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Alfred Bester's View Of American Exceptionalism

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Alfred Bester says that there are two threads to his view of American Exceptionalism: one based on Seymour Martin Lipset and another on Frederick Jackson Turner.1 He says that Martin Lipset said that the United States is exceptional because it came out of a "revolutionary event" that set up America as "the first new nation" and built a vision for the future on the ideology that caused them to break with England in the first place.2 He says that Turner thought that because the U.S. had a lot of unclaimed land that regular people could own land and not have to depend on anyone else. This means that there wouldn’t be an aristocracy and that small land-owners stuck to the values of the Revolution.3 The combination of what Lipset and Turner said

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