Re: American Exceptionalism
clipper said:
American Exceptionalism is the real problem here. Americans are constantly immersed in the idea that the USA is the "beacon of freedom in the world" , the "good guys" and god's chosen people.
The culture reinforces this self-image. Most people get their ideas about what the USA is like and it's motives are from American movies. The concept of the "frontier society", the rugged individualist has been cultivated for 100 years in dime-store novels, then movies.
Unfortunately, the frontier society was a lawless place. The truth is the cowboy heroes were back-shooting drunkards .
The biggest disappointment to me is that American seem unable to take any responsibility for their actions in the world.
Isn't it time to stop mourning Pearl Harbour and give at least a passing thought to the civilians incinerated in the firebombing of Tokyo and the detonation of two nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The Iraq war is plainly illegal, and has resulted in the deaths of many thousands of innocent non-combatants. I expected Americans to hold Bush accountable, but given the cultural brainwashing, I understand why they did not.
A bit of American Exceptionalism from the Economist (see Nov. 6 2003):
But the term “exceptionalism� is more than a description of how America differs from the rest of the world. It also encompasses the significance of those differences and the policies based upon them. People have been searching for some wider meaning to the place since its earliest days. In 1630, the year the Massachusetts Bay Company was founded, John Winthrop, the colony's governor, described his new land as “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.�
And as they have looked, people have found two quite different reasons for thinking that America is special. One is that it is uniquely founded on principles to which any country can aspire. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper that “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.�
That is America-as-model. George Bush has embraced the idea. Commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks of September 11th 2001, he said that “the ideal of America is the hope of all mankind.� He was echoing Lincoln, who called America “the last, best hope of earth�.
But exceptionalism has another meaning: that America is intrinsically different from other countries in its values and institutions, and is therefore not necessarily a model. Thomas Jefferson said that “Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours are perhaps more peculiar than those of any other in the universe.�
In 1929, Jay Lovestone, the head of the American communist party, was summoned to Moscow. Stalin demanded to know why the worldwide communist revolution had advanced not one step in the largest capitalist country. Lovestone replied that America lacked the preconditions for communism, such as feudalism and aristocracy. No less an authority than Friedrich Engels had said the same thing, talking of “the special American conditions...which make bourgeois conditions look like a beau idéal to them.� So had an Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and a British socialist, H.G. Wells, who had both argued that America's unique origins had produced a distinctive value system and unusual politics.
America is different than Old Europe and much of the world, and we view that as a good thing.
OTB
