What makes us arguably the greatest nation in history.Hayes has a quibble with Walker, over the word "arguably." He feels it was too tentative for a red meat conservative audience. Hayes reports nobody but himself seemed to notice the qualifier.
My quibble with Hayes is that the U.S. is not the greatest nation in history, merely the greatest nation of the past century. It is hard to argue with the British Empire being the world's greatest nation, when at its high point the sun literally never set upon its soil and every world map was covered with territory tinted pink.
Both the entire subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal) and half of Africa were British colonies, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, much of the Caribbean, and modern day Ireland, Belize and Guyana. Never before or since has the world seen a nation like the British Empire.
Sixteen hundred years earlier, the Roman Empire was a very big deal, as well at that of the Spaniards in Central and South America plus the Philippines.
If Hayes wants to argue that the U.S. is the most moral or free or honorable nation ever, even those claims are dubious. We are certainly a good, free, successful nation, the most powerful of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and my favorite place to call home, with much of which to be proud. Beyond that lies hyperbole and jingoism.
