American Exceptionalism: a Danger to Democracy
American Exceptionalism may be the most popular and powerful lens that our nation uses to view history. From this vantage point, democracy in the United States is humanity’s greatest form of government ever because it is committed to extraordinary personal freedom of thought and behavior.
Two corollary beliefs are that our nation is morally superior to others, and the United States is the best place to live. This patriotic interpretation of history contains truth, aspiration, and exaggeration. In the hands of extremist politicians, media personalities and religious leaders, it undermines our democracy.
Our Founders believed this country held not just exceptional but unique promise. They knew, however, that their delicate experiment in democracy could succeed only with the constant care of reason, tolerance, and compromise as well as safeguards against the worst ambitions political leaders have exhibited over millennia. Surely the Founders would believe that the Exceptionalism preached by many today endangers the unique hope the newly united states represented.
Exceptionalism can offer honest, inspirational, and useful lessons in American history. Too often it is a cultish mantra impermeable to critical thinking, mandating a self-absorbed and narrow mindset for America to use in dealing with the problems of a complex, ever-changing world. Exceptionalism is vulnerable to hijacking by demagogues because:
1. Almost exclusively it boasts of this country’s greatness, discounting or denying our problems and deficiencies. Hubris and complacency are no way to strengthen America. The coach of a football team with a winning record does not build on it by focusing his players on how great they are.
2. In using American history to support their Exceptionalist views, politicians and others rely on popular, simplistic, often distended or false narratives that romanticize the nation’s accomplishments and values. Counter-narratives — for example, the country’s extensive legacy of hatred and discrimination against immigrants — are taboo. And nearly a century had to go by before we could take the cancerous sins of Reconstruction seriously.
3. Too easily Exceptionalism feeds divisive political rhetoric with an “us” versus “them” mentality. By praising America’s unique greatness, one qualifies as an “us”. By emphasizing the need to fix our shortcomings, one earns demonization as an unAmerican “them”. Blind loyalty counts for more than does concern about how to strengthen the nation.
4. Exceptionalism shoves us into a backward-looking perspective rather than rallying us to adapt to harsh realities and prepare for the future. Exceptionalism holds forth the image of a bygone golden era that we must resurrect. Some physicists theorize about how humans might go back in time but even the most brilliant cannot yet figure out how to get us there. The golden-age syndrome has afflicted rebels and unhappy people throughout history without a single success in reviving the past. Much of American history can legitimately make us proud, and many of us recall years of youthful bliss. Still, in every era large swaths of our population have suffered from discrimination and poverty, and childhood memories have little appreciation of life’s relentless difficulties for our parents. Images of a golden age are the misty delusion of aging brains, romantics, storytellers and, most dangerously, propagandists.
The deficiencies of Exceptionalism make it a handy weapon for the worst incarnation of a propagandist — the demagogue. Academics who study rhetoric have produced useful work on how to define demagoguery and differentiate its types and practitioners. Not all of them engage in a perilous form of it, but the most dangerous are those who want to acquire or cement authoritarian power over a society. Experts on politics or rhetoric see in such demagogues’ common behavioral patterns, including the demonization of political opponents as enemies of the homeland; the whipping-up of “us versus them” fervor around political and social issues; attacks on traditional norms of conduct in politics and government; and the manipulation of established institutions and laws to create a veneer of legitimacy for actions that promote authoritarian control.
“How Democracies Die,” a brilliantly upsetting book, documents these patterns and their tragic outcomes as it probes the globe-spanning retreat of democracy in recent times. The Harvard authors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, cover the ant-democratic leaders of many countries, affixing a special warning sign on Donald Trump. As they emphasize, the United States is the world’s most vital bulwark of democracy, and he is the first genuine authoritarian to breach the barriers our Founders erected against Presidential tyranny.
President Trump relied on the worst in American Exceptionalism to express his political genes that encode the universal behaviors Levitsky and Ziblatt identify. “Make America Great Again” screams unhappiness with the state of the country right now, but its magnetic force field is the delusional and perilous conviction that the real, forever exceptional America still exists, waiting to be rescued.
The Trump era is still history-in-the-making with existential decisions about our democracy lying not far ahead of us. Only the values of our Founders can save us from being another entry on history’s long list of casualties in democratic experimentation.
