The last, best hope? The perils of American exceptionalism

Two weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, President George W. Bush said "The people who did this act on America and who may be planning further acts are evil people.... That's all they can think about, is evil. And as a nation of good folks, we're going to hunt them down." A year later, in the preface to his new National Security Strategy, the president enumerated the "values of freedom" that he believes are "right and true for every person, in every society." And long after the Iraq war had turned out to be not as easy, popular, or justifiable as predicted, Bush said that "the United States is the beacon for freedom in the world.... And I believe we have a duty to free people." The statements have become grander (at last month's Republican National Convention, the president said "we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom") but all rely on the popular belief in American "exceptionalism." This is the idea that the United States is somehow unique in history, an entirely new and progressive society based on eternal, transcendent values, which it is the country's destiny and duty to spread to the rest of the world. The United States is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "the last, best hope of earth."

Certainly the United States has been a champion of freedom, particularly in the defeat of Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism. And in the wake of 9/11, even without Bush's rhetorical effusions, it was natural that Americans should come together to reaffirm core values and to oppose barbarism and intolerance. A decade prior to 9/11, the end of the cold war and America's apparent triumph had already produced a popular discourse about the "end of history" and unprecedented U.S. moral prestige. But as wielded by the Bush administration in our "war on terror," American exceptionalism has become a belligerent posture that is winning us new enemies while losing us old friends, one that is endangering rather than strengthening America.

Far from toning down its rhetoric after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, the revelations at the Abu Ghraib prison, and other events that have made the "mission" there seem less than idealistic, the Bush administration has turned to religious language to shore up its claims. The president has repeated over and over that "freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to every person in the world." In his April 13 press conference, he coupled this with claims that "we're changing the world" and "we're freeing people." Thus the syllogism completes itself: Freedom is God's gift; we are freeing people; therefore we are doing God's work. Is it surprising if others get the impression that we think we're God's gift to the world?

George W. Bush did not invent this line of thinking. It goes back to the Puritan notion of America as a "city on a hill." Historian George Bancroft observed in 1853 that we "follow the steps by which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory." Bancroft's view was solidified by other historians over the next hundred years until it became, in the words of sociologist Robert Bellah, a "civil religion."

To be sure, many nations have a chauvinistic view of themselves--the French, who coined the word, are often singled out, but they are far from alone. "France cannot be France without greatness," Charles de Gaulle said. But even at their most arrogant, Europeans do not claim that their nations are chosen by God from "beyond the stars" to be the model for the rest of the world. A special set of circumstances led to America's distinctive form of national pride, including settlement by groups fleeing religious persecution; the lack of an aristocracy and emphasis on equality in the "nation of immigrants"; and, of course, the now debunked notion of an "empty" continent with no history at all, set aside by Providence for a great experiment.

In Of Paradise and Power (Alfred A. Knopf), neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, a strong backer of the war in Iraq, admits that the United States has tended to view itself as an "exception" to international law, and that at times it is even willing to "set aside legal and institutional constraints" in the pursuit of its interests. Traditionally, such apparent breaches of principle have been justified by America's unique "calling." But now, according to Kagan, there is a "crisis of legitimacy" brought on by the Europeans' refusal to condone actions like the Iraq war and by their insistence on multilateralism, hobbling the West in its efforts to defend liberal democracy. Yet Kagan says that "to address today's global threats America will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide." He thus admits that some of our actions violate liberal Western principles, but criticizes others for not approving them. In the end, Kagan seems to suggest that Europe should simply trust that America's goals are the right ones.