These men running for the Office of President of the United States as Conservative Republicans. They are basing their debates on American Exceptionalism.
American Exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's Exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation,"[1] and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as "exceptional" in 1831 and 1840. [2] Historian Gordon Wood has argued, "Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy."[3]
The specific term "American Exceptionalism" was first used in 1929 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin chastising members of the American Communist Party for believing that America was independent of the Marxist laws of history "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions."[4]
Although the term does not necessarily imply superiority, many neoconservative and American conservative writers have promoted its use in that sense.[1][5] To them, the United States is like the biblical "shining city on a hill," and exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries.[6]Since the 1960s "postnationalist" scholars on the left have rejected American Exceptionalism, arguing that the United States had not broken from European history, and has retained class inequities, imperialism and war. Furthermore, they saw every nation as subscribing to some form of Exceptionalism. [7]
Puritan roots
Parts of American Exceptionalism can be traced to American Puritan roots.[17] Many Puritans with Armenian leanings embraced a middle ground between strict Calvinist predestination and a less restricting theology of Divine Providence. They believed God had made a covenant with their people and had chosen them to lead the other nations of the Earth. One Puritan leader, John Winthrop, metaphorically expressed this idea as a "City upon a Hill"—that the Puritan community of New England should serve as a model community for the rest of the world. [18] This metaphor is often used by proponents of Exceptionalism. The Puritans' deep moralistic values remained part of the national identity of the United States for centuries, remaining influential to the present day.
Double standards
U.S. historians like Thomas Bender "try and put an end to the recent revival of American Exceptionalism, a defect he esteems to be inherited from the Cold War."[54] Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dickson argue "how the development of the United States has always depended on its transactions with other nations for commodities, cultural values and populations."[55] Roger Cohen asks, "How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?"[56] Harold Koh distinguishes "distinctive rights, different labels, the 'flying buttress' mentality, and double standards. (...) [T]he fourth face—double standards—presents the most dangerous and destructive form of American Exceptionalism."[57] Godfrey Hodgson also concludes that "the US national myth is dangerous."[58] Samantha Power asserts that "we're neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers. It's going to take a generation or so to reclaim American Exceptionalism."[59]
Similarities between the United States and Europe
In December 2009, historian Peter Baldwin published a book arguing that, despite widespread attempts to contrast the 'American way of life' and the 'European social model', America and Europe are actually very similar on a number of social and economic indices. Baldwin claimed that the black underclass accounts for many of those few areas where a stark difference exists between the US and Europe, such as homicide and child poverty.[69] However, critic Andrew Moravcsik alleged that some of Baldwin's evidence actually supports the stereotype of a distinctive American model: a free-market system with little labor protection, an adversarial legal system, high murder rates, high rates of gun ownership, a large prison population, inequitable and expensive health care, and relatively widespread poverty.[70]
American Narrative of Freedom Based on Ideology
Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (1992) writes that the American narrative of freedom is the lie of Exceptionalism. All this can be derived from reading early American literature. She writes that Young America distinguished itself by, and understood itself to be, pressing toward a future of freedom, a kind of human dignity believed unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of “universal” yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled phrase, “the American Dream.”
Although this immigrant dream deserves the exhaustive scrutiny it has received in the scholarly disciplines and the arts, it is just as important to know what these people were rushing from as it is to know what they were hastening to. If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
The flight from the Old World to the New is generally seen to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and possibility. Although, in fact, the escape was sometimes an escape from license—from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined—for those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, constraint and limitation impelled the journey.
All the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty, prison, social ostracism, and, not infrequently, death. There was of course a clerical, scholarly group of immigrants who came seeking the adventure possible in founding a colony for, rather than against, one or another mother country or fatherland. And of course there were merchants, who came for the cash.
Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the “clean slate” variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born again in new clothes, as it were. The new setting would provide new raiment of self. This second chance could even benefit from the mistakes of the first. In the New World there was the vision of a limitless future, made more gleaming by the constraint, dissatisfaction, and turmoil left behind. It was a promise genuinely promising. With luck and endurance one could discover freedom; find a way to make God’s law manifest; or end up rich as a prince. The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger and debt. (34-5)
There was very much more in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make the trip worth the risk. The habit of genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of command. Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from social ostracism to social rank. One could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be inscribed. Much was to be written there: noble impulses were made into law and appropriated for a national tradition; base ones, learned and elaborated in the rejected and rejecting homeland, were also made into law and appropriated for tradition. (35)
What are these politicians about? They are in the words of Charles Reich in Opposing the System (1995) these politicians shaping and limiting our knowledge and our thinking through transforming ideas into pictures or models of reality. The “free market,” “States Rights,” the “private sector,” and the “big government bureaucrat,” are all pictures or models of reality shaped by ideology.
Morrison believes that early American literature reflects the making of the American racialized personality. She uses as illustration Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986) because it underscores the salient aspects of the American character she has been describing. (39)
Both Reich and Morrison agree that what these politicians are creating is what Morrison calls ‘ a sense of authority and autonomy—a force that flows from absolute control over the lives of others, a distinctive new man—a borderland gentleman, since they have knock Michelle Bachman out of the race, a man of property in a raw half-savage world.’ All this is done through the ideology of fear.
Morrison suggests that autonomy, authority newness and difference, absolute power—not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism [in is opposition against President Obama]. It was this Africanism, or this Othering, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.
Foreign Policy ~ Them vs. US
Autonomy is freedom, not “socialism,” even though Social Security guaranteed that capitalism would not be overthrown during the 1930s, and translates into the much championed and revered “individualism”; newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintain it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering “heroism,” virility, and the problematic of wielding absolute power over the lives of others.
All the rest are made possible by this last, it would seem—absolute power called forth and played against and within a natural and mental landscape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”
Why is it seen as raw and savage? Because it is peopled by a nonwhite indigenous population? Perhaps. (45)
BBC NEWS
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16482216
As Nigeria faces the second day of a general strike over fuels prices, the country is also dealing with unrest related to religious tensions that…
THE OUTSIDE BUSINESS WORLD LOOKS ON
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Unemployment in America is now at its lowest for almost three years. You might think news like that would put a rocket under the New York share markets. But that's not at all how things turned out on Friday... Harry Clark is at Clark Capital Management in Philadelphia.
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US Jobs 06 Jan 12
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Life for America's thirteen million jobless could be looking up in 2012. More jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has fallen - but we'll ask if it can last. Investors are queuing up to do business in Burma. As a film about Margaret Thatcher's life is released in Britain - what will be the Iron Lady's economic legacy? And the new smartphone software that fines you if you don't go the gym.
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ON POINT RADIO
It’s the American dream. But upward mobility is falling way behind Europe’s and Canada’s. What’s up?
In this Oct 19, 2011 file photo, an automobile rolls past many closed storefront businesses in downtown Pickens, Miss. The ranks of America's poor have climbed to a record high, according to new census data that paints a stark portrait of the nation's haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high. (AP)
America has always meant “land of opportunity.” Above all else, this was the country where you could get ahead. And pity old, stodgy, stuck-in-the-mud Europe. Well, look again. A wave of studies now show that upward mobility is higher in Europe than America. And not just a little higher.
Your chances of rising up are now greater in Norway, Finland, Denmark than in the USA. Higher in Sweden, Germany, France. Higher in Canada – and by a good margin. What’s gone wrong? What should we do about it?
This hour, On Point: This is core. America’s big upward mobility problem.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Scott Winship, fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Center on Children and Families for the Social Genome Project.
Reihan Salam, columnist for The Daily and lead writer of The Agenda blog at National Review.
Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden.
From Tom’s Reading List
Pew Economic Mobility Project “By a margin of 85 percent to 13 percent, Americans care more about financial stability than upward mobility.”
The New York Times “Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion. ”
The Atlantic “The American model has been regarded as proposing a kind of bargain. This is not Europe: Here, idleness and incompetence are sternly punished—but merit gets rewarded. Much more than elsewhere, your class background will neither prop you up nor hold you back. If you deserve to succeed, you will.”
National Review “What’s the most important issue in American politics? In a narrow sense, the sputtering economy and ballooning deficits are likely to dominate the 2012 election season. But while every election has its own particular concerns, fundamentally it is to the American Dream that our politicians must tend — that libertarian and egalitarian bundle of values and hopes that transcend our partisan, economic, and social divisions.”
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