I say again, pervert, I am not denying that we are unique, I am denying that we are uniquely unique – that we are somehow different in kind from all other nations. We’re not. But “American exceptionalism” asserts that we are.
Hit “submit” by mistake . . .
As I was saying: The doctrine of “American exceptionalism” asserts that America is different in kind from all other nations. Ideas like “manifest destiny” and the neocons’ vision of our role in the world depend, to some extent, on American exceptionalism; but, as you say, the idea precedes them and does not necessarily imply them. I agree. The point I am making is that the original idea, American exceptionalism as such, is fundamentally wrong.
Yes, I know that one of your motivations is to make socialism more paletable in America. I can agree that scraping the entire constitution and replacing it with almost anything else would not change the desires of most Americans. I’m not sure how this ties into the idea of Pax Americana though.
Please stop. If you want to suggest that any American policy is particularly racist please bring more substantive argument than “they sound the same, same bullshit different actors.”
Perhaps then, you need to provide a definition of American exceptionalism by someone who believes in it. I have no idea whatsoever what uniquely unique is or how it is different from unique. As I understand the idea, American Exceptionalism is simply the notion that America is different combined with an appreciation or preference for that difference. What would be different about someone from France prefering to live in France.
I would agree that manifest destiny might have been closely tied to ideas of American Exceptionalism. However, I am not at all sure that this concept is included in the neocons ideas. I may have missed a briefing (I’m not really a neocon, I just play on on the internet) but I have not seen good evidence that neocons are promoting anything but freedom, prosperity and safety for the world as a whole. And I should add, that I have not seen good evidence that their methods are particularly nefarious.
And again, you are wrong that American Exceptionalism is fundamentally wrong. One would have to postulate that our form of government were totally unrealted to our culture rather than an expression of it. I think you may have a long way to go to show that. 
So it is the term that’s the problem, not any actual idea? If it is an idea you have a problem with, I should think defining it would be very important.
If by exceptionalism you mean the idea the God just loves us more because we’re American, I don’t think anyone here will disagree.
If you’re talking about the neo-cons, they are by and large not driven by our national mythos. Given that most neo-con thinkers are *not *seriously religious, they’re not driven by any belief in destiny or divine purpose or any such thing. Their attitudes are grounded much more in the obvious reality that the US is the economic, militarily and culturally dominant force on the planet, which they believe gives us unique opportunities and responsibilities. They may co-opt the rhetoric of the Mayflower to sell themselves, but their intellectual roots are secular.
As to whether or not America is different in kind: Do you allow that there are any differences in kind among nations? Consider:
Thailand:
Has existed as a unified nation in the same location for centuries
Has a dominant language which is distinct and widely spoken nowhere else
Has distinct, indigenous art and cultural forms which are widely practiced nowhere else
Has distinct religion that is widely practiced only in their region (Therevada Buddhism)
Has never been conquered or colonized for a long period of time
India:
As above, except … was profoundly affected by prolonged period of colonization by another culture, effects of which remain to this day.
Burma:
As above, except has completely rejected colonizer’s culture, language and religion.
Papua New Guinea:
History as an independant nation-state very short
Culture, language and religion are linked to tribes, of which there are many, some of which spill across arbitrary borders drawn by colonizer.
Australia:
History as independant nation-state short
Descendants of colonizer brought culture, language and religion with them and dominate to this day. Native cultures, languages and religions marginalized if not destroyed.
ISTM those are very different kinds of nations. Do you agree?
There seem to be two distinct ideas here that are not mutually exclusive.
Yes, America is unique. Aside from the history, how many sole superpowers are there around these days? American is quite distinct from other countries in that way. The largest economy, the strongest military.
Can’t we embrace, even celebrate, our uniqueness without wanting to force our way of life on other countries? Maybe I’m reading too much into your OP, but it seems that you want to kill both ideas, when it’s only the 2nd one (ie, using military force to spread our ideology abroad) that really is a problem.
BrainGlutton,
Check out American Exceptionalism on Wikpedia - gives both pros and cons to this concept. I just have a few things I’d like to point out.
Not surprising, since it can be argued that the neoconservative movement has been influenced by former Trotskyites and all that entails (note: I am not equating the neoconservative movement with Trotskyism - just that there are some rather striking parallels to each. One of which is the use of force in establishing legitimate forms of government that abide by a particularly ideology (Trotskyites - communist societies/govt’s; neocons - liberal democracies).
