American Exceptionalism

[Rand_Rover]

@Bryan_Ekers

I dunno, these days exceptionalism seems more likely to be used as an excuse to protect America’s moneyed class:

“Who cares if government-funded health care leads to longer lifespans and lower costs in Canada and Europe? That doesn’t prove it’ll work here! We’re exceptional!”

Oh good, a strawman. So rare to see those.

[Nars_Glinley]

@BrainGlutton

Tell us about Canadian Exceptionalism.

They gave the world poutine.

[RickJay]

@ElvisL1ves

Now: Do you still think it’s bullshitting if the audience knows, and is expected to know, and even likes, that they’re being bullshat? The listeners have a ceremonial role to play too.

Oh, absolutely. Bullshit is often ceremonial. It’s part of many jobs.

[New_Deal_Democrat]

@Bryan_Ekers

I dunno, these days exceptionalism seems more likely to be used as an excuse to protect America’s moneyed class:

“Who cares if government-funded health care leads to longer lifespans and lower costs in Canada and Europe? That doesn’t prove it’ll work here! We’re exceptional!”

This is the way a conversation like that usually goes:

Him: Socialism has failed in every country where it has been tried.

Me. Countries that have universal health care always have better health and lower costs than the United States.

Him: Oh yeah? If you like it over there, why don’t you leave here?

His assumption is that any criticism of the United States from the left means that one hates America. Those who feel that way feel free to express their hatred for the American government and for any American to the left of Joseph Lieberman.

[Little_Nemo]

@BrainGlutton

Tell us about Canadian Exceptionalism.

P.J. O’Rourke once said Canadians “are apparently able to train Frenchmen to play hockey, which is more than any European has ever been able to do.”

[Latro]

@Little_Nemo

P.J. O’Rourke once said Canadians “are apparently able to train Frenchmen to play hockey, which is more than any European has ever been able to do.”

The French play good hockey.

Oh you mean ice-hockey..

[wonky]

I don’t mind if people are patriotic or think the US is a great country. I generally think it’s pretty rockin’, myself. But the above mentioned “Oh, that won’t work HERE” bs is infuriating. It most often crops up in healthcare discussions, but there are other contexts. It’s the fallback of American Exceptional Incompetence. Those other countries can make universal healthcare work, but we’re just not capable!

[BrainGlutton]

@Latro

The French play good hockey.

Oh you mean ice-hockey..

Which does not involve the tonsils.

[punch_line_loser]

For my part, I don’t think the Obama quotations above make him an “American Exceptionalist” nor do they make him a liar - a bit of a weasel perhaps, given the wording he used that would prevent anyone from being able to characterize him as anything conclusively.

But I’m just going to come out and say it: I think American Exceptionalism is an evil idea that can bring almost nothing but harm. It’s a flimsy justification for our hubris in repeating the past mistakes of other nations (and even our own) and thinking that just because we’ve got a novel origin story we can somehow get away with more bullshit than those other, more pedestrian nations.

If you wanna enter the global age then ditch your old-school imperialist-ass ideas, you entitled “exceptionalist” fools!

[BrainGlutton]

@jsgoddess

I don’t mind if people are patriotic or think the US is a great country. I generally think it’s pretty rockin’, myself. But the above mentioned “Oh, that won’t work HERE” bs is infuriating. It most often crops up in healthcare discussions, but there are other contexts. It’s the fallback of American Exceptional Incompetence. Those other countries can make universal healthcare work, but we’re just not capable!

This a thousand times.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Rand_Rover

Oh good, a strawman. So rare to see those.

So why wouldn’t it work in the U.S.? Too much resistance from all the rugged individualists out taming the west?

[drewtwo99]

Ever since I watched the Auto Tune The News series, I can’t think of American Exceptionalism without thinking of “Exceptional dance moves and exceptional fast food!”

Love it.

[BrainGlutton]

@Nars_Glinley

They gave the world poutine.

OK, now give us an example that does not warrant nuclear bombardment.

[XT]

@Bryan_Ekers

So why wouldn’t it work in the U.S.? Too much resistance from all the rugged individualists out taming the west?

So, why wouldn’t a US political system work in Canada? Too much hockey?? :p. The answer, of course is that it would, but due to historical factors that’s not the path you took, and at this point most Canadians would be uncomfortable trying to go that path. Pretty much just like universal health care in the US. Our current kludge system didn’t just spring up fully formed from the mind of Zeus on day, but evolved over a long time…and by and large it’s worked for us, met our perceived needs and hasn’t pissed off enough people in the US to (yet) warrant a full blown reboot to something else. Other countries had different historical pressures that led them to their own current systems.

