Every time we have an election my Beloved Curmudgeon says something to the effect that the rest of the world must look at us in wonder that we regularly transfer power peacefully. I guess we all have certain things our spouses say that we can predict. That’s one of the things I can predict. I never thought that much of it, but that’s the point. We don’t think that much of it. Its the way we do things and its something we take for granted. The right to vote and the right to a representative government that listens to the people. We don’t expect our method of doing things to be anything different than it has been since the days of our revolutionary forefathers.

We can take our way of life for granted because our government works, in its own way. We are a satisfied people. We have no great injustice to rage against. We don’t live in a state of angst created by an oppressive government. We are prosperous and free to pursue happiness with minimal interference from our government. It doesn’t occur to us to be anything else. In fact, we forget that the rest of the world doesn’t live the same way.

When you stop and think about it, that’s pretty phenomenal.

I thought about this today because of an article I read that underscores this very concept. Mark Steyn writes about the uniqueness of the American Thanksgiving holiday. He writes that people from other countries wonder what we are giving thanks for. We know. But how do we explain it to others? We take it so for granted that we rarely give thought to the privilege we have been given by simply being born American. “We know we belong to the land, And the land we belong to is grand!”

Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod?

And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.

If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced ‘n’ diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish, in effect, the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it.

I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era.

In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.

But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

There’s so much said there (and more - go read the article!). I noted the words, ‘the most benign hegemon in history’. Yes, it is. That’s why I get so frustrated with I hear the progressives refer to our great country as an ‘empire’ or ‘occupiers’. They don’t mean that in any benign way. In truth, if we were those things in the way the progressives mean to accuse us, then the world would indeed be a much more evil and bloody place.

Thank God for America.

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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Stop the ACLU, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Stix Blog, Right Truth, The Populist, Shadowscope, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Adeline and Hazel, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, CommonSenseAmerica, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Church and State, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, A Blog For All, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, Grizzly Groundswell, Big Dog’s Weblog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Nuke’s, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Faultline USA, Allie is Wired, The World According to Carl, Walls of the City, Wolf Pangloss, High Desert Wanderer, Gone Hollywood, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.