First, I personally think that it’s more an appropriation of the term by the neocons as a justification for portions of their ideology (If that, indeed, is how they view the term). An argument can be made that American exceptionalism refers to the historical uniqueness of how America came to become America. In other words, America, more than other countries, is more an embodiment of an idea (or ideal). Granted, much of that idea (or ideal) was a product of the times - greatly influenced by the humanistic philosophies of the British enlightenment (Locke, Mill, Hume, Smith, etc.). But it was those living in the American colonies that had the vision to actually put into practice the lofty ideals of the British enlightenment (Jefferson, Madison, etc.).
In many respects, if one agrees with this definition of American exceptionalism, then it raises it to the status of mythos. In other words, America is defined by it’s ideas/ideals more so than any other nation. If you take away the mythos, then what do we (as Americans) have to fall back on? Our language? Our religion? What?
I wouldn’t categorically state that the term “American Exceptionalism” is entirely bullshit. Maybe the way in which those that appropriate the term to justify their ideology, I would agree that the term is bullshit. But it all depends on ones view of what American Exceptionalism really means.
While in one sense, I would agree that the USA is an ordinary nation-state, similar to other nation-states. However, I remember someone stating in an old thread that the US is more a state-nation rather than a nation-state. In other words, more than other countries, what defines us as a people is more based on our form of government, our political institutions, and the ideas behind them.
As somone earlier stated, I think the USA and the USSR had a lot more in common than with other nation-states. That is, what defined the USSR not a shared cultural heritage, but one based more on ideology. A failed one, and I think one which was a shell of its former sense. In other words, the USSR morphed into something completely different from what the founders had initially envisioned. Whether this was a result of a flawed ideology or people who corrupted the ideology, I leave for another debate.
With the US, the idea of America - it’s mythos - lives on because America will never be a “finished product”. What I mean is while the ideals that embody America have been problematic in practice (slavery, etc.), we, as Americans, have demanded of ourselves to live up to the ideals we espouse. And I think, if America is to remain as America, that we always demand ourselves to live up to our ideals. I don’t think we, as Americans, will always be able to live up to our ideals. But we should never resign oursleves to not trying. The day we do, the day we can no longer call ourselves Americans.
Here’s where I strongly disagree with you. The day that the USA is ruled by a fascist dictator or a king is the day America ceases to exist. Oh, sure, it may live on as a nation-state. But the USA, more than any other country is defined by the ideals that helped bring it into existence and sustain it today.
Disagree - it can be argued that it does define who we are as a nation. I’ll agree that it’s possible our system can be improved upon. But here’s the kicker - if it is improved, it will be improved through the political/instrutional frameworks initially established by the founding fathers and built upon by those that have come after (this includes us). A Communist revolution on the order of establihsing a USSR taking place in the US, for example, will destroy any semblence of America as a nation. The name may live on, but the mythos will be destroyed (to be replaced by another mythos).
I agree that we don’t necessarily have an obligation to spread liberal republican government to the rest of the world. Again, I think this aspect of the neoconservative movement is misguided (trying to spread democracy by force). Instead, we should set an example to other countries around the world the benefits of a liberal republican government.
In one sense you are right; however, I think the US is special in a lot of ways. Historians will look back in a thousand years and pick apart the good and the bad. But I think what will resonate with the people of the future will be the ideals that Americans put into practice (imperfect though they have been).
We are and always have been an isolationist country with a drive towards manifest destiny.
We have and always will represent the lowest common denominator, the primary example of which is the Commander in Thief.
We may have more resources currently, but our legacy for the past fifty years is being the biggest blowhard of a country, always trying to intimidate everyone else into doing things our way.
Rah, rah, rah.
Go team.
Thank you professor Chomsky. Here’s your thorazine milkshake.
I did, not long ago, start a thread on replacing the Constitution (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262577), but I never suggested that would change anybody’s desires. When we replaced the Articles of Confederation with the 1789 Constitution, that did not change anyone’s desires, did it? It merely created different mechanisms by which the people’s desires could be translated into public policy (or not).
You miss the point. A multiracial American government sent a multiracial army to invade Iraq. We have abandoned the idea of racial imperialism but we are still infected with cultural imperialism – the idea that we are the real people and everybody else should be given a chance to be like us.
It’s something different from ordinary nationalism or patriotism, pervert. It is not just a sense of national uniqueness, but of national superiority. From the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism):
:eek: pervert, what country have you been living in – what planet have you been living on – for the past three years?
Please do not confuse the American nation with the United States of America. The first is a people and culture, the second is a government.
The nation of Russia existed before the Communist revolution. It continued to exist under Communist rule, within the larger USSR. And now that the USSR is no more, Russia continues to exist.
The nation of Poland was partitioned by foreign powers in the late 18th Century and did not re-emerge as an independent state until after WWI. Nevertheless, Poland continued to exist, as a nation, for all that time – otherwise it could not have been resurrected as a state.
