A View from Monticello

Charlottesville is an old city by American standards. It’s famous for being home to Thomas Jefferson and his primary plantation, Monticello, and to the University of Virginia. It is now infamous for being the host-city to the largest gathering of politically far-right organizations we have seen in over a decade.
The protests were supposedly a response to the city’s decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. This pretense became clear as soon as the legions of armed, white men and women flooded the city. These protests were not about the statue, but the fictional narrative it had come to represent — a belief which the white nationalists and Nazis who gathered there happen to share with our president: the myth of American exceptionalism.
The debate over this myth is divided along traditional, political lines with those on the right reinterpreting history to prop up the conclusion they need to reach (that we are truly the “shining city on the hill”) while those on the left often reject the notion a prioi. And though we can easily point to the insubstantial footings upon which this myth has been constructed, we can’t ignore the debate, which continues to attract elected officials, Ivy League scholars, and representatives from our country’s biggest and most well-funded think tanks. We shouldn’t, either. For while it can’t offer us a better understanding of the past — and, thus, the present — some people actually believe it, and “for the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion — and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion” (52).
The hate speech of the alt-right is familiar. In fact, other than their slogans (which reference the contemporary suffering of white, male Americans) much of it is recycled Nazi propaganda — the “white” race is pure and is being undermined by multiculturalism; the Jews are to blame for all of the world’s problems. They’ve added the notion that communists control the government to their list of grievances, but this is clearly a red herring since our elected officials have consistently squashed every new social program that sees the floor of the house, all while citing the verities of market capitalism.
There used to be important differences between white nationalists and Nazis (the latter being a sub-category of the former), but for our purposes they are now relatively meaningless. White nationalists traditionally believe in racial superiority and in preserving the white majority in any white-dominant society while Nazis historically relied upon pseudoscience to legitimize the racial superiority of the “Nordic race” (which doesn’t exist) and a corresponding persecution of Jews. These differences are now meaningless because the Nazi’s pseudoscience has been debunked while their antisemitism has become one of the defining ideologies of our contemporary strain of American white nationalism (which was also influenced by the Ku Klux Klan whose antisemitism dates to Reconstruction). The only outlying position comes from the American Nazis — their belief that a Third-Reich will rise in the United States — but we can dismiss this outright since it isn’t an operational motive. Rather, it would be the result of a successful rise of their policies on the national level which, obviously, the white nationalists support.
We preserve the distinction between the groups simply because they are formally different organizations, listed separately by the Southern Poverty Law Center as different hate groups, and because they need to be addressed accordingly. And though we clearly don’t need to debate the merits of their ideologies, we do need to consider what makes a nation exceptional and whether we have the right to claim that for ourselves.
For many scholars and groups who’ve coopted the idea, American exceptionalism helps to define the differences they see between the western narratives of Europe and America (America’s being one of individual opportunity and, therefore, responsibility while Europe’s is dominated by socialist forces that have undermined its economic stability and ethno-heritage). American exceptionalists thus see our history as not only a unique function of our experience, but one which can’t be reproduced anywhere else in the world: we are literally exceptional.
Thankfully, this isn’t true. Even the principles our country was founded upon aren’t exceptional. And though the unique characteristics of our democracy have, at times, helped us achieve the position we hold in the world today, a functional democracy needs to be nurtured, and the form of Buchanan’s market capitalism that currently dominates our right-leaning politics doesn’t leave much room for the kind of generosity of spirit this demands.
Which brings us to Trump’s form of exceptionalism. Though he certainly supports that of his fellow white nationalists and Nazis, his exceptionalism accounts for a much smaller group of beneficiaries: himself. To his mind, America is exceptional because it produced Donald Trump and Donald Trump is exceptional because he is American. This position clearly fails even the simplest of logical tests.
His interpretation of history suffers a similar fate. As he wound himself up in the aftermath of Charlottesville, he mused about the possible fate of other statues across the nation. In these, he proposed whether we might see the removal of statues of Washington and of Jefferson. We know that he isn’t a student of history, but like his version of exceptionalism, this fails even the weakest of logical tests: though both men were slaveholders (and far from perfect as individuals), neither Jefferson nor Washington actively fought to destroy the American republic. Rather, they both fought against our colonial occupiers, and, having won, established the foundation upon which we have continued to build since then. To equate their statues with those to Confederate “heroes” shows either a gross misunderstanding of history or a deep sympathy with the white nationalists who have shown him so much support. In either case, the result is troubling.
Exceptionalism is, at its base, really an extreme nationalism and nationalism, as we know, “is childish.” A nation can’t be exceptional, but people can and this, among other things, means they can change. At the end of his Fire Next Time, Baldwin says that:
Thus, we become exceptional when we achieve the impossible while at the same time refusing to be seduced by any delusion (and perhaps more than their firearms and flags, these are what the white nationalists and Nazis had armed themselves with most heavily that afternoon). It is, as Baldwin says, a tall order, but if we do nothing else with ourselves, we must at least try.
From the Big House at Monticello, one can almost see the park where the white nationalists and Nazis tried to have their rally. Jefferson also believed in American exceptionalism (though of a different variety than the Nazis and Trump). But it has never existed. The most we’ve ever had are those handful of people willing to strive for the impossible and who sometimes achieve it.