Politics & Power Quote by James Monroe

Monroe’s boast lands with the confidence of a young country that can’t believe its own growth - and needs everyone else to believe it, too. The line is a presidential victory lap disguised as sober historical comparison: scan the annals of “ancient or modern” nations, he says, and you’ll find nothing like the American surge. It’s an argument from scale. By placing the United States in a global timeline and then declaring it an exception, Monroe isn’t just praising prosperity; he’s manufacturing legitimacy.

The intent is political glue. Monroe governed during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, when one-party dominance masked simmering conflicts over slavery, finance, and sectional power. Calling Americans “prosperous and happy” performs unity, smoothing over fractures by narrating them as already resolved. “People” does a lot of work here: it suggests a cohesive national subject, even as millions were excluded from that happiness by law and violence.

The subtext is strategic innocence. If America’s rise is unprecedented, then its ambitions can be framed as destiny rather than aggression. This mindset dovetails with the Monroe Doctrine’s emerging posture: the Western Hemisphere as a sphere where European meddling is illegitimate and U.S. influence is natural. The phrase “no example” is a rhetorical barricade - it closes the door on cautionary comparisons to Rome’s overreach or Britain’s empire.

Monroe’s sentence doesn’t merely celebrate growth; it tries to preempt doubt. It turns expansion into evidence of virtue, and virtue into a license for what comes next.