June 14, 2006
The Problem with American Exceptionalism II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST With regard to the three men who hanged themselves at Guantanamo, an act that many thought showed an indifference to human life, even their own, Ellen Feldman wrote in her thoughtful piece, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism,” that “I would argue that taking one’s own life, especially in protest rather than desperation, demonstrates an extremely high regard for human life. Look what I am willing to sacrifice to make my point, the suicide screams.”
One could argue, with at least equal validity, I think, that these suicides demonstrate not that the prisoners regarded life highly but that they had a very high regard for the PR value of their suicides in the western media. Ever since the Vietnam War, wars have been fought not just on the ground but on television and in the newspapers. The North Vietnamese did not win the war on the ground; they won it on CBS. Al Qaeda is every bit as media savvy as the Vietnamese and is fighting an even more asymmetric war. So it seems to me perfectly reasonable for the prisoners to have argued that “We know we will be welcomed into paradise after a momentary unpleasantness with a bed sheet around our necks, and our suicides will be a major media coup, setting off the usual knee-jerk, blame-America reaction that we can always count on from the likes of The New York Times and the major networks.”
As for American exceptionalism, it seems to me there are two varieties of it. One is the exceptionalism that everyone feels about his or her own tribe, a notion of exceptionalism that is built into our genes. Human self-interest is bound up in three things, ourselves, our families, and our group, whether it’s a band of two dozen hunter gatherers in the Kalahari or 300 million technically advanced people spread out over half a continent. One universally employed mechanism of building tribal solidarity, for instance, is to make fun of one’s neighbors. The English language is full of casual insults such as “Dutch courage” and “French leave.” The Dutch and French languages have equivalent insults regarding the British. I have no doubt that Polish has numerous expressions putting down the Germans and the Russians and vice versa. Even within a language these mechanisms exist. The bodies of mayflies that wash up on the shores of the Great Lakes every spring by the tens of billions are often known on the south shore of the lakes as “Canadian soldiers.” On the north shore they are commonly referred to as “American soldiers.”
This tendency to tribal solidarity might be especially true of polities that evolve on islands, such the English (“wogs start at Calais”) and the Japanese. Ours, too, is an island race, to borrow Noel Coward’s phrase, for we are a country that was born and grew up in profound isolation, two months’ sail from Europe.
And this form of exceptionalism, while perfectly normal and healthy, can be turned into a terrible, soul-destroying perversion, as the Third Reich demonstrated at the cost of 50 million lives.
The other sort of American exceptionalism is not, I think, a “belief that we are more moral and righteous than other peoples of other nations.” There are, to be sure, the usual flag-waving lunatics who believe exactly that, just as there are people who believe that the King James Bible is the literal word of God, who, they seem to think, speaks in Elizabethan English.
Most Americans, however, believe that we have been more successful, both politically and economically, than other countries, a belief that is hard to argue with. And that therefore adopting American ways is in the interest of other countries. For most of our history, however, most Americans could not have cared less if other countries did or didn’t. Even after Woodrow Wilson led the country into a European war in order “to make the world safe for democracy,” (translation: prevent a German victory), we skedaddled back to isolationism just as fast as we could, with disastrous consequences for the world as a whole. It was only after World War II that this country came to the conclusion that, like it or not, we had to lead because no one else could. We have been the most reluctant hegemon in world history.
Other countries, though they are far less likely to say so, of course, apparently agree with this idea of American exceptionalism. At least for the last 200 years the world has been becoming more and more democratic and capitalist, which is to say more and more American. We have led the way into the modern world because good ideas spread, despite all attempts to suppress them, and this country has been blessed with both remarkably good ideas and the circumstances that allowed their evolution.
Ellen Feldman also writes that “the Marshall plan required beneficiary nations to draw up their own programs rather than impose an American brand of democracy, as we are now determined to do.” I don’t know what the “American brand of democracy” is, as opposed to other brands. There is nothing inherently American about democracy. Democracy is democracy, any system of government where the locus of power resides with the people, not the elite. And while we imposed a constitution on Japan—it was written largely by General MacArthur and staff—we certainly didn’t impose one on Iraq. If we had, the whole messy business would have been done a lot more quickly. And the Iraqi constitution that is, finally, fully in place bears hardly any resemblance to ours, nor does the court system, as the trial-cum-circus of Saddam Hussein demonstrates. Whether the new constitution will work and democracy will take real and lasting root in Iraq only time will tell.
But I have no doubt whatever that if democracy fails in Iraq it will not be democracy’s fault. No country that has established a democratic form of government has ever relinquished democracy, except at the point of a gun. (To be sure, Hitler became chancellor of Germany by perfectly legal, democratic means. But that was the last decision left to the German people, for he almost immediately established a tyranny by extralegal means. In retrospect, of course, we know the German people made a ghastly mistake, but at the time they were more worried about anarchy and economic collapse than about Hitler’s real intentions. They thought he could be “controlled.” They were wrong.)
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