American Exceptionalism

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American Exceptionalism

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1Urquhart
Bewerkt: dec 3, 2015, 10:53 am

2Urquhart
Bewerkt: dec 4, 2015, 2:39 pm

Well, I haven't heard anything from anyone so I will just assume that everyone in this group agrees with me that this "city on a hill" country of ours is truly exceptional indeed and should not think of changing......anything.

It is so nice that we can agree on something during the holidays.

3Cecrow
dec 4, 2015, 2:54 pm

Just a symptom of how everyday these incidents have become, I guess.

Here in Canada on the local radio news, a top headline from a neighbouring small town: "A report that someone used a GUN to threaten another person yesterday; no one was hurt." And you should have heard her shocked emphasis on the word "gun". Maybe we'll catch up eventually, but I appreciate the distance between.

4richardbsmith
dec 4, 2015, 2:56 pm

Urquhart,

I think many of us that American exceptionalism is a myth we have grown up with.

It is not true. We rank high in some of the worst categories and low is many of the best categories.

We still tell ourselves we are great.

It would likely be good to challenge that self image constructively, meaning in a way that does not go equally errant in the other direction.

5stellarexplorer
Bewerkt: dec 4, 2015, 4:20 pm

The San Bernadino attack almost puts the Planned Parenthood attack out of memory, which itself made you aghast, but forgetful of the Oregon college mass murder shortly before. I think there may even have been some mass shootings before that one, but I don't remember.

6Urquhart
dec 4, 2015, 4:13 pm

"some mass shootings before that one, but I don't remember."

Strange, but I agree. In fact, I now consciously avoid the news on the shooting incidents. I think it horrible and sick and my focusing on the latest incident is not going to help. To do so would lift my levels of innervation to unhealthy levels. The frustration comes from not having "agency" or the power to stop all this killing in this country.

People from foreign countries wanting to kill and terrorize Americans will have to get in a long line behind all the Americans who are already busy doing so....

7Urquhart
dec 4, 2015, 4:23 pm

4richardbsmith

"We rank high in some of the worst categories and low is (sic) many of the best categories."

Yes and thank you for the reminder.

8chagonz
dec 4, 2015, 10:51 pm

Exceptionalism is a loaded word I grant you, and many, especially on the right have abused the term to forgive any number of sins. Saying that, any true and honest study of history of the past 300 years would have to admit the fact of it. This is a country that aims at " a more perfect union" to I think quote Lincoln. Not that many nation states have that in their history books or even as a fantasy. The United States have always been seeped in violence of one kind or another. Its a tragedy that we continue to indulge ourselves in this kind of event more often than any other western nation. My wife just said tonight watching TV that our normal program are more violent now than ever before and call it "quality television".
As big a mess as we have, we at least try , on occasion to think about and acknowledge the contradictions in our society. On balance, and its a broad calculation I know, exceptional is a pretty good description of this nation's behavior and values in comparison to others. And isn't that an important measure. We have done some terrible and stupid things over our history, and at the same time acted in ways that no nation state has ever acted on behalf of others. We have to be the strangest imperial power ever constructed in the history of mankind.

9Cecrow
dec 7, 2015, 7:20 am

>8 chagonz:, "our normal program are more violent now than ever before and call it "quality television"."

That may be proving a necessity as they must try harder to out-do the news.

10DinadansFriend
Bewerkt: dec 7, 2015, 4:35 pm

>8 chagonz::
"Exceptionalism"is, to many English speakers, not a compliment. It has the air of special pleading to cover up a feeling that there is a condemnation to be made, if it were not for invoking "exceptionalism". There is a science fiction novel called "Darwinia" where a portion of an alien planet, a wilderness devoid of sapient aliens or large fauna, has been dropped on a section of the earth formerly occupied by Europe and the British Isles, at about 1895. And to me, that would be the thing that many current Americans would have preferred to happen!
The USA has not only an obsessive interest in its own politics and economics, which under the guise of "Globalism" has become the dominant form of industrial endeavour on this planet, but an aggressive non-interest in any other actions or behaviour of any other part of the international polity...until someone starts shooting, and endangering profits. Then sides will be drawn, or created to fit the situation requiring military intervention, and solution. Nuance is not granted to analysis, or to response. It doesn't work, except to gradually sell weapons and damage the neighbours so they cannot create economic rivals, or work out unique answers.
Every other government except avowedly looter governments is trying to achieve "A more Perfect union" in its own terms, because the people living there are not early 21st century Americans!
No other country wants to be seen as a bad guy, especially to its inhabitants, and often attempts to deal with the contradictions in its sphere, and evolve its own resolutions, importing the better parts of foreign efforts and improvising when necessary. but, there always looms the spectre of violent intervention by the great powers of the day, whose choice of local allies seems arbitrary, and sometimes raises the local level of violence. American "Exceptionalism" often seems to cheapen and endanger any other response except the ones the USA business community would like, with a consequence of local frustration.

