That treacherous phrase, “American exceptionalism,” is in the air of debate today.
Take, for instance, the Ukraine question. As most believed he would, President Donald Trump ordered the engines of American aid to Ukraine to a screeching halt. Part of the stated logic for this decision was that entanglement with Ukrainian affairs was a financial and political burden on American innovation. When that entrepreneurial spirit is released, it is claimed, Americans will experience the new rush of prosperity that they are due.
What is interesting is that the administration has flipped what American exceptionalism meant just two decades ago. Then, that term underpinned every foreign intervention the country had embarked upon since the Spanish-American War. We must ask why exceptionalism has become a lingering and dynamic motif of American identity.
The answer may lie in the glorifying historiography that has long adorned our textbooks. The story is consistent: Our history is squared in revolutionary idealism, not geographic or ethnographic happenstance. A far-sighted cadre of men, flanked by an enlightened generation of common folk, established an unprecedented form of governance with the stroke of the pen and the smoke of the musket.
But history like this is constructed, not factual. A complex network of conflicting and cooperating groups enshrined their own heroes and commemorated their own holidays, and it took generations for a predominant vision to arise from the crucible of that culture war. The revolution did not arise independently from the broader global arc. It was well situated in the jangling chords of social, political, economic and intellectual history.
Of course, America is not being exceptional when it publicizes its exceptionality. History reveals that civilizations love to boast. The “Middle Kingdom” was the epithet applied to Imperial China, asserting its preeminence. Similarly, their communist successors saw themselves as commissioned to bring history to its final, socialist stage. Even the ancient Assyrians, three thousand years ago, believed themselves to be guardians of order against barbaric neighbors. All societies mythologize their histories and flesh out their national lore with stories of greatness and moral supremacy.
Yet still, perhaps there are exceptional features to this republic that leave it in a unique social and political location. They need not result from the encroachment of a national destiny, but rather the swing of circumstances, giving the country, for better or worse, special conditions. America happens to be the most powerful country, it happens to be more religious than most other Western nations, and it happens to have a welfare state less entrenched than them too. And, perhaps most importantly, it is best positioned, by its strength and socio-political values, to be the “arsenal of democracy” that shone from D-day to the Donbas and from the Marshall Plan to modern aid.
The old games of agency, power and interests have taken root and made this nation what it is. But this is not a destiny, this is not assured. If America retreats from the world, its markets and its peoples, then who is to say that America’s unique position will not collapse like a house of cards? This country has been given a good hand to better itself and the world, and the truly exceptional act would be to use that hand to the fullest.
