Editorials & Other Articles
In reply to the discussion: Ukraine’s Slow Descent Into Madness; Kiev Is Beginning To Crumble From The Inside [View all]bemildred
(90,061 posts)The origins of the phrase American exceptionalism are not especially obscure. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, observing this country in the 1830s, said that Americans seemed exceptional in valuing practical attainments almost to the exclusion of the arts and sciences. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, on hearing a report by the American Communist Party that workers in the United States in 1929 were not ready for revolution, denounced the heresy of American exceptionalism. In 1996, the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset took those hints from Tocqueville and Stalin and added some of his own to produce his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. The virtues of American society, for Lipset -- our individualism, hostility to state action, and propensity for ad hoc problem-solving -- themselves stood in the way of a lasting and prudent consensus in the conduct of American politics.
In recent years, the phrase American exceptionalism, at once resonant and ambiguous, has stolen into popular usage in electoral politics, in the mainstream media, and in academic writing with a profligacy that is hard to account for. It sometimes seems that exceptionalism for Americans means everything from generosity to selfishness, localism to imperialism, indifference to the opinions of mankind to a readiness to incorporate the folkways of every culture. When President Obama told West Point graduates last May that I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being, the context made it clear that he meant the United States was the greatest country in the world: our stature was demonstrated by our possession of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known, uniquely tasked with defending liberty and peace globally; and yet we could not allow ourselves to flout international norms or be a law unto ourselves. The contradictory nature of these statements would have satisfied even Tocquevilles taste for paradox.
On the whole, is American exceptionalism a force for good? The question shouldnt be hard to answer. To make an exception of yourself is as immoral a proceeding for a nation as it is for an individual. When we say of a person (usually someone who has gone off the rails), He thinks the rules dont apply to him, we mean that he is a danger to others and perhaps to himself. People who act on such a belief dont as a rule examine themselves deeply or write a history of the self to justify their understanding that they are unique. Very little effort is involved in their willfulness. Such exceptionalism, indeed, comes from an excess of will unaccompanied by awareness of the necessity for self-restraint.
Such people are monsters. Many land in asylums, more in prisons. But the category also encompasses a large number of high-functioning autistics: governors, generals, corporate heads, owners of professional sports teams. When you think about it, some of these people do write histories of themselves and in that pursuit, a few of them have kept up the vitality of an ancient genre: criminal autobiography.
http://www.atimes.com/