11TLCrawford
dec 15, 2015, 9:44 am

There was an interview on NPR this morning that I found slightly distasteful, calculating the value of human life. It did offer insight into how "exceptional" our, the USA, tolerance for gun carnage is. The San Bernardino shooting caused financial loses of about $125 million. But that is only a fraction of the daily average of the monetary cost of shootings. We lose $235 billion every year to intentional and "accidental" shootings.

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/15/459673828/looking-at-violence-in-america-with-a-fi...

12chagonz
dec 16, 2015, 11:35 pm

I would agree that the US has an obsessive interest in its own politics and economics. It would be amazing if any nation state did not. That after all is what partly defines the nation state, its belief in its own uniqueness. Brazil has as much obsession with its values, economics and politics as we do and they add futbol to the mix.
My arguement is historical in nature, not forgetting or absolving us of our many sins and mistakes. In my study of global history however I have found no instance of a wartime victor who spent billions of dollars to prop up former enemies as we did post WW II. Now you will say that's ancient history, and for a gen-xer or millennial you would be right, but I suspect there are many in the EU who have different memories. Alas, for every Marshall Plan we have Vietnam. Thus goes the imperial power running amok.
I suppose one could have made an argument that the Roman Empire dabbled in exceptionalism when it granted Roman citizenship to most conquered territory's inhabitants. Our good friends Pericles and company would have drunk hemlock rather than grant such a right to barbarians.
Being exceptional brings great responsibility. The world has followed or at least taken our lead when we have shown that leadership. For that reason and many others exceptionalism is not a pejorative in this sense.

13TLCrawford
dec 18, 2015, 2:56 pm

>12 chagonz: " Brazil has as much obsession with its values, economics and politics as we do and they add futbol to the mix." That futbol thing can change. In my lifetime the USA has gone from baseball obsessed to football (American) obsessed.

14DinadansFriend
dec 18, 2015, 4:34 pm

>12 chagonz::
The Roman Empire and the Republic preceding it was a municipal government grown gargantuan. It stopped practising "Exceptionalism" when the Emperor Caracalla granted Citizenship in 212 CE to all in the Roman territory that He recognized as "real people" that is all male free persons.
"Our good friends Pericles and company would have drunk hemlock rather than grant such a right to barbarians." One should remember, however that to the contemporaries of Pericles, the vast majority of Greeks, not Athenians or Spartans wanted to be Corinthians, not Athenians. Read non-Athenian lives in Plutarch, or read Polybius. The Glory of Athens, as "A City on a Hill', was created by later Roman and Renaissance Europeans looking for alternatives to their petty tyrannies.

15chagonz
dec 23, 2015, 6:32 pm

Exactly ; I would argue that 212 was the height of its exceptionalism. What other conquerer has done the same? Given events in the EU today, Caracalla's policy was somewhat exceptional in any age. Re the Greeks, Madison and fellows were not modeling themselves on the Corinthians, Athens and its political culture was what they read and studied.

16Muscogulus
jan 25, 2016, 11:02 am

American exceptionalism is a myth founded on a very narrow view of U.S. history. For instance, pro-exceptionalism arguments in this thread mention no historical event earlier than World War II, except for some vague gesturing toward earlier misdeeds that do not vacate the fact of exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism made implicit sense to Americans who came of age after World War II, when the USA supplanted Britain and all of Europe as "workshop of the world." Thanks to our vast continental territory (acquired by less than honorable means, but never mind), we were also the breadbasket of the world. Little wonder if we got a swelled head about ourselves, our Founding Fathers, and our exceptional history. It's after World War II that the cult of Alexis de Tocqueville takes off in a big way among American intellectuals.

Interestingly enough, it took another half century for American scholars to come up with a decent English translation of Democracy in America. Twentieth-century Tocquevilleans were content with warmed-over editions of the hack translation by Henry Reeve — still by far the easiest one to find today. The translation is poor enough that it has had to be revised, but I think Tocqueville's almost scriptural status in American civic religion has tended to hinder efforts to do a completely fresh translation. We finally got one in 2000, a team effort by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (no relation to John Winthrop of "city on a hill" fame, I assume).

Speaking of Winthrop and the "city on a hill" quote that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made into a patriotic cliché, modern recycling of that quote has almost inverted Winthrop's intended meaning. This is discussed in the recent Backstory episode on American exceptionalism, where historian Mark A. Peterson makes the case that Winthrop was referring to Matt. 5:14 to argue for the Plymouth colony's exposed position in a benighted wilderness: "Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid." But 20th-century New England historian Perry Miller made the mistake of reading a prediction of future greatness into Winthrop's sermon. And Miller impressed the young JFK with this idea.

It's of interest that the term "American exceptionalism" was coined by an American Communist Party member, Jay Lovestone. He used the term in arguing to Joseph Stalin that the orthodox Marxist doctrine about the inevitable fall of capitalism did not apply to North America's peculiar historical and cultural circumstances, so political alternatives to proletarian militancy should be adopted. Stalin responded by having Lovestone demoted and marginalized within the Communist Party. Lovestone left the party and became an outspoken opponent of Stalinism and something of a red-baiter within the U.S. labor movement.

The Backstory program I mentioned is well worth your time. http://backstoryradio.org/shows/city-upon-a-hill-2/