Nah, it’s just the same old cheap marketing, appealing to fear and insecurity. There’s not much travel distance from “you won’t get laid unless you drive a cool car and drink a cool beer” to “your kids will be kidnapped and corrupted by radical commie muslim atheist queers.” Nothing “masterful” about it. The same refrains keep happening because they keep working.
I alluded to one example in the OP, and I’ll post up a few in a bit (I’m technically supposed to be working right now)
When I was a child I was told that by the good fortune of being born in America, I was in the pinnacle, both geographically and chronologically, of freedom and equality and individual rights.
By the time I was nineteen, I thought “What a horrible thing, if it’s true!”
I like G K Chesterton’s attitude: saying “my country right or wrong” is like saying “my mother, drunk or sober”. It’s those who care enough to critique America for its shortcomings and insufficiencies who are the patriots.
I’m waiting to hear about the better nations that support freedom around the world. We are failing now, because of a movement that wants to destroy what we actually stand for.
Where else did anyone have any civil rights? The answer is nowhere. We can certainly look at our failures and criticize those who want us to fail. But you are using their approach to tear down what we have and what we have achieved. The US started at when no one was free and pursued freedom as we know it now on a hope and a Deist prayer. The job is not done but we now face our worst enemy, the one that comes from within. We must return to the real exceptionalism that until recently had beaten back the fascists powers of the world. That fascism now is building within inside and outside and the solution is not to tear down the success we have achieved. I have no trouble pointing out our failures, but I don’t see the rest of the world doing any such thing.
And they would use those armies as they always have, for their own defense at best, and usually only to prevent or remove the autonomy of other nations.
I decry the attitude of those who use the phrase ‘American Exceptionalism’ to justify the opposite, who actually seek ‘American Ordinaryism’. I won’t aid them in their effort to end the exceptionalism that we have to hope will be there to fight back the growing threats in the world.
I saw this quoted on a calendar once and it’s always stuck with me
America is not exceptional.
(Well, except in its gun violence - that’s actually what I originally figured the thread was about).
I feel that quote can be modified just a bit and be true for most religions as well.
Scandinavia, France, Holland, historically. The EU, UK now. All my examples have made horrible mistakes, just like USA. My country’s treatment of the Inuit in Greenland and slaves in the West Indies are as bad as anything USA have done at the same time, even if the numbers of oppressed are smaller.
I suppose the “better” depends on the definition of better.
I didn’t start this thread to play top trumps, I started it to explain why top trumps is stupid.
Since you obviously are having difficulty getting this, let’s imagine that we were talking about the claim that California is the #1 state, exceptional, and blessed by God. Do you appreciate how silly this is, even if we can find metrics in which California is indeed the best?
Pure ignorance. Nowhere is perfect of course, but in terms of slavery, civil rights etc, the US was absolutely a laggard, and continues to be in terms of civil rights.
I have no doubt you’ve grown up with people telling you “The US taught the world slavery was wrong” or whatever. Yeah, turns out it’s bullshit.
White supremacy has been a core part of US culture from the very beginning. And, during world war ii, there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the US, holding mass rallies explicitly in support of the Nazis.
It doesn’t help anyone to pretend that the US has always been the beacon of freedom and liberty, and that the modern fascist movement is just a blip. It will just keep happening.
And this point is not just directed at you, @TriPolar , this is the kind of thing I am trying to address with this pitting.
I have no issue with anyone that sees American Exceptionalism as an aspiration, a goal to achieve. If that were all it was, then it would be be an inarguable positive.
I’d like to offer up two articles – both of which I just read and can heartily recommend. The first is from Pew, about a 14-17min read, and is from 2006:
The second is from 2019, about an 11min read, and is from “Foreign Policy”:
Pew takes a more quantitative, poll-driven approach to attitudes and impacts. Foreign Policy, I think, takes a more holistic view that comes closer to describing my views on the matter.
Though I’d love to see (if they haven’t already) Pew update the numbers and the resultant article.