Again, exceptional doesn’t equal best, and doesn’t mean there arent flaws…even fundamental flaws. Just look at other nations or empires considered exceptional historically and you can see myriad flaws. Honestly, this whole focus on universal healthcare as some sort of proof that the US isn’t exceptional is kind of silly…it’s like trying to look at a bush while not only ignoring the trees but denying there is any forest there as well. The US, by any definition is pretty clearly exceptional. This isn’t blind faith or silly jingoism, it’s plainly fact at this time in history. The US has a huge, disproportional influence on the entire world on political, economic, military, cultural, etc etc levels, and we’ve had that for decades now. And probably will for decades to come as well, though you can already see the waning of that influence as other nations start asserting themselves or breaking out of our shadow.

-XT

[XT]

@sisu

That could be said for ANY country, Australia is unlike any nation in the world, so is Iraq, Uzbekistan, Samoa etc etc.

Yes the US does have some major impact on the world but I would go as far to say that it China, Greece, Germany and the Middle East are having a larger impact on the world financially.

So is America exceptional? Yes, but it is not better.

But none of those countries have anywhere near the same level of impact that the US does or has had for the past several decades. They aren’t even close…yet…and may never be…and certainly not in the same league with the US, impact wise. As a for instance, imagine if the same thing going on in the Eurozone ATM was instead happening in the US. Instead of looking at a possible recession world wide we’d be looking at financial armageddon.

And, again, exceptional does not equal best. I’m sure that everyone who lives in other countries rightfully feel their country is the bestest mostest wonderfultastic place to live…and that living in the US would suck. Lots of Americans would agree with them too. But thinking you live in the most wonderful place on the globe (set to the Debeers theme song) doesn’t equate to your country being exceptional, except maybe in your own mind or the mind of your fellow citizens.

-XT

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

I think American Exceptionalism is a combination of traditional English freedom as argued for in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history combined with the fact that American was isolated from European conflicts relatively until World War I and the fact that American culture was shaped largely by Puritan, middle-class New England (hence why the South remained backward due to it being strongly Anglican, “Cavalier” more in common with the Caribbean colonies in some ways).

[BrainGlutton]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

I think American Exceptionalism is a combination of traditional English freedom as argued for in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history combined with the fact that American was isolated from European conflicts relatively until World War I and the fact that American culture was shaped largely by Puritan, middle-class New England (hence why the South remained backward due to it being strongly Anglican, “Cavalier” more in common with the Caribbean colonies in some ways).

America was also shaped by the entrepreneurial political culture of the Mid-Atlantic states, perhaps even more so than by the political culture the New England Puritans. You can read all about this in Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind, drawing heavily on Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer and The Cousins’ Wars, by Kevin Phillips. From Lind’s book, Chapter 4, “The Fall of Washington”:

The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the ethnoregional theory of American politics, which has been developed by the historians David Hackett Fischer, Daniel Elazar, D.W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. The ethnoregional theory holds that in the United States powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties and ideologies. The labels “Democrat” and “Republican” differ in their meaning from generation to generation; regional subcultures such as those of New England and the Tidewater South change much more slowly.

The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate to a uniform American national culture; rather, they assimilate to one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky has defined a thesis he calls the Doctrine of Effective First Settlement that holds: “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” . . .

Historians differ on the question of how many of these enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. Most agree on three: a Yankee culture that spread westward overland from New England; a Quaker culture operating in Pennsylvania; and a Cavalier culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, identify a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland South from Appalachia to the Ozarks and Texas. In his magisterial Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), David Hackett Fischer argues persuasively that these four “hearth cultures” originated in different regions of early modern Britain and were transplanted to North America by four waves of immigrants. In the first wave (1629-40), Puritans from the eastern counties of England settled New England. The second wave (1642-75) brought anti-Puritan, royalist Cavaliers from the south of England to Virginia. Quakers from the North Midlands of England colonized Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley after emigrating during the third wave (1675-1715). The fourth and final major Anglo-American migration, which lasted from 1717 to 1775, transplanted so-called Scots-Irish from northern England, lowland Scotland, and the north of Ireland (Ulster).

In addition to having distinctive folkways and dialects of English, these four groups of British-American immigrants had their own unique variants of a common individualistic and liberal British political culture. Fischer describes the New England Puritan ideal as “ordered freedom,” the Quaker ideal as “reciprocal freedom,” the Scots-Irish ideal as “natural freedom,” and the coastal southern ideal as “hegemonic freedom” (deference to traditional elites). Another historian, Daniel J. Elazar, calls the New England tradition the “moralistic” culture, the midatlantic region the “individualistic” culture, and the coastal southern tradition the “traditional” culture. . . .

The ethnoregional theory provides the answer to the mystery of American sectional differences with respect to war. Regional disagreements about war are part of a larger pattern of regional disagreement about the legitimacy of all forms of violence. “Historians of Southern mores are agreed that violence as an aspect of Southern life clearly distinguished the region from the rest of the country,” writes historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Of the southerner, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the energy which his [northern] neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.” Southern states lead the nation not only in military academies but in homicide rates and death penalty laws and in low penalties for domestic violence. Northern states have the lowest homicide rates and the greatest number of statutes requiring a citizen to retreat before attacking an assailant or intruder in his home.

These regional differences reflect the difference in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different, but compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners look with greater approval on violent retaliation for insults. But southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates is accounted for almost entirely by violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers’ quarrels, and disputes within the family. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city black Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants.

“Greater New England” here refers to the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest and northern California, all heavily settled by New Englanders after the Civil War, as the Southwest was heavily settled by Southerners.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

– NM will repost.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Bryan_Ekers

So why wouldn’t it work in the U.S.? Too much resistance from all the rugged individualists out taming the west?

UHC would undoubtedly be expensive, though not necessarily more so than what we now have. In the world view of many American conservatives, the poor would benefit disproportionately from UHC, but are undeserving of such social benefits, being the cause of their own sorry plight. Along with the idea of AE goes American Optimism, (AO) which goes to support the thesis that anyone who wants to can become successful, or at least secure, if they simply work hard enough. Accordingly, they don’t believe the rich should be overly burdened by taxes, and say so at the ballot box even when it runs counter to their own best interests. AO also is central to belief that if you’re healthy now you won’t ever be sick, at least not beyond the capacity of your own resources to handle. Meanwhile, in another area of what used to be a public responsibility, we continue to give lip service to the ideal of good public education. But somewhere along the way we decided to stop paying for schools and universities. We don’t even pay for wars anymore; in the 1960s, there was a special surtax to pay for the intervention in Vietnam. By contrast, no voter has been asked to pay for our current excursions in any real financial terms. I think the statement that there is no such thing as a temporary tax reduction will emerge as the defining axiom of our political era.

Back in March there was an episode of This American Life which attempted to delve into people’s attitudes about government and public works. Increasingly, it appears that the right wingers are so disparaging of government that they want privatization of public works even when that proves to cost the people more money to get less done–just like our health care system.

The decline of organized labor, in whose coffin yesterday’s failed recall in Wisconsin may indeed be the last nail, began long before anyone heard of off-shoring and outsourcing. In the postwar decades, employers, workers, and consumers all needed to be near each other, while the currently entrenched employer-based health insurance system began as a historical accident. Nevertheless, the system worked great for more than forty years during which the notion of corrupt labor leaders and lazy union members also became entrenched. But now that employers no longer need American workers, where does that leave us? We, as middle class Americans, despised labor organizers as soon as we thought we would never need them again. But they say there is an answer, which is that we should become our own CEOs and start our own business in the grand American tradition. Do conservatives think that each of us can be a successful entrepreneur? Or that the overall level of productivity in such a system, in which economy of scale would go out the window, wouldn’t plummet? But it doesn’t matter, because ideology trumps all else.

The great tragedy of AE may well turn out to be that we, alone of all the nations that achieved a high average standard of living in the last century, will vote ourselves into a banana-republic style oligarchy characterized by an impoverished working class.

[Full_Tilt_Boogie]

There’s no such thing as ‘American Exceptionalism’ - it’s a myth taught to American children and one broadly propagated in certain US media outlets (FOX ‘News’ being the worst offender), which relies heavily on tub-thumping claims to ‘patriotism’. It’s one of those phenomena, along with 'The American Dream, for which no one seems to have a coherent explanation… merely an impression or a gut feeling.

And lastly, we need to set a set of matrices as to in what ways is America ‘exceptional’? It’s world leading position as the country with the most incarcerated people-per-capita? Its 27th place in the world Mathematics tables? What?

Great article on it here: The Myth of American Exceptionalism

Added to which, my mate in Washington State (WA), Bruce Lindner, wrote this article, apropos the topic, only yesterday (I have his permission to reprint it here):

@Bruce Lindner

American Exceptionalism?

In the late 19th Century, there was a Frenchman (who may or may not have actually lived) named Nicolas Chauvin, a zealous nationalist who believed everything French was superior, merely by virtue of it being French. From his name, was derived the word chauvinism. When I hear conservative talkers and Fox News anchors drone on about “American Exceptionalism,” it makes me cringe. They are the modern-day Nicolas Chauvins, only they aren’t French, they’re Americans. And as was Chauvin, they’re wrong. Dead wrong.

A few months ago, I met with some friends over dinner at an extremely busy restaurant. The place is always packed, with a line of people standing outside, waiting to get in. In my party of 9, was a couple from Wales, visiting friends, and touring the states from coast to coast. After we finished our dinner, we all walked outside to say our goodbyes, and I spotted a man sitting in a concrete divider in the middle of the street. He only had one leg. Laying beside him was a pair of crutches, and he was muttering to himself incoherently. He was obviously mentally troubled, and the people milling about in front of the restaurant just went about there business, with this derelict of a human being wasting away before them as if he were part of the landscape.

