What's Great About America

• The reason that “a lot of countries have freedoms” today is because our Founding Fathers pioneered the principle of popular sovereignty, where governments answer to the people. At the time of our founding, the rest of the world was ruled by monarchs. Our founders established the first country in human history that was built not only on blood and soil, but on an idea — the idea of human liberty.
• For most of our history, American democracy was a global outlier. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, there were just 17 democracies. It was not until 1998 — just two decades ago — that there were more democracies than autocracies.
  
• Today, 4.1 billion people live in democracies. (Of those who don’t, four out of five live in China.) The unprecedented expansion of liberty has produced unprecedented prosperity.
• Last September, the Brookings Institution reported that “for the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind . . . some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered ‘middle class’ or ‘rich.’ ”
• None of that would be possible without the Pax Americana guaranteed by US military. Americans liberated a continent, rebuilt much of it from the rubble of war with the Marshall Plan, and then stood watch on freedom’s frontier and prevented a Soviet tank invasion across the Fulda Gap. And today, the only thing that stops North Korea from invading South Korea or China from invading Taiwan is American military might.
• Every country that enjoys democratic governance today owes its birth of freedom to our Founding Fathers and the continued existence of their democracy to the US military.