The Irony of American Exceptionalism

American exceptionalism is alive and well, apparently – and apparently in the sectors of the commentariat where you might least expect it.

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, early in Between the World and Me (now a number one bestseller):

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

That’s the kind of exceptionalism that George Packer finds objectionable. In a New Yorker review of a book about violence by John Sifton, who worked for Human Rights Watch in the years after Islamist terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Packer finds Sifton sliding into what might be called “reverse exceptionalism,” and sees this attitude overtaking a book whose reportage and depth of insight he admires.

There’s the well-known American hubris of adventurism, and there’s another kind, which sees our wrongs as dangers to the foundation of civilization. The Bush Administration tortured prisoners and created a legal fiction to justify it; other regimes torture prisoners and call it obtaining a confession from traitors who threaten national security. Is there really such a difference that the second can be dismissed as the way of the world, while the first is “not mere violation but something more profound,” a crime so audacious that “a general deterioration in the valuation of human life, such as was seen in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, could happen again”? This is exceptionalism in another guise.

Packer’s kicker is that any close observer of post 9/11 events ought to know better:

The belief that when America behaves like other countries the results are worse carries an assumption that America must be different, and in some sense better. The past fourteen years have been hard on almost every dogma, including that one.

Reading the two passages on the same train ride, I found two things came to mind.

One is that, for both these authors, it seems to me, exceptionalism isn’t a conviction, it’s a tactic – a rhetorical means of fitting an argument to its likely audience. For an American human rights activist, there is more traction in finding fault with U.S. military policy than with the policies of, say, NATO or the Western “community of nations.” And for an American commentator on race problems writing for an emphatically American magazine, there is much to be gained by focusing one’s argument on the distinct race problem of a nation of 300 million people rather than diffusing one’s energy by giving attention to race problems in, say, England, or France, or Italy. English, French, and Italian commentators, writing about their own countries’ problems, habitually appeal to their own nations’ notions of exceptionalism, and for the same reason. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, etc. etc.

The other thing that came to mind is that Coates’ disdainful caricature of the American exceptionalist position is a poor fit with his disdainful rejection of religion, all religion, as a form of magic. To me, it’s a strength of the biblical tradition that it urges the believer to see nations and governments as provisional against the background of sacred history. It’s an everyday refutation of exceptionalism, and although the churches are full of exceptionalists, the strongest modern refutation of American exceptionalism derives its strength from sacred history: it’s that of John Sifton’s grandfather, Reinhold Niebuhr. I spelled out the point this way in a long Atlantic essay about Niebuhr’s legacy:

Niebuhr was what Flannery O’Connor called a “realist of distances,” and the distance that gave his realism its clarity and explanatory power was gained through a grasp of what was known in his time as sacred history. In his view, the youth and optimism of the American experience was offset by the Founders’ conviction that we are a biblical people, enacting in the New World an older history. For Niebuhr, the aspirations that shaped our common life predated the republic: They were the visions of the promised land held by the patriarchs and the apostles, described in the history of Israel’s origins and destiny, which, in our early settlers’ account, became the story of our origins and destiny as well. This history tells of a people confident of its special role yet thwarted again and again on account of its pride, and growing in wisdom through a sense of the frailty of human nature and the limits of earthly powers. This history records that nations rage and peoples rise up together—that war sets brother against brother, despoils the land, and rends the social fabric; it counsels that you go to war with a heavy heart, for the truly good war has never been fought. This history acts as a restraint on national pride, not a stimulant to it, for it is not merely history, but in some sense our history, a story that cannot but be a cautionary tale, for it tells us who we are and what we are prone to do.

22 August 2015