That, of course, is the heritage of this land. The people who came to Jamestown 400 years ago may not have all been saints. But they were all pioneers. They crossed the broadest waters and dreamed the grandest dreams. Their spirit is the American spirit. It is why America surpassed our native England to become the world’s most powerful nation. ~Mitt Romney

Dreamed the grandest dreams?  The early settlers in Virginia were primarily looking for land and money.  Nothing to be ashamed of, these things, since these are what pretty much all settlers, pioneers and immigrants are interested in finding.  Occasionally you will have sectarians who want to carry out their mission in a new land, but for the most part you will have normal people.  It is this plain, down-to-earth history of people seeking to find a plot of land and tend it that tells us a lot more about most traditional Americans down through the centuries than talking about people “dreaming the grandest dreams.”  The New Englanders were more into dreaming, and look at all the trouble they–we–have managed to cause.  We would have done better to have even more sodbusters and even fewer dream-obsessed Yankee Puritans.  I say this as someone with a lot of New England Puritan and Yankee background. 

In any case, it’s nice to see that Romney’s Europhobic chauvinism extends also to the Mother Country, which is remarkable since the “American spirit” exhibited by the settlers at Jamestown was very much an “English spirit” and continued to be decidedly English or, if the last five defenders of the Union prefer, British.  Romney’s little remark is like something out of Hegelianism for Dummies: the American Geist has carried us along and caused us to triumph over all our adversaries. 

I have an alternative explanation for why the U.S. has outstripped the U.K. in world power: World Wars One and Two may have had a small part to play in dethroning England from global predominance.