Down with American Exceptionalism

I loved my eighth-grade civics class. It marked the first time I learned about the inner workings of American government, and helped me realize I might want to pursue a career in politics.

But the course had one big problem: the textbook guiding its curriculum had a tendency to ignore the glaring flaws in our country’s system of government, and the unforgivable stains upon its history. A specific example that has stuck with me in the years since is the fact that the textbook barely mentioned slavery, relegating it to a footnote that failed to acknowledge that we have yet to fully rectify the damage slavery did to African American communities.

You might point out that this was a civics class, and that the story of slavery would be more at home in an American history course than in one on the mechanics of our system of government. But to suggest that slavery and racism are unrelated to U.S. politics and legislative policy would be lunacy.

The teacher did his best to make up for the textbook’s faults, but it’s hard to educate twenty-odd eighth graders on the subtleties and gray areas of the American system when the textbook around which the course is designed is so convinced of that system’s spotlessness.

In preaching the idea that America’s is the ideal form of government — and in dismissing any problems in its past as minor blips — my civics textbook attempted to implant in our impressionable young minds a concept known as American exceptionalism. Peter Beinart, journalism professor at the City University of New York, explains in The Atlantic:

“American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness. It connotes moral superiority. Embedded in exceptionalist discourse is the belief that, because America has a special devotion to democracy and freedom, its sins are mostly incidental. The greatest evils humankind has witnessed, in places such as the Nazi death camps, are far removed from anything Americans would ever do. America’s adversaries commit crimes; America merely stumbles on its way to doing the right thing.”

American exceptionalism is perhaps the most dangerous, widespread and covert flaw in our national political culture. Unlike nativism, excessive individualism, and misplaced opposition to big government, it seems to affect liberals just as much as it does conservatives.

In May 2019, North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) ran a story attacking former Vice President and presidential candidate Joe Biden for a variety of past actions and gaffes, branding him a “fool of low IQ.” President Trump tweeted soon after in apparent support of the KCNA’s Biden piece. The next day, Trump stood by his tweet when a reporter questioned him at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, saying “Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual. He probably is, based on his record. I think I agree with him on that.”

Analyzing the incident in a May 28 Vox article, Alex Ward wrote:

“Just stop for a second and think about that: The president of the United States endorsed a foreign government’s nasty insults of America’s former vice president — and did so while standing next to the leader of a top American ally. That’s appalling behavior from the president. There’s an unwritten rule that Americans — and especially high-level American politicians — are supposed to leave domestic politics at the water’s edge when they travel abroad. That means you don’t talk badly about your political opponents overseas, but instead show a united front as a representative of the United States.”

At first, Ward’s logic seems sound. It’s especially easy for Trump-haters like myself to fall in with this line of thinking. But when I “stop for a second and think about that,” as Ward asks, the sensibility of his argument begins to degrade.

To be clear, I do not condone what Trump said in Japan. His stance is, as Ward points out, “appalling behavior from the president” — but not because he endorsed a foreign power’s criticism of a “fellow American.” It’s appalling because, as Ward more astutely notes, Trump “sided with a murderous, repressive dictator” in doing so, and because he has done the same on multiple occasions.

Ward’s was only one of many articles condemning Trump’s conduct. The president faced criticism for his remarks from both sides of the political aisle.

Here’s the problem with this backlash: in asserting that it is essentially treasonous for an American president to side with a foreign power — regardless of its nature — over a U.S. citizen, one implies that said citizen is correct or superior simply because they are American, regardless of their moral or political character, and that the foreign power is inferior.

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The United States of America has committed a number of downright despicable crimes in the 243 years since we declared our independence from the British. At the outset of America’s current system of government in 1789, the founders allowed the trade and forced labor of enslaved Africans to continue legally until 1863. After emancipation, the federal government’s failure to intervene in the South assisted in the birth of nearly a century of lynchings and domestic terrorism throughout the region and, eventually, widespread legislative repression of African American rights and socioeconomic prosperity.

Throughout the 19th century, financial motives and manifest destiny — the belief that the United States had an essentially divine mandate to expand across the continent — fueled a steady push westward that wiped out many of America’s native peoples.

The sequel to this oft-ignored American holocaust came in the 1890s and lasted through the first decade of the 20th century, concentrated in the McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt eras. Roosevelt in particular was an ardent American exceptionalist, convinced that the United States’ form of government and way of life reigned supreme, and that his country had a right and responsibility to dominate the Western hemisphere. These leaders’ conviction led to thousands of American and Filipino deaths in the Philippine-American War.

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the U.S. military to round up and incarcerate over 110 thousand Japanese Americans in internment camps without trial or evidence to suggest any of the interned had conspired against the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that the order was constitutional in 1944.

From the Nixon through Clinton eras, American government at all levels conducted a calculated campaign to marginalize and lock up people of color disguised as a war to combat drug abuse. The George W. Bush administration lied to the American people and the world in order to justify its invasion of Iraq, alleging that dictator Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and that he was connected to the 9/11 disaster. Neither claim was true.

And today, at this moment, the Trump administration is incarcerating undocumented migrants, deporting them, and separating them from their children.

In many ways, ours is a great country. But we have done and continue to do terrible things that have tragic consequences for millions of people. Americans have a dangerous tendency to minimize those misdeeds, or to ignore them altogether. A better name for American exceptionalism would be American supremacy. Just as white supremacists assert that the Anglo-Saxons are racially superior, American exceptionalists are convinced of the fantasy that American society is superior to all others.

This past September, I asked in my commentary on Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protest:

“If you truly love your country, if you care for it as you would a spouse or a sibling, wouldn’t an attempt to fix its shortcomings be the most noble way to express that love? Is protest not the highest form of patriotism?”

In pretending that the United States is the ideal nation — thereby refusing to acknowledge its faults — American exceptionalism leaves no room for our country to grow. In this sense it is fundamentally unpatriotic. But perhaps more importantly, pretending the American system is without fault represents a profound detachment from reality. Especially under a president who works hard to dispute facts and control the public narrative, it is important that Americans come to recognize our nation’s flaws and work to fix them instead of sweeping them under the rug.

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