a few dozen to effectively menace an adversary. So both countries have realized that most doesn’t equal best. That was a brief fever dream in the early 1960’s where there was a real fear of falling behind.
If you want to argue that a country’s superlative makes them the “best” then it has to mean something. So what if North Korea has the world’s tallest flagpole, or Iraq built the world’s largest artillery tube, or the USSR built the largest nuke ever, or Dubuque Iowa has the world’s biggest ball of string. If it doesn’t create an exceptional capability or practical outcome, or an unmatchable achievement, then it’s a meaningless vanity monument.
Not in the slightest, not at any point whatsoever. Even if I were, I might be pointing at the USSR in the 1970’s and 80’s, which fielded more men as well as most types of non-naval equipment than anyone else at the time. They were superior in military mass. Fortunately we never had to learn whether that translated to a superior outcome, but certainly it was enough to intimidate the US from retaking any of the Iron Curtain by force.
What I do support is the idea that many of the narratives to discredit US military achievements are false, and upon inspection simply turn out to be someone else’s unsupported exceptionalism fantasy (i.e. no, the USSR did not singlehandedly win WW2, that’s ludicrous, though in Europe it absolutely was a joint effort).
US achievements here don’t make it the “best” country, but they were pivotal to bending the arc of history away from the worst actors achieving the worst outcomes. To pretend otherwise is to let one’s partisan feelings about America lead oneself to credit some absurdly ahistorical ideas.
Nah, that would be in Cawker City, Kansas. Still the US though.
It weighs almost ten tons and was started in 1953. Visitors can visit it in its open air pavilion and add their own piece of string.
Dubuque, Iowa does have a historic funicular offering scenic views of the mighty Mississippi though.
As for the world’s biggest ball of stamps, that is in Boystown, Nebraska. Which is wholly surrounded by Omaha.
The world’s largest ball of stamps is located at Boys Town** in Nebraska, weighing 600 pounds and measuring 32 inches wide**. It contains roughly 4.6 million canceled stamps
You didnt make that claim. You claimed it was uniquely American- which it isn’t
I don’t get the OP’s purpose in starting this thread. Do they think all Americans are on the same wavelength and brainwashed by the same controlling entity? There is way too much polarization, internal disorder, and difference of opinion in this country to discern any kind of central unifying ethos, much less a patriotic one.
Some Americans move to other countries because they consider the US too conservative or too woke. Sometimes they seek a lower cost of living, but realize they don’t have all the bennies they did in the US. What do you want us say, “We’re not the best country in the world because we have gun violence and don’t socialize health care”?
Generation might make a difference. Prior to the multi-polar world of the 90’s, it was a fairly common saying that (in one form or another) the US was the best country in the world, to the point that you’d get some suspicious looks if you said otherwise. Which makes me wonder, again, if it was an unconscious product of Cold War rivalry. There are two superpowers. We want to be the winner. Why should that be the case? “because we’re the best”.
It never really went out of fashion with Republicans. In fact we could look at MAGA through this lens and suggest that their deepest grievance isn’t that anything real has changed with the country — in fact, by most of their metrics, the country had improved and strengthened up until the Trump years — but rather the simple fact that most people in America no longer claim that America is the best. Not only that, but the reach of the internet allowed them to hear lots of different voices worldwide expressing that they don’t think America is the best, or that America is usually bad, or most horrifyingly, that they don’t think about America very much at all.
Where and when did you go to school? That wasn’t my experience, like, at all.
Good point. But of course we are not.
In the 50s, sure- and for about a decade- the US was the Greatest Nation- while pretty much all the others recovered from WW2. But sure as hell not in the 60s and beyond.
Nor mine. Those things werent taught in grade school, sure. But they certainly were in High School and College.
This mindset is something that I have seen out there in the media, in current affairs pieces etc frequently. I also, on a few occasions, seen it expressed by some American tourists in Europe.
I have also seen interviews with American public figures in which they have explicitly stated that everybody else wants to either be American or have what Americans have, as though the US and its stuff and culture, is the gold standard.
