Exceptionalism!

Over the last few days, many Americans have, if they have been paying attention, heard the term “American exceptionalism� bantered about. President Obama used the term in his speech to the nation this week as he attempted to garner support for his strike against Syria and its weapons of mass destruction while Russian president Vladimir Putin also brought it up in a negative way in his “A plea for caution from Russia� op-ed in the New York Times. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&

In point of fact, the United States is an exceptional nation in many ways and has been so since even before it became a nation in 1776. John Winthrop, the puritan thinker and leader, described the new American colony in Massachusetts as being “A shining city upon a hill�around 1630, a reference dating back to Jesus Christ’s quotation from the book of Matthew in his sermon on the mount. All throughout America’s history there have been references to American exceptionalism and securing our freedom from the British
Empire was probably one of the greatest and most exceptional things that this nation ever did. The odds were long against that happening but the exceptional George Washington and the bands that followed him in peace and war defied the odds and we became a nation after all. So, this nation was birthed out of an exceptional event!

But America has done some very unexceptional things just as well. Our treatment of minorities such as the American Indian and the African negroes slaves who have dwelled among us have cast this nation in a very unfavorable shining light. And much of the manifest destiny that was practiced throughout the nineteenth century also did not reflect well on this nation nor its people. But a destiny we have always perceived that we have had and our exceptionalism has both fostered that destiny and been a result of it just as well.

Perhaps one of the greatest and most horrible attempts in the name of that exceptionalism was done when George W. Bush led the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as he attempted to fulfill what he thought his God has told him that he needed to do in the Middle East. All throughout the twentieth century, this nation had adopted the moral philosophy that we would never attack unless we were first threatened and Bush flew into the face of all of that doctrine with what he did. There was something exceptional about the lies that he and his administration told to get the nation to consent to the war that he got us into and that, in so many ways, still rages today. As a result of that action there are many across the world who take great exception to American exceptionalism as we go forward through this new and emerging century. There are many around the world who feel that the twentieth century was the American century and that the twenty first century will belong to someone else, perhaps the Chinese.

If there is an exceptionalism in the United States there is also a sickness, a malaise, that also affects the nation as it is having a great deal of trouble confronting the fact that its composition is changing very rapidly as we speak. The majority white population is about to become its largest minority and those who inhabit that group are, in so many ways, not coping very well with their new status at all. They equate American exceptionalism with white exclusivity as they ignore all the great accomplishments by those who would not be considered the old White Anglo Saxon protestant coalition, otherwise known as the Wasp’s who so dominated much of the twentieth century in this nation.

At the close of the second world war, American president Harry S. Truman proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild much of the world, especially Europe and that was one of the most altruistic and benevolent things that this nation ever really did. We were exceptional indeed when future political opponents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon joined together in the congress to help promote and to pass the Marshall Plan. We would not like to contemplate what kind of world it might have been if that plan had not been passed but we could see the glimmer of what might have been in the decay and the lagging behind that occurred across much of the Soviet Union as western thought completely eclipsed the Marxian model and way of life. But, like all models, western economics has had its days of embarrassments and nothing has been more embarrassing than the accumulation of wealth that has gone on since the last great espouser of city on a hill philosophy held forth--one Ronald Wilson Reagan. A just released study has noted that the top ten percent of the people in the United States control almost fifty percent of its income and a probably far greater percentage of its wealth. It has recently been noted that the single Walton family dynasty has as much worth as the bottom forty percent of the rest of the nation. This is the greatest concentration of wealth in one class since the roaring twenties that preceded the Great Depression of 1929 that dominated the nineteen thirties and was only abated by the beginning of the Second World War.

Our exceptionalism has not been shared by all of those who fall under the mantel of the nation that espouses that it is so. Many of us are in exceptionally bad shape.

As we peer forward into this new century we see threats to our exceptionalism as our education system has fallen behind what much of the rest of the world seems to be accomplishing. There are jobs going begging in this nation because there are not qualified people to fill those needs. And, we have a Republican party in this nation who seems to see no need for funding expanded education nor job training as they try to curtail a falling deficit as they wage a fight that seems so out of place in this new time that we face. In point of fact, the greatest exceptionalism that America faces today is the exceptional job its government and some of its people are doing in fighting the progress that marked so much of what made this nation so exceptional to begin with. And, if that trend continues for much longer, we will no longer be an exceptional people at all and we will be remembered as the latest great power and great people to fall by the wayside just as so many of the prior illuminists such as Great Britain have done.

Ben Wattenberg has called the United States the first “universal nation� because of the great diversity of the people who inhabit its borders. But that diversity is threatened by the actions of those who are, through their concerted efforts, trying to destroy the breadth of the economy that has brought so much of that diversity about. Just because we have been an exceptional people for so long does not mean that we will continue to be that way. And it is going to require some exceptional leadership and bipartisan effort to keep us from falling into the pit of mediocrity. There are still those among us who believe in that shining city on a hill in its most purist form but we look at it from differing perspectives and see different outcomes where different people benefit from its glow. The city was an ideal that all could draw from but now so many want to see the benefits from the vision restricted to the very few while all others live only an existence to serve their needs. It is, in point of fact, the rise of an economic slavery to replace the actual one that once lived among us and embarrassed so many of us in its time.

There are many “isms� still floating around and exceptionalism is but one of them. Radicalism and extremism are usually always with us in one form or another. We remember what is becoming unpopular to recall when we speak of the third Reich of the last century. Adolf Hitler dreamed of an Arian race of blond haired and blue eyed people who would become his supermen and he brought that vision to partial fruition in pre war Germany with so much of what he did to promote his ideal man. The effects of the great depression allowed Hitler to come to power in Germany and, in the United States today, we are just perhaps one depression away from the same thing potentially happening here. The last depression gave us the liberalism that has dominated our society for now over eighty years and has been responsible for so much advancement for all mankind. We will likely not be that lucky or fortunate the next time around as the forces on the right mean to destroy the whole liberal outlook and replace it with something very ugly indeed that does not include blacks or Latinos or other races that do not fit the neoconservative model for life in their new world. As we look around us, in reality, they have already brought much of what they desire to fruition as we describe a world that we live in where most of the wealth and power are currently confined to the hands of the very few. All the right lacks is a leader like Hitler to carry out the rest of their plan. As we look at people like Ted Cruz of Texas, we can see that they are working on that as we speak.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe