4. The Political Culture of the Liberal Hegemon

The United States was the only major nation whose birth was influenced by the philosophical enlightenment movement. Thus, it has a very different view of the role of government. In America, the government was created not to watch over the individual welfare of its citizens but to guarantee their fundamental rights and liberties. That perspective emphasizes the individual over the community. America rode the tiger of globalization to economic, if not domestic tranquility like few other nations. But in that exhilarating ride, America never gave anything but lip service to the underbelly of globalization—pandemics, global warming, economic contagion, and internationally unregulated economic power. So does America’s political culture, based on an aggrandized view of the eighteenth-century enlightenment theory of individual rights, hinder its ability to lead in the twenty-first century?