The American nation existed, under monarchical rule (usually rather indifferent rule), for at least a century before we won independence from Britain. It existed under the Articles of Confederation and under the 1789 Constitution. It has continued to exist through all the social and political changes – emancipation of women and blacks, extension of voting rights to the propertyless of both genders and all races, legalization of homosexuality, creation of the New Deal welfare state, centralization of more and more government functions in Washington, acceptance and assimilation of tens of millions of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants and even nonwhite immigrants – which frankly would have horrified our Founding Fathers to no end. And it will continue to exist, no matter how we evolve (or devolve, or just plain mutate) politically or socially in the future. Nations are not immortal but they live a long time, usually much longer than their governments and even longer than their political cultures.
The British nation is in party defined by its political culture – but how much does that culture have in common, really, with British political culture as it was at the time of the first Parliament or the signing of the Magna Carta? As George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn, “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.” And, in predicting a postwar socialist transformation of Britain (which didn’t happen, but to many intelligent Brits it seemed a reasonble expectation at the time):
And he was right! That is, if the socialist revolution he expected had come to pass, England would have remained England. And if some such revolution (whether violent or electoral) happened here in America, America would remain America.
I am probably wrong, but i have always understood the term “American Exceptionalism” to mean the somewhat narrow concept that the U.S. is unique in that, unlike other advanced countries, it has never really had a viable Socialist party.
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I don’t mean to pick on this post in particular, it’s merely typical of a mindset that I find disturbing. Pick a misguided quote from a conservative about a century ago, and insinuate that this is the sort of thinking guiding decisions today. The “Right” in American politics has drifted considerably to the left since Kipling’s days, and it’s a good thing. I would argue that the current “hard right” would at best be moderately left of traditional Gladstonian “liberalism” of Kipling’s day…
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As far as American uniqueness, there IS a fundamental difference between us and any other nation out there. At its root the relationship of Americans to their government is a proprietary one - the government exists at our whim, and it exists to serve us. When it fails to do so, or it tramples on our “natural” rights, it loses any claim to legitimacy. This is an attitude deeply ingrained in Americans, and it forms a core of our cultural beliefs. The same is not true in Europe where, despite pretty words and theories to the contrary, the baseline relationship of the government to the citizen is much more paternalistic and authoritarian. Put briefly, Euros on the whole will put up with a great deal more intevention from their governments than would ever be tolerated in the US.
Don’t many in this nation claim, that we must be exceptional. because so many wish to come to this nation and does that not contribute to that thinking, even if the dichotomies set up within the system create that false illusion, depending?
But this is a fundamentally flawed interpretation of events. No one has said that Iraq must emerge some sort of middle east America. Not in any reasonable sense of that word anyway. No one has claimed that Iraq must establish all or even many of the exact same institutions that we have here. What has been said is that Saddam had to go, and the Iraqi people must determine for themselves how to form thier own government after that. Your contention that we are forming some sort of little America by force is just silly.
Quite. I said, a celebration or preference for the identified uniqueness. I’m sure many cultures have similar notions.
Well, go back into the ask the neocon thread, look at the documents prepared by the neocons linked to there, and show me where your nefarious motives can be discovered. I’ll admit that I am not an expert on this subject, but it seems to me you have to believe neocon detractors to ascribe nefarious motives to them. You have to swallow the detractors version of American Exceptionalism whole and take it several steps farther to get to your position.
I’m sorry, I realize it is fashionable to claim that America is establishing an empire in the same way that Rome, England, or Alexander did. But this seems, to me, to miss fundemental differences. I agree entirely that were America to spread by force the market for Madona or Coke this would be reprehensible. But the only thing we’ve done in the last 3 years is remove some very nasty people from power and allow those subjugated the opportunity to determine for themselves how they will run their own lives. History may tell a different story. When the full tale of Afghanistan and Iraq are viewed from history, there may indeed be imperialistic overtones. But it is just silly to equate American actions there with Soviet actions in Hungary, for instance.
I don’t understand.
Above you are arguing that America should not do much of anything about the affairs of other countries. But in the thread to which you linked:
You seem to be contradicting yourself. We shouldn’t feel obligated to clean up anyone else’s government, unless it is the Sudan or Rwanda.
If there is nothing special about America, why are you arguing that the US should intervene in the Sudan and Rwanda, instead of, say, the French?
If no one else is going to do anything, why should the US lift a finger? If, in fact, there is nothing special about the US that would compel us to do so.