Who told you this, and why did you believe them?
I remember thinking this. In 7th grade after finishing my US History class. Afterwards I continued learning history and gained a more nuanced understanding of the process.
Ummm, while I agree with most of your post, I think you may want to revisit this, or at least provide some further explanation.
I will concur that before WWII there was supporters of Nazi Germany (America Firster’s and the German-American Bund for example), but they petered out pretty quickly in December 1941.
I’m guessing you meant “WWII prior to US direct involvement” (Sept 1939-Dec 1941), but that wasn’t clear, at least to my possibly dense thought processes (hey, it’s Friday morning).
Otherwise an interesting discussion.
Pedantry completed. Press on.
I’ve never really understood American Exceptionalism to mean that the US is better, but rather that it’s unique in a number of ways, and that uniqueness colors everything we do/have done in ways that (primarily European) countries don’t have/don’t understand.
For example, we’re one of the very few countries that was settled through immigration and homesteading/pioneering, as opposed to some sort of Encomienda system, penal labor, etc… We’re one of the few (the only?) where the individual States got together and delegated power TO the central government, instead of the other way around. (I personally think this one is a huge difference and is overlooked too often). We’re one of the few that has a Constitution that outside of defining our system of government, largely limits the powers of the government. We’re still one of the countries with the most robust free speech laws and protections that there are.
These sorts of things when taken as a whole tend to be what I always considered American Exceptionalism to be about. I can see how some might interpret that to mean that we’re better somehow, but that wasn’t how I really understood it, which is that comparing the US to say… Germany is going to be fundamentally apples to oranges in some degree.
I think that’s an important distinction. To add no value whatsoever, here are ‘the two’ dictionary definitions for ‘exceptional:’
You’re distinguishing between the two uses in a rather important way.
I was rather surprised that it was apparently NOT sarcasm, myself…
Adversarial posturing. “It’s us against them!” Adversarial confrontation meshes with the emotions and cognitive state of being suffused with adrenaline. Fight or flight. Danger. Be prepared to endure pain and hardship, be tough. Hate them back. Beat your enemies.
Politics can have a personality, and the politics of the chest-beating angry finger-pointing, enemy-within-blaming, “we need to go back to glory days” testosterone-enshrining types are the politics of authoritarianism. And definitely vice versa.
If you don’t take our word for it, take the word of all the people that have looked to move.
You’re not being pedantic. Activities of the German American Bund were virtually nil in the period between September 1, 1939, and December 7, 1941; and it was outlawed when the US entered the war.
German American Bund | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)
The German American Bund closely cooperated with the “Christian Front” organized by the antisemitic priest Father Charles Coughlin. The activities of the German American Bund led both Jewish and non-Jewish congressional representatives to demand that it be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Martin Dies. The Committee hearings, held in 1939, showed clear evidence of German American Bund ties to the Nazi government.
Shortly thereafter, Kuhn was convicted of embezzling funds from the organization and was sentenced to prison. In the following years, a number of other German American Bund leaders were interned as dangerous aliens, and others were jailed for various offenses. By 1941 the membership of the organization had waned. After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the US government outlawed the German American Bund.
Within a year of the German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden [on February 20, 1939], the organization and their support collapsed. The Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, and declarations of war from France and the United Kingdom, eroded support for the American Nazi movement. Shortly after, Kuhn was convicted of embezzlement of funds from the Bund and was sentenced to prison at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Within a year, every leader of the Bund was interned or jailed as dangerous aliens, and by the end of December 1941, the US Government outlawed the German-American Bund. In 1942, Kuhn’s citizenship was dissolved and he was deported to West Germany in 1945.
Yes sorry I should have said that the public rallies were immediately prior to the war, not during.
It doesn’t really affect the point though: that the modern lurch towards fascism is hardly new.
America actively worked at making my country (And many others) less free.
This is so wrong it’s not even laughable, just incredibly fucking sad.