The Moralization of American Exceptionalism

The neoconservatives, whose ideas led to so much senseless slaughter and destruction when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran the American empire, and their functional equivalents, the humanitarian interventionists who have taken charge under Barack Obama, twaddle on, at opportune moments, about American exceptionalism.

It is one of those expressions, like “the American dream,” that have no fixed meaning, only vague connotations, but that are sometimes useful in political contexts.

Following the dubious lead of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, contemporary exponents of the idea moralize the concept.  For them, American exceptionalism means American moral superiority.

This understanding is ideologically pernicious, philosophically incoherent, and preposterous on its face.  But it does serve a purpose.

President Obama’s September 24 address to the United Nations General Assembly exemplified the idea’s flaws and its uses in a perspicuous way.

It is too bad that this speech, and the self-righteous saber rattling about Syria that preceded it, have already fallen into the great American memory hole.  Had their fifteen minutes of news cycle fame lasted longer, the ludicrousness of Obama’s contentions might have become too obvious for even our base and servile media to ignore or deny.

But Tea Party acting out put the kibosh on that prospect. In a display of mindless obstinacy extreme even for them, they decided to shut the government down unless Obama would give in on funding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The focus of the news cycle therefore shifted away from Obama’s feeble efforts to justify American bellicosity to divisions within the Republican Party, and to the mean-spiritedness and imbecility of the Tea Partiers who now run the show.

This development would not have been all bad, had the corporate media made plain how the reform Republicans now recklessly oppose is essentially a Republican plan – forged in the early 90s at the Heritage Foundation as an alternative to Hillarycare, and implemented, just a few years ago, in Massachusetts under then Governor Mitt Romney.

But that would be too much to expect from them; and indeed, it never came to pass.  Instead, Obama’s proclamation of America’s probity emerged unscathed.

And so, a moralized understanding of American exceptionalism is still very much in the public arena, and still doing harm.

It is therefore all but certain that the next time a new military adventure in the Middle East or elsewhere beckons, the neocon-humanitarian interventionist twaddle will resume.

Taking exception to it is therefore still timely and, the media’s attention notwithstanding, as urgent now as it was just a few days ago.

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What Obama said in defense of the idea was more than usually slippery – in part because he implicitly conflated America’s exceptionalism with his own.

This rhetorical slight of hand has become familiar in...