by Patrick Appel
At a campaign stop in Iowa Newt Gingrich said that American exceptionalism exists because we "are the only society in history which said the power comes from God to each one of you personally." Will Wilkinson rejects this:
[T]he mere fact of divinely-endowed rights gets us nowhere. It's the widespread belief in rights that really constrains the power of government. It would seem, then, that a conception of rights acceptable to believers and sceptics alike offers a bulwark against tyranny superior to a vision of rights attractive to believers alone. At the very least, it seems plausible that an account of rights based on a grasp of the empirical conditions conducive to fair, mutually-beneficial social cooperation offers an equally sturdy basis for effective limits on state power. As evidence for this proposition, one might point to countries such as Denmark, which are far more secular than America, but whose citizens are at least as free as Americans.
The Dish 