This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 12th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

In light of the events of the past week, it's at least relevant to ask is America really all that

exceptional historian Anthony Kamegna discusses American exceptionalism of the

left and of the right and what duties an exceptional America imposes on people who want to keep it that way.

There are a lot of events in the United States that are unfortunate last year, though you can applaud the protests of police

violence in the United States, a lot of cities had blocks that were just burned down by angry rioters.

And earlier, well, just last week, as of this recording,

a group of armed super-fans of Donald Trump of three or four their own supporters of the president and I hear this phrase thrown around

this isn't who we are and you see these negative events in the United States and frankly elsewhere in terms of the US involvement around the world and all of the people that the US military kills around the world in countries that we are not officially fighting.

And at some point you have to wonder, well, maybe this is who we are.

Yeah, I think that's a legitimate wonder.

I'm not necessarily here to say it is who we are either.

Because I think it's always interesting to note that by now the US has the oldest existing

constitution in the world at least in its in its present form written constitution certainly the oldest you know so it were actually a pretty old

country in terms of you know major changes to our institutional structure we've only had tweaks here and there in

our constitutional system for, you know, a long time now and what's the math?

200 something

244 years that's quite a long time it's actually a very conservative record and

something that's that's really been bugging me is is hearing people on the news aghast saying things like, you know, can you imagine? Could the founding fathers have ever imagined something like this happening.

And the point is, of course they did.

They thought this would happen all the time.

And that's precisely why they developed a government where Congress is

...