And indeed, he was. For me personally, this was mortifying. As for my friends visiting from Wales, it was embarrassing enough that they witnessed it, but to have them see just how routine it seemed to the passersby, it became seared into my brain. I’ve been to Europe several times, and with the exception of the more third-world ex-communist bloc countries, you rarely see beggars anymore, and you never witness a disabled person discarded like a piece of trash. If someone in France, England or Germany has problems as horrendous as this guy apparently did, they’re generally scooped up by social services, and given the appropriate help. This guy could have keeled over and died there that night, and nobody would have known about it until the vultures started circling.

So when I hear this term; American Exceptionalism, being bandied about by the right-wing (and in truth, by some on the left who are too cowardly to refute it and call it what it is: patriotism on steroids), I cringe. The fact is, the term is a euphemism for American superiority. This is all part of the flotsam and jetsam leftover from the 2000 election, and the hubris that emerged from the neocons after 9/11. That period when “Freedom Fries” replaced French fries, when restauranteurs all across the country were pouring Bordeaux wines into gutters, to protest that nation’s refusal to participate in our little Iraqi adventure, and as a way of poking our collective finger in the eyes of all the other countries who doubted America’s military and political hegemony.

The truth is, American superiority is 100% pure, 24 karat bullshit.

Is America exceptional in many ways? Absolutely. Our national parks, our beautiful coastlines, our rivers, our mountains, the Bill of Rights… I could go on for hours. But could anybody say that our national parks are more beautiful than those of say, Canada? Our coastlines are more beautiful than those of Brazil, Italy or Turkey? Our mountains are more beautiful than the Swiss Alps or the Andes? The Bill of Rights is superior to the Magna Carta? No. Every nation on the planet can in some small way claim to be exceptional. Even the most poverty-stricken nations of the third world have at least one or two unique bragging rights, and NONE of them suggest superiority over all others. Only Americans do that. We just love to remind everyone that we have the most powerful armed forces and the biggest arsenal ever known to man. Yet in all our boasting, we’re quick to skirt such stories such as how our military was misused by its civilian leadership to invade and utterly destroy a nation of 25 million people who posed no threat to us. And, in all our “superiority,” we brush aside as unimportant, the fact that we allow disabled, mentally disturbed citizens to rot in the gutters of otherwise pristine cities.

A truly enlightened nation would have very different priorities. The feeding of our poor and infirm should be at the top of that list. Healthcare for citizens lying in the street, should come before tax breaks for billionaires and subsidies for oil companies. Universally available and affordable education for our children shouldn’t come at the expense of a fleet of stealth aircraft that will (hopefully) never be used. And, perhaps unique amongst us, any truly exceptional nation would NEVER have adopted an electoral process that relies so heavily on electronic voting machines provided by partisan corporate interests!

The fact is, this country now has the highest healthcare costs, the highest infant mortality rate, the worst gender inequality, the highest murder rate and the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation on the planet. Exceptional, indeed. Where do these defenders of American superiority stand on that?

At one time or another, many empires, monarchies and nations have laid claim as the most powerful on Earth. Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and probably a half-dozen others whose names are lost to history. And the one thing they all had in common, is that not a single one of them could ever conceive of a time when they weren’t the most powerful, or they didn’t have the biggest armies, or their armadas didn’t rule the Seven Seas. Yet, their power did indeed wane, as will ours. I would argue that the process has already begun, but the folks on the wacky right who measure America’s strength via military prowess, aren’t looking at the big picture. They’re only looking at who has the most muscle, while ignoring – or indeed, causing – our withering backbone.

No nation can survive with an undereducated populace, or with a two-class system; the haves and the have nots… or by spending nearly 60% of its discretionary budget on military hardware. Just as surely as Rome fell, so too will we one day. And for those who talk about American Exceptionalism, in this case, I would tend to agree; we’re exceptional amongst the nations today due to our path of self-annihilation. I just find it ironic that the right mistakes such obvious weaknesses as strengths.

I love this country, warts and all. But when these faux patriots boast of our superior power, and pressure politicians to co-opt their talking points, I’m amazed by their stupidity. Is America great? Yes, it is. Are we exceptional? Yes we are, in many ways — as is Guatemala, Bhutan, Gabon, Peru and Laos. But are we superior to any other country on the planet, by any sense of the word? No. And it’s high time we call out this American Exceptionalism meme for what it is; pompous, overbearing arrogance, fringing on fascism. And, American Exceptionalism as defined by the right is a bald-faced lie.

© Bruce Lindner - 15th July 2012