America is not exceptional after all

January 18, 2021

By Charles Lane,

Emotions still surge in the aftermath of a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol by President Trump’s supporters, and the subsequent deployment of troops and other security personnel to safeguard Washington for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration: shock, anger, fear.

The United States’ string of peaceful power transitions is over, though an orderly one may yet occur Wednesday. If it happens, anxious sentiments will give way to relief.

And then we’ll need humility. Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century German chancellor, reportedly said that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.” If the past two weeks should have taught Americans anything, it is that Bismarck was wrong. No cosmic exception guarantees this republic will remain free and stable, when many others ultimately succumbed to polarization and violence.

We should have been more realistic about American exceptionalism all along. The phrase itself was invented by Joseph Stalin, as a pejorative label for the belief among U.S. Communists that this country’s working class was uniquely resistant to revolution.

The Founders, who devised checks and balances in anticipation of Trump-style demagoguery and blind, Josh Hawley-style ambition, were not exactly American exceptionalists. They were conservatives, but of a different stripe than former vice president Dick Cheney, co-author of both a moralistic foreign crusade, the Iraq War, and a book, “Exceptional,” that touted U.S. influence in the world as a nearly unmixed blessing, born of the American system’s special capacity for good.

America is indeed exceptional in one sense, relative to older powers such as France, Japan, Russia and China. Unlike them, this country did not grow organically over millennia but was settled, or conquered, in the modern era, then consciously organized according to historically derived political theory. “It has defined its raison d’etre ideologically,” the most astute modern analyst of exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset, wrote.

Lipset correctly considered exceptionalism a “double-edged sword.” The United States is more religious, less class-conscious and more libertarian than its international peers, but also more violent and more indifferent to economic inequality, he wrote. American society’s virtues and defects are a package deal.

Writing in the late 1990s, a time of relative domestic tranquility, when Americans were savoring a Cold War victory that seemed also a victory for our way of life, Lipset suggested that the consensus underlying American values was so powerful that even our most bitter partisan arguments involved how to interpret those values, not relitigating the country’s essential legitimacy.

That balanced assessment seems unduly optimistic now, after Donald Trump captured the presidency by telling the people that everything about the United States, from elections to media to financial markets, is “rigged” — and who was, and is, believed by millions.

Meanwhile, a resurgent left blends opposition to Trumpism with its own accusations of economic rigging and charges that the U.S. political order has been corrupted by white supremacy and oligarchy since its inception.

We might not be exceptional, after all, compared with the democratic republics that tore themselves apart nine decades ago in Germany and Spain. We might not be exceptional with respect to the Latin American constitutions that we have so often derided, but that generate many of the same structural issues now bedeviling the United States: periodic high-stakes presidential elections; competing claims to majority support between the national legislature and the executive; difficulties ousting a dysfunctional leader without a crisis; and dealing with a defeated ex-president who retains a following and does not accept his loss.

To a sobering degree, the United States in 2021 is not even exceptional relative to the Civil War era. The closest precedents to the troop concentrations in Washington today are the measures adopted to protect the inaugurations of Abraham Lincoln in 1861 and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, both regarded as illegitimate by, and facing threats from, potentially violent Southern-based opponents.

Looking back, the comparative political stability of the post-World War II period — and its associated social, economic and cultural benefits — seems disconcertingly contingent, a consequence more of pressure from a common Soviet enemy, perhaps, than of durable consensus.

A product of that era, Biden seems determined to re-create it by appealing, as Lincoln did in March 1861, for national unity in spite of everything.

Many regard this as naive or worse, unsurprisingly: The median American, age 38, was a first-grader when the Berlin Wall fell, and has known little but escalating U.S. partisanship since becoming eligible to vote in the disputed 2000 Bush-Gore election.

But Biden’s posture is consistent with the spirit of liberty, which Judge Learned Hand defined in 1944 as “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” and which we desperately need. If this aging political warhorse from Delaware somehow revives it, history will rank him among the greats.

Read more: Jackson Diehl: How Joe Biden should update Obamaism for this new era E.J. Dionne: Joe Biden has already shown us that governing is back Gary Abernathy: If Biden really wants to unify the country, here’s the olive branch he must extend to conservatives Melody Barnes and Caroline E. Janney
: In a civil war, accountability must precede healing Michael Gerson: How Joe Biden can shape a rhetoric of unity

Source: WP