It’s also been visible recently with such things as some American politicians claiming that Canadians and Greenlanders actually want to be Americans (note: the vast majority of Canadians definitely and absolutely do not want to be Americans).
I suspect that most Canadians (we get a ton of American media btw) believe that Americans think that the US is the greatest thing that the planet has ever seen (a slight exaggeration perhaps) and, holy crap, is it ever annoying simply because it is so blatantly wrong and unrealistic.
Personally, I have until now, really liked the US, but never thought that it is the best country in the world - notwithstanding your incredible technological and military capabilities. I was a Canadian naval officer for several years and have worked with numerous American USN officers as well as officers from other US military services and, based on my experience, you have a selection process which selects people who I would love to have as next door neighbours with whom I would love to shoot the shit and share a beer while bbq’ing. But that exceptionalism thing just boggles my mind and I’ve never seen it anywhere else in my travels.
You trust the media? 
Although the U.S. and Canada are the two top destinations for migrants, record-high numbers in these two countries want to permanently leave.
Desire to migrate has risen steadily in both countries since 2011 – but most sharply in Canada, where the 20% who want to leave today is the highest on record and more than double the 8% who wanted to leave in 2011. Most of the increase in Canada has occurred since 2021.
In the U.S., the 17% who said they wanted to leave in 2023 statistically ties the previous record high (which appears to have been shattered in new polling from 2024 that shows 21% want to move) and is seven points high
U.S. Still Top Desired Destination but Remains Less Attractive Today
The list of countries where potential migrants say they would like to move, if they could, has generally been the same since Gallup started tracking these data in 2007, with the U.S. topping the list of the most desired destinations every year.
So, the US is the nation more people want to move to than any other.
Yeah " American public figures in which they have explicitly stated that everybody else wants to either be American " is an exaggeration, but there is something solid behind the claim.
Good summary and I’d add that there are various negative effects of this belief:
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As I alluded earlier, it’s often ironically used as an excuse or handwave for failure. The US can’t be falling behind in X, because it’s the best country.
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Americans seem more willing than people in most developed countries to believe in worldwide conspiracies. Because all it needs is the cia or nasa or whatever to decide something. All the other countries just follow America, right?
I would phrase it as… if we’re to say there was a period when the US was mostly the “best” across the board, it would be the post WW2 decades when it was the last big country with a functioning economy, whose industrial capacity had been massively ramped up during the war, and it used this headstart to terrific effect.
And all of these conditions, combined with some Cold War propaganda, influenced the widespread believe that the US really was “the best”, whatever that means. In a few dimensions, there really was American exceptionalism, some of which persists to this day. Again, it would be odd if this weren’t the case, given some of the unearned advantages of resources, geography, and history that the US has enjoyed.
Seeing that most Canadians live within earshot of US media, you’re like a captive audience as you get our headlines shoved down your throat. I’ve had Canadian friends online who thought Americans were restrictive on freedom, and I would reply “Where do you get this? I can read any book I want, see any movie I want, etc.”
My line manager at work was originally from Hong Kong, lived in Vancouver, and then London UK. He would occasionally ask me about gun violence in the US, and I would say it’s tragic, but it’s not as common as the headlines make it out to be. I can see how non-Americans would get that impression from our movies. I remember when I was visiting England, I watched a British detective show, and it centered on the crime of a Muslim woman shot with a crossbow. The idea of convenient gun carry laws is nonexistent to the British.
I certainly see your point about American arrogance, but it’s the loudest voices that get heard the most. Believe me, it’s not typical, at least among my little coterie.
Without opening this can of worms too far, yes and no. The idea that guns are an everyday sight in America is nonsense fuelled by films, but gun violence IS common compared to all other Western nations.
And is commonly accepted to be the number 1 cause of death in kids 1~19. I wish more Americans found that to be absolutely unacceptable.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-and-teens
This thread seems to have a significant drift toward discussions on whether the US is the best country (no), not when and how we, as residents of the US, learn the myth. Kids today might think that Lee Greenwood is one of the Founding Fathers, so pervasive is the narrative.