Regards,
Shodan
I tend to agree with eponymous that the US is an idea-state as much as it is a nation-state. While the US might remain recognizably American under a totalitarian government or as an theocratic empire, to a great many Americans (and others, I suppose) there would be an incredible loss of what made us us - a rejection of certain ideals which, though there interpretation and application have evolved substantially over the years, have remained constant at least in the abstract.
Greece in Homeric, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern times may be recognizable as “Greek” from an external or modern point of view but what do they have in common other than a nominally common language, geography, and ethnicity? Would a region of seven independent nations over the area currently occupied by China still be China? How long before the parts become their own nations? (Will Taiwan ever be its own nation?) Is Austria a nation (or just a truncated German statelet)? Were Prussia, Bavaria, and the Rhineland all inevitably part of the German nation-state? Is Switzerland a nation? Belgium? Belarus? Are the US, Australia, NZ, Canada, and South Africa (and any other ex British settler states I may have omitted) all doomed to rejoin the UK as part of the same nation? When did France become a nation? Are the Basque regions part of the Spanish nation? Was a Burgundian nation ever a possibility?
Historians may agree that the 13 colonies had a separate culture from GB well before the revolution - but would the colonists have agreed? Was there a single culture on this side of the Atlantic? Which side of the Atlantic diverged from the common starting point?
I am well aware of the distinction between a nation and a government. But I think it’s you who are somewhat confused. What I mean is that, unlike many other countries, what distinguishes America as a nation is based on how it came into existence (revolution), how its government and political institutions were formed (democratic respresentative republic, seperation of powers, constitution & bill of rights), and how well (or badly) we have lived up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (Civil War, Civil Rights, etc.)
Sorry - disagree. There was no singular “American” nation that existed prior to independence. A strong argument could be made that it was British - an extension of a nation already in existence. Another argument could be made of 13 seperate nations prior to the American revolution - after all, many of our forefathers more strongly identified themselves with the states from which they came.
Two key elements that helped bring out the idea of America as America (or America as a NATION) was the American Revolution (a historical event unlike any other in history at the time) and the ratification of the Constitution (the political framework for our country). If the Articles of Confederation were still the abiding framework for our government and political institutions, we would most definetely NOT be American (as a nation) but a collection of “nations” (Virginians, Californians, Texans, Ohioans, etc.) bound by a governmental/political framework. We, as a nation-state (The United States of America) fought a civil war that firmly solidifed the notion that we were one people (an American NATION) based on the principles laid out by our founding fathers and codified in our Constitution.
And here you help make my argument! In other words, what makes a Jew from Eastern Europe, A WASP with forebears from the Mayflower, a Hispanic living in Texas who speaks no English, a lesbian athiest from Berkeley, California, a “skinny kid with a funny name” whose parents were from Africa - what makes all of these people American? By virtue of the fact that they all happen to live in the nation-state called the United States of America? Or is it rather the “ideas” from which this nation-state was formed and live on in the beliefs of people today? Again, I think it more useful to use the term state-nation rather than nation-state to reflect how we, as Americans, have become a nation (country came first, identity came later; much different from others - identity came first, country came later).
That is what Marxists mean by “American exceptionalism,” but the term is used by other commentators in other ways (see above). Again, from the Wikipedia:
(I am not a Marxist, by the way. A socialist, but not a Marxist. But that’s another discussion.)
I never said I was opposed to American military intervention abroad on principle, only that I reject the notion of any special American mission in the world. We just need to pick and choose carefully. Sometimes we can beneficially intervene, and at relatively little cost to our own interests. And sometimes we can make a justifiable case for intervention purely in our own interests.
If I had been president after 9/11/01, I think I would have invaded Afghanistan, just for the sake of eliminating al-Qaeda’s main base of operations; benefits to the Afghan people would have been a secondary consideration – but not to be disregarded entirely, as the Bush Admin seems to have done.
But I would not have invaded Iraq, because we did not need to do that to defend ourselves, and the costs would be enormous, and the benefits to the Iraqi people very uncertain. Which is, now, proving to be the case. What we see happening there now is much like what happened when the Yugoslavian government fell: A brutal dictatorship, which was at least capable of keeping the lid on ethnic and religious hatreds, has been removed, and now all those forces are coming to the surface. We should have left bad enough alone.
In the case of Rwanda, I think our intervention might have saved lives – changing the government would be a secondary consideration. Likewise in the case of the Sudan – but I’m not entirely convinced (Tamerlane corrected me on certain important facts), and I have started a GD thread to discuss that issue (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=269291).
Here’s another interesting discussion of the AE idea: From a review, by Michael Lind (yes, him again!), in Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996 (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19960301fareviewessay4193/michael-lind/the-american-creed-does-it-matter-should-it-change.html), of American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, by Seymour Martin Lipset (W.W. Norton, 1996):