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asyouwish72 -> RE: American Exceptionalism (2/13/2014 10:07:12 AM)
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I actually think that the WWII generation came in late in the history of the idea of American exceptionalism. I think the phrase was coined a century earlier by Alexis de Toqueville. Back then, in the early 19th century, we really *were* exceptional. We'd put effective representative government into practice (admittedly, it only represented landed white males) when most of the rest of the western world was still running under monarchies of some kind or another. All of the political ideas of the enlightenment and classic liberalism (which is not exactly the same as modern liberalism) came to full flower here first, the end of a line of political thought that had started way back with the founding of Boston as a 'city on a hill'; a model of an egalitarian society. The 'American experiment' was a radical, destabilizing upheaval of existing political norms. It fired (at least in part) events like the French Revolution (which had noble, enlightened goals before it degenerated into mobs, barbarism, and Napoleon). Ben Franklin had been a rock star over there.
We also had a very egalitarian society in terms of wealth distribution, at least in the North and on the frontier. Land was abundant (since smallpox or plague had fortuitously annihilated the rightful owners- truly 'divine providence' in the worst sense of that term), so there were few truly poor except in the South, which was built much more on the European model: landed gentry and peasant (or in our case, slave) labor. Given how much earlier slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the catastrophe of slavery and Jim Crowe made our "exceptionalism" very much white-only (and more than a bit hypocritical), but for what it was worth, it was there.
The idea continued, even as the rest of the western world largely adopted our political thought, as a consequence of our vast economic strength following the industrial revolution. By the time of Standard Oil, Americans were the people who got things done (even if our egalitarian economic system had collapsed into pockets of endless gilded age wealth atop vast swathes of immigrant poverty). In World War II, we assumed the mantle of world leadership (on the cheap, as it turns out; the Soviets did most of the heavy lifting against Nazi Germany, supplied by American factories) and once again were cast in a position where our political thought was superior to that of our competitors. For all the ideological fervor of the communists, nobody ever much tried to sneak from West Berlin across into East Germany. It was a bleak, spirit-breaking form of government. The west had a more moral system (again, despite the travesty of the Jim Crowe south), and American was the captain of the west. The World War II generation had reason to be confident, even smug, in their belief in our superiority. They'd earned it.
In the present day, though, there's nothing much left to distinguish our political or economic philosophy (which is succinctly described, as best I can tell, as 'winner take all and the rest be damned'). Communism is effectively dead. Western thought, free-market capitalism, and representative democracy won. Those ideas now span the better part of the globe. Western Europe has a much stronger social contract with its citizens now than we do (what's derided as a nanny state here is just what is expected of effective governance over there- in exchange for paying taxes, citizens get good educations, assistance with child care, and access to decent health care). It's a matter of judgement if their system is better (I personally think there's some things each side could learn from the other) or worse than ours, but there is no simple, clear-cut answer. Why would children today (who have better access to efficient communications than any prior generation, and therefore live in a 'smaller' world) see us as exceptional, when our ideas have spread so far that they are now the rule elsewhere as well? I'm sure that notion seems like thoughtless hypocritical posturing to them, as well it should.
I always have and always will believe that our core political ideas have great value, and that America is the intellectual and spiritual parent of most of modern political practice. But when I here retorts about American Exceptionalism in the modern day, I generally cringe. They are normally coming from people who seem to think America has some blanket moral superiority over everyone else, and that we are effectively supposed to 'win just by showing up' in everything we do. The reality is we have a mediocre education system, poor infrastructure, and inefficient tax system, lousy provision of health care (or at least an insane system of financing it, technologically it's quite good), a system of incarceration that looks like a totalitarian state, and a political process that is obscenely dominated by money (which is conveniently concentrated in a small number of hands). In short, we have work to do, and no amount of preening about our own inherent superiority is going to fix any of those problems.
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