* The article by Ian Tyrellis, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and author, was published in Aeon. Aeon is an online magazine that asks big questions, looking for fresh answers and a new perspective on social reality, science, philosophy and culture. NEWS 24/7 republishes a story every week for those who love original thinking on issues old and new.
Every time a public figure uses the term "American exceptionalism," ordinary Americans turn to my website. It's #1 for a quick answer to the question:"What is American exceptionalism?". My latest benefactor was Hillary Clinton, who used the term in a speech on August 31, 2016. My website traffic increased. Until almost 2010, few Americans had heard the term. Since then, its use has expanded significantly. It's strange that such an inelegant term would be adopted by two major political parties when so many people had no idea what it meant. Of course, one need not use the term to believe in the underlying meaning. But the phrase has a history that helps us understand its current overuse.
American exceptionalism is not the same as saying that the United States is "different" from other countries. It doesn't just mean that the US is "unique". Countries, like people, are all different and unique, even if many share some underlying characteristics. Exceptionalism requires something much more:the belief that the US follows a historical path different from the laws or rules that govern other countries. This is the essence of American exceptionalism:the US is not just a bigger and more powerful country – but an exception. It is the bearer of freedom and morally superior to something called "Europe". Don't bother with the differences within Europe or the fact that "the world" is bigger than the US and Europe. The "Europe" versus "America" dichotomy is the test from which American exceptionalism was shaped.
Some speculate that Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville coined the term in the 1830s, but only once did de Tocqueville actually call American society "excellent." He argued that Americans lacked culture and science, but could rely on the Anglo-Saxons in Britain to provide them with the higher forms of culture. This is not what Americans mean by "exceptionalism" today.
American exceptionalism is an ideology. De Tocqueville examined US institutions and moral attitudes as structural tendencies of democratic societies. He did not see US democracy as an ideology. For him, the US was the harbinger of a future that included the possible democratization of Europe, not an unrepeatable extreme state of civilization. He studied the USA as a model of a democratic society, the workings of which had to be understood because the idea was spreading.
Some believe that Werner Sobart, the German socialist of the early 1900s, coined the term, but he did not. Sobart claimed only that US capitalism, and its abundance, made the country temporarily inhospitable to the growth of socialism. It was actually Joseph Stalin, or his followers, who, in 1929, gave the name to the idea. It is surely one of the ironies of modern history that both major US political parties are competing to support a Stalinist term.
Orthodox communists used the term to condemn the heretical views of the American communist Jay Lovestone. In the late 1920s, Lovestone argued that the U.S. capitalist economy did not promote the revolutionary moment that all communists had been waiting for. The Communist Party expelled Lovestone, but his followers and ex-Trotskyists in the US embraced the term exceptionalism and eventually the idea that the US would finally avoid the socialist stage of development.
After the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, as well as later during the Cold War, many of these US Marxists shed their old political discipline but retained the mindset that US economic success had buried the class struggle in their nation—permanently. . As the leader of the free world, the main victor in World War II over "totalitarian" Germany, and by far the world's most prosperous economy, the US seemed like a great nation. Seymour Martin Lipsett, the eminent political sociologist at Stanford, has made a career out of investigating the many factors that led to this American exceptionalism. Until his death in 2006, Lipset continued to argue that the US is not subject to the historical rules of all other nations.
No one did more than Ronald Reagan to strengthen and promote the US as great. Refusing to accept the indolence of Jimmy Carter's presidency or the transgressions of Richard Nixon as the best Americans could do, Reagan promoted the image of the US as a shining "beacon of hope." This reference comes from a 1630 sermon by John Winthorpe, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthorpe was urging the new Pilgrim settlers heading for Massachusetts to stay true to the narrow path of Puritanism.
Reagan and his followers misattributed American exceptionalism to this Puritan injunction and added "gloss" to the original, which gave the phrase a distinctly different connotation. Winthorpe was not referring to a nation, but rather to a distinct community of English Protestant believers. In particular, Winthorpe's sermon had been neglected for centuries. It was only resurrected in the 1940s by some Harvard academics engaged in a spiritual recovery of Puritan thought. In a 1961 speech, John F. Kennedy, who was a Harvard student influenced by the university's Americanists, used the phrase "beacon of hope." The idea of the US as a "beacon of hope," however, really took hold in political rhetoric in the 1970s and '80s as Reagan sought to rebuild the country.
Without a doubt, Reagan saw the US as a great nation. The language of exceptionalism, however, comes from Marxism, not God. The idea of a morally superior and unique civilization meant to guide the world did not become the banner of an orthodox "doctrine" until very recently, the 21st century. In the wake of 9/11, the speeches of George W. Bush and his supporters reaffirmed the radical distinctiveness of the US with a new polemic. We've all heard it:it's our "freedoms" that Islamic terrorists hated, wanted to kill Americans because they were jealous of this fine heritage.
The global financial crisis of 2007-10 added to the geopolitical turmoil that followed 9/11. Although the US economy grew in the 1990s and early 2000s, the economic inequality that began to rise during the Reagan era became even worse. In the post-1945 era, when academics first posited American exceptionalism as a coherent doctrine, the idea was also associated with US global military and political hegemony. In the two previous generations since the Reagan era, Americans had not prospered to the same extent, and American exceptionalism had become more closely associated only with military hegemony.
Decline is, in fact, the creator of the ideology of American exceptionalism. The less exceptional the circumstances in the US seem, the stronger defenders of exceptionalism insist on orthodoxy. When the nation was undeniably strong and its people prosperous, Americans did not collectively require a "doctrine" to serve as a guiding light. In these more polarized times, when Americans' fortunes are based more on their location and less on their shared nationality, the ideological orthodoxy of American exceptionalism has emerged at the political level. A previously obscure academic term became a rallying cry for a political agenda.
When Hillary Clinton joins the stream of exceptionalism, she reflects a political consensus that Donald Trump rejects. In wanting to make America great again, Trump implicitly accepts that it is currently not "great" and that it has never been great. No longer is the Republican Party the main proponent of American exceptionalism. But Democrats have taken up the mantle, and the language of exceptionalism continues to rally a party and a country.