American Exceptionalism Reconsidered
Exceptionalism is a double-edged sword, which cuts those blind to America’s flaws and those blind to its virtues.
“America,” declared Donald Trump during his second inaugural address, “will be far more exceptional than ever before.” These words may have puzzled those who have followed Trump’s statements about such matters over the years. In April 2015, a couple months shy of announcing his candidacy for president, Trump was asked how to restore American exceptionalism. “I don’t like the term,” Trump replied. “I’ll be honest with you. … I don’t think it’s a very nice term. … First of all, I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, ‘We’re exceptional. We’re more exceptional.’ … I don’t like the term. I never liked it.”
Trump has distinguished himself as a leader congenitally opposed to American responsibility as the guarantor of world order. Adopting the program of “America First,” he has scorned coalitions and alliances, and without any special regard for democratic values, he has recoiled from liberal causes and praised powerful revisionist regimes that hope to overthrow the order built and maintained by American power. Faith in the liberalising powers of commerce and technology that animated US foreign policy after the Cold War has given way to a pervasive pessimism—the conviction that, in a zero-sum world, all nations must go their own way. This narrow appeal to the American national interest is at odds with larger ideas about America, not to mention with the very idea of America itself.
Trump’s disdain for American exceptionalism was hardly novel—the term has fallen out of fashion across the political spectrum over the last couple of decades. President Obama demonstrated a similar reticence about the phrase when he was president. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” he said in 2009, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As a number of critics pointed out at the time, this concept of exceptionalism is so elastic that it really means nothing at all.
But American exceptionalism was originally coined as a question, not as a boastful conceit. As European, Asian, and South American societies turned to socialist nostrums and models in the aftermath of World War II, the United States stubbornly held on to its liberal creed, which led Marxist theorists to wonder what made America uniquely immune to the appeal of socialism. It was liberal anticommunists who first embraced this definition of exceptionalism.
In time, American exceptionalism acquired broader connotations that suggested the country holds a special place in history and that it has evolved a unique national identity. This aspect of America’s national character has been evident from the country’s inception. Alexis de Tocqueville—the 19th-century French aristocrat who was the first to refer to the United States as exceptional—compared the traditional forms of patriotism on display in Europe to the new variety he found in America in the 1830s. In Europe, he wrote, the “natural fondness (i.e., for one’s birthplace) is united with a taste for ancient customs and a reverence for traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their father.” The American brand of patriotism, he observed, was altogether different:
But there is another species of attachment to country which is more rational than the one I have been describing. It is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting; it springs from knowledge; it is nurtured by the laws; it grows by the exercise of civil rights; and in the end, it is confounded with the personal interests of the citizen.
Samuel Veissière
This type of patriotism has discomfited many visitors to the United States, who, in the words of Charles Murray, have written about Americans in “the tone of a zoologist writing about a hitherto unknown species.” This national character is often interpreted, and not only by foreigners, as evidence of an inferiority complex. American progressives have expressed particular distaste for the concept of exceptionalism, and not simply because it originally referred to the absence of a significant socialist movement in the United States. Informed by the radical self-disgust of writers like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, progressives have little time for the idea of an exceptional nation in a global and cosmopolitan age. It conflicts with their relativist and multicultural proclivities and they perceive its triumphalism as a dangerous incubator of xenophobia and jingoism.
In his 2004 book The Good Fight, Peter Beinart illustrates this tendency when he writes about the liberal antitotalitarian consensus before it fractured in the jungles of Vietnam. In the immediate postwar era, liberals were alert to the danger posed by Soviet communism, but “they were equally worried about uncritical belief, a moral hubris that blinded Americans to their own capacity for injustice.” I can’t be the only reader who agrees with this Niebuhrian argument but also wonders why Beinart, like many other post-Vietnam liberals, has concluded that America greatness is a “lunatic notion.”
If progressives reject the notion of exceptionalism outright, American conservatives have occasionally misunderstood it. They chafe at the denial or denigration of their country’s achievements, but this defensiveness, especially in its more chauvinistic forms, sometimes reflects a failure to appreciate its essence. Imagining America as a “city on a hill,” conservatives often cultivate isolation. And it is precisely this insular impulse that animated the original “America First” movement, rejected by those who laid the foundations of the American century. The rise of Trump has made this flawed reading of American exceptionalism pervasive on the US Right. But American exceptionalism does not derive from some magical property in the American DNA, nor is it intended for the benefit of Americans alone.
As the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset famously remarked, exceptionalism is a double-edged sword. It cuts those blind to flaws in the American character and those blind to its virtues. It is not a claim of divine favour or moral infallibility. Nor is taking pride in such a unique country the same as blustering about it at every opportunity. As the French used to say when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were in German hands: “Always think of it. Never speak of it.” If patriots want to praise and defend their country, jingoistic triumphalism is not helpful. Nor does American patriotism require an uncritical appraisal of the United States’ history and conduct. Such complacency is antithetical to the duty to build a more perfect Union. It does not require the denigration of other countries. On the contrary, the principles of the American founding clearly require “a decent respect” toward all peoples, and an active concern for the fate of liberty throughout the world.
This founding ideology is what makes America exceptional. The United States was the first nation in history to rest its claim to nationhood on an appeal to universal principles derived from natural rights. The reputation for ethnocentricism or chauvinism that attends American exceptionalism is undeserved—unless it is swallowed by Trump’s narrow conception of nationalism. Traditionally, American internationalism has been distinguished by a strikingly expansive patriotism. This exceptionalist belief—that, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, the cause of America is the cause of mankind—does not reflect a restricted or localised outlook. It contains multitudes and amounts to a recognition that the principles upon which the country was founded were superior to the principles that shaped conceptions of nationalism from time immemorial.
The act of shouldering responsibilities abroad is often interpreted by its critics as imperial hubris. Whatever it is, it has a lengthy precedent in American thinking and conduct. In Federalist No. 1, Hamilton argued that ratification of the Constitution was necessary to preserve the “existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire, in many respects, the most interesting in the world.” Yet it wasn’t just the cause of America that was at stake:
It has been frequently remarked 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. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
American exceptionalism has its roots here. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” states the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These truths were not the exclusive possession of Americans, let alone of English-born gentlemen. Rather, they applied, as Lincoln insisted, “to all people of all colors everywhere.”
The United States remains the only republic founded on the basis of these truths, and it has spilled precious blood and spent valuable treasure to vindicate them. This was the most common understanding of exceptionalism when Obama misunderstood it and Trump deplored it. But it is only one understanding of exceptionalism. There are others. And in a new “golden age,” when even President Trump now dons the exceptionalist mantle, be very careful about what kind of exceptionalist you are.
