American Exceptionalism Never Meant Superior

In the age of autocratic and populist fervor, it's important to remember the entire point of the union of states.

Among the political ideas that I keep coming back to the most is American exceptionalism, a term with an opaque meaning but that has universally been interpreted with a meaning it cannot possibly fulfill. Like many millennials, I had been under the impression that American exceptionalism meant that America was superior, when I would later believe it to mean that America was simply different — but not exactly in the way it’s been posited by others.

“Different” does not imply a judgement of virtue, but the observation of distinct features that one may find desirable. The earliest such instance being Tocqueville observing how different America was from his native France. In his visit to the U.S. in the 183os, he recognized a unique decentralized society unlike any other in the world at the time. He noted the strong spirit of individualism that advanced American innovation and social progress generally. Notably, Tocqueville committed to writing about the importance of the local communities he observed, both religious and civic, that were crucial in fostering social cohesion. He likens local institutions to primary schools that brought science “within the people’s reach”, adding that “a nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty." This local power and the people’s ability to wield influence is part of the particular sovereignty Tocqueville writes of:

"In America the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not either barren or concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences. If there is a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be judged, that country is assuredly America.”

I think this is a telling passage for a couple of reasons. First, Tocqueville alludes to a kind of trickle-down government, where it isn’t the central authority that embodies the sovereignty of the union but that it is secured by the people on the ground. Bear in mind this contrasts the societies of Europe which at the time were either ruled by monarchs or an aristocracy with very limited democratic elements. Second, Tocqueville is not promoting America, but making an observation about how this dispersement of sovereignty allows for America to be judged for its arrangement. Tocqueville, importantly, is not premising his dispassionate observations of what he sees to rebut the vision the founders set out in the Declaration of Independence.

Tocqueville’s neutrality stands in contrast to the Soviet communists who roughly a century later are believed to have first incorporated “American exceptionalism” in their vocabulary. Thought to have first appeared in the Daily Worker and later picked up by Stalin, America as an “exceptional” force was meant as a critique. In particular, in 1946, Stalin gave a speech at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre and characterized the United States as an exceptional case in terms of its resistance to communism. He acknowledged the strength of capitalism in the United States and its determination to oppose the spread of communism globally. However, he framed this as evidence of capitalism's aggressive and imperialistic tendencies, rather than as a positive attribute of American society.

People the world over are cynical about the supposed greatness of their own country, but Americans’ might be exceptional for a reason. Within the last 40 years, and certainly since 9/11, American exceptionalism has come to be interpreted as a distinctly chauvinist superiority to other countries which stemmed from a fallacy based on allusions presidents had made to American obligations abroad to represent American values. This was embodied by the moral hubris of the Ronald Reagan presidency amid America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union but especially the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in response to 9/11. To liberals, American exceptionalism came to mean that American values were so great that we needed to impose them on others, not only to protect our interests but to validate our existence as a moral authority, a modern manifest destiny.

But the real staying power of the misinterpretation of exceptionalism — the idea that exceptional means “America is better” — is predicated on a liberal strawman in response to right-wing rhetoric during the Bush era. Conservative chest-thumpers making an obnoxiously qualitative point about how they thought America was the number one country in the world was predictably met by a wave of pedantic rebuttals by liberal squares waving spreadsheets on how poorly America ranked on various metrics. This strawman has become a genre of journalism unto itself with one report, essay, column, documentary and podcast after another debunking the same conservative analysis as if the audience for such content hasn’t yet be reached.

The Iraq war era, however, had a distinct influence in shaping a considerable number of millennials’ conception of American exceptionalism. Unlike Vietnam, the social conservatives and foreign policy hawks were not nearly as aligned as they were during the Iraq War. This mattered because millennials — many of whom I’ve encountered across friends groups over the years — who grew up in socially conservative households during Iraq were surrounded by a doubling of often religious and political zealotry which reinforced itself as Islam became conflated with jihadists and Christianity with the noble cause of fighting terrorism. This culminated in an excess that became too much to bear for a swath of the largest living generation.

By the time they became adults they had departed commensurately from those convictions that they grew up around, including the view that America was better. And when smartphones went mainstream in the early 2010s, a wave of venture capital-backed progressive digital news startups joined legacy media in knocking America off its high horse that critics had themselves put it on. While there was for a period of time figures like Barack Obama positing an alternative vision of exceptionalism that was introspective and laced with a theme of perseverance, conservative-grown liberals remained scarred by the excesses of their upbringing even as conservative conceptions of exceptionalism have turned sour and conservatives more content with measured foreign policy while more moderate on multiple social issues since the Iraq era, particularly among younger generations.

Today, the dominant narratives of anti-exceptionalism revolve around an America that is distinctly challenged by, on the right, forces of modernity like demographic change, social egalitarianism, and technology — and on the left, an America whose past and attachment to outdated founding principles and institutional checks impede righteous progress. Both of these miss the point of exceptionalism.

On a qualitative sidenote, America is exceptional in that it is a populous, vast, rich, democratic, diverse and decentralized sovereign country bordered by oceans and cooperative neighbors. No other country checks all of those boxes off as thoroughly as the United States.

But what foremost makes America exceptional is its skepticism of the state. Democracy, equality, justice, liberty are all core American values that while antithetical to centralized power were not pursued for their own sake. The impetus for the entire American project was the repudiation of absolute power. More to the point, American exceptionalism properly interpreted is premised on the idea that the freedom and democracy from which a skepticism of the state derives is understood first as a tradeoff and second as a virtue. What American exceptionalism can come to mean is less a celebration of the absence of tyranny or oppression (thought it can be that) and more an acknowledgment of the struggle that comes with maintaining a free society, that true freedom involves something between a responsibility and a burden to accept power that would otherwise be consolidated elsewhere.

That freedom is what allows one to pursue love, expression, belonging, wealth, time, work and leisure on one’s own terms with minimal interference from the state and it requires durable institutions but also tolerance, risk and a degree of stoicism on the part of the individual. It’s no surprise then that pursuing one’s own unencumbered conception of purpose alongside millions of others creates a place that feels paradoxical, haphazard and insecure — the world’s wealthiest developing country so it’s been said. America is open to everyone willing to partake, but the American idea is clearly not for everyone.

The last eight years have demonstrated that there are anti-exceptionalists on the right and on the left who are struggling to adapt to a modern and increasingly pluralist union of states. On the right we see a self-defeating resistance to migrants, a demographic observed to be relatively more patriotic and in some cases more socially conservative. On the left, the struggle to adapt to a changing America revolves around the democratization of information and free expression that has challenged entrenched narratives. On either end, we see a conditional commitment to election outcomes and core American democratic institutions and norms that have either stood to impede a sweeping seizure of federal power or expand federal representation of the citizens in the states. Whatever the United States’ flaws, it will not solve them by comparing itself to others more submissive to centralized power. Doing so will all but negate its existence.

The implication that a free society will necessarily create a number one society has always been a non-sequitur. For American exceptionalism to transcend generations it will need to rebrand, to speak softly, humbly, and with conviction. It will need to become more secure in its flaws and recognize the point of the project is to not achieve an end, but enable the people who dare partake in it the opportunity to achieve the ends they seek.

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