The Beginning of the End of American Exceptionalism

The Interpreter

The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>

13 Oct.

 

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub

It’s been a bruising year for the image of the United States. Americans report declining faith that their country delivers on core ideals like fairness, access to basic freedoms, and democracy itself. Around the world, pollsters find record-low views of the United States’ leadership, its handling of racial issues and foreign policy, even the country in general.

There is, laced throughout, a sense of disappointment: that one of the United States’ gravest failures are having fallen short of its special, city-on-a-hill ideal.

“I feel sorry for Americans,” a lawmaker in Myanmar told Hannah Beech, The New York Times’ Southeast Asia bureau chief, for her story last month on what she called “the diminution of the United States’ global image.”

Writing a few months earlier from Berlin, Katrin Bennhold, the bureau chief there, reported that events were “shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.”

 

For years now, the reality of the United States has been crashing, with ever-greater force, against the image of an exceptional nation. For just as long, each clash has been portrayed as an aberration from the country’s rightful default as a global beacon and protector.

But these polls may indicate a growing number of Americans and non-Americans inching toward a view widely held by historians and political scientists, but deeply taboo among American and allied politicians: that exceptionalism is a myth. That the United States has a lot going for it — unusually wealthy and powerful, its democracy unusually long-lived, its cultural influence unusually pronounced — but it was always just a country, subject to the same frailties, foibles, and forces of gravity as any other. That these breaks between ideal and reality are not American exceptionality interrupted so much as American normality revealed.

American exceptionalism can be an exceptionally slippery phrase. James Ceasar, a University of Virginia political historian, has called it “one small step for abstraction, one giant leap for abstractionism.” But it does have a fixed meaning.

The term conveys two claims that are often portrayed as synonymous but are really quite distinct: (1) The United States is ordained as innately special and superior; (2) American power is a force for good in the world, which brings special rights and responsibilities.

 

The story of where those two ideas came from, and how they fused under one label, is often mistold as emerging from Puritanism, World War II or the Cold War. In fact, they originated as justification for seizing Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.

Their origin, Mr. Ceasar writes in a comprehensive academic history, is often traced to a speech made two years into the war by Albert Beveridge, a senator from Indiana who championed the annexation of the Spanish colonies. God had “marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world,” Mr. Beveridge said in 1900.

 

His argument may sound familiar: The United States’ greatness and exceptionally free way of life, he said, made the country fundamentally different from all others. And this gave it a responsibility to help the wider world realize the universal values it embodied.

Like so many things in American life, Beveridge’s idea traced, in part, to slavery. During the mid-1800s, as northern states banned the practice, proponents of slavery argued for adding new states to which it might be expanded. First on their list was Cuba, then a Spanish colony. They borrowed ideological justifications from Manifest Destiny, the assertion that Americans’ inherent virtuousness compelled their conquest of the western frontier.

The Civil War ended slaveholders’ ambitions for Cuba, but the expansionist school of thought remained. Beveridge and others embraced it as a way to square their ambitions for annexing foreign territory with America’s self-image as an enlightened opponent of European imperialism. They were broadly successful, persuading the United States to seize much of the Spanish empire, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.

That ideology might have faded in subsequent years, along with the United States’ overtly imperial ambitions, if not for World War I. Circumstances forced President Woodrow Wilson into a war that he saw as an excuse for Britain and France to further their colonial ambitions in the Middle East, according to presidential records unearthed by the historian David Fromkin. Wilson reconciled this by calling intervention a mission to make the world “safe for democracy” and to spread the “the principles that gave her birth and happiness.”

 

These back-to-back wars instilled what Mr. Ceasar called “America’s self-designation as a special nation endowed with a great historical task.” The apocalyptic stakes of World War II and the ideological charge of the Cold War, which portrayed American hegemony as a righteous and necessary cause, deepened this belief into something like a civic religion. In his 2012 presidential campaign, one of Mitt Romney’s most frequent accusations, and a focus of his 2010 book were that President Barack Obama did not fully believe in American exceptionalism. Even Mr. Obama, an impassioned critic of American interventionism, responded, “my entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism.” That first part of exceptionalism — virtue — may arguably be wavering as well. This summer, troops were deployed to stem protests. Militias increasingly clash in the streets or, as in Seattle, seize them outright. The country’s performance against the coronavirus is, by most metrics, one of the worst in the world. Democratic norms, like the peaceful transfer of power or the sanctity of the courts, are in growing doubt. In some places, so is access to the vote. The lines supposedly separating the exceptional United States from the unexceptional rest of the world are blurring or disappearing. In my experience traveling abroad, those lines were always brighter to American eyes than they were to anyone else, even in places where American values and culture are widely admired. Most, if not all, scholars whom I’ve spoken to argue that those lines never existed in the first place or were fainter than portrayed. Foreign policy experts tend to attribute American power to wealth, size, and the structure of the postwar order, not to innate American virtue or ideology. Political scientists warn that nothing about American democracy, including its longevity, guarantees its continuation.   Perhaps that is what makes losing faith in American exceptionalism so painful: confronting that it may have never been as real as Americans wanted to believe in the first place.