Michael Kazin: American Exceptionalism is a Flawed Idea, but Obama Should Still Use It
[Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. His next book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, will be published in August (Knopf).]
Has the United States always been an exceptionally free and virtuous nation? If you have to ask the question, you are already well on the road to unpatriotic perdition—or so every Republican about to run for president seems to think. “Don’t kid yourself with the lie,” Rick Santorum recently told a group of college Republicans. “America is exceptional, and Americans are concerned that there are a group of people in Washington who don’t believe that any more.” Mike Huckabee gives the same indictment a quasi-spiritual spin: “To deny American exceptionalism,” he told Politico last August, “is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation.” In his new book, Mitt Romney adds a messianic note: “Billions of people today live in freedom, or have the hope of freedom who otherwise would have lived in despair, if not for the greatness of the United States.”
Of course, the main purpose of all this star-spangled chest thumping is to brand Barack Obama an apostate from one of the more venerable elements of our civil religion. At CPAC last week, Santorum even said Obama “doesn’t believe America is exceptional.” Moreover, an offhand remark the president made in 2009—“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”—loops repeatedly on conservative websites and talk radio shows. What can you expect, these outlets imply, from a closet socialist with a Muslim middle-name, bi-national parentage, and a fishy birth certificate?
The irony is that the president has sworn his belief in the exceptionalist faith more frequently than did George W. Bush, whom we have to thank for making a flag pin on one’s lapel a requirement for anyone who hopes to get elected to federal office. He’s done so in two ways, one aspirational, the other self-congratulatory—and neither very productive or convincing. But a third way of invoking exceptionalism, and one not tried nearly enough, could be both clarifying and politically beneficial for the president.
Read entire article at The New Republic
Has the United States always been an exceptionally free and virtuous nation? If you have to ask the question, you are already well on the road to unpatriotic perdition—or so every Republican about to run for president seems to think. “Don’t kid yourself with the lie,” Rick Santorum recently told a group of college Republicans. “America is exceptional, and Americans are concerned that there are a group of people in Washington who don’t believe that any more.” Mike Huckabee gives the same indictment a quasi-spiritual spin: “To deny American exceptionalism,” he told Politico last August, “is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation.” In his new book, Mitt Romney adds a messianic note: “Billions of people today live in freedom, or have the hope of freedom who otherwise would have lived in despair, if not for the greatness of the United States.”
Of course, the main purpose of all this star-spangled chest thumping is to brand Barack Obama an apostate from one of the more venerable elements of our civil religion. At CPAC last week, Santorum even said Obama “doesn’t believe America is exceptional.” Moreover, an offhand remark the president made in 2009—“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”—loops repeatedly on conservative websites and talk radio shows. What can you expect, these outlets imply, from a closet socialist with a Muslim middle-name, bi-national parentage, and a fishy birth certificate?
The irony is that the president has sworn his belief in the exceptionalist faith more frequently than did George W. Bush, whom we have to thank for making a flag pin on one’s lapel a requirement for anyone who hopes to get elected to federal office. He’s done so in two ways, one aspirational, the other self-congratulatory—and neither very productive or convincing. But a third way of invoking exceptionalism, and one not tried nearly enough, could be both clarifying and politically beneficial for the president.