MYTH AMERICA
The quiet doubt about the American uniqueness
"American Exceptionalism?" U.S. historians take a critical look at what history myths have accumulated over the years
Frank Herrmann
May 20, 2023, 15:00
The euphoria of the new beginning had not yet dissipated when Barack Obama dared to knock a myth off its pedestal. At least to shake it. "I believe in America's uniqueness, just as the British believe in the uniqueness of Great Britain and the Greeks believe in the uniqueness of Greece," he replied to a reporter's question, not in Washington, by the way, but in Strasbourg, on the sidelines of a NATO summit. He added that he was proud of his country and the role it had played in history, barely three months after moving into the White House. That all of this, though not perfect, was exceptional. The garlands of words with which he framed his key sentence did nothing to change the storm of indignation that washed over Obama. It was as if his opponents in the conservative camp had only been waiting for such a sentence, and they promptly used it as an opportunity.
The quiet doubt about American uniqueness seemed to fit into a mosaic that they were trying to assemble from quickly picked puzzle pieces. To a black-and-white picture, glaring contrasts, no shades of gray. The picture was supposed to show Obama as a stranger in his own country. As an outsider who, with his misgivings, his academic both/and, does not fit in with the proud United States.
Obama is a president who believes America is just one of many nations, rebuked Republican Mitt Romney, who ran against the incumbent in 2012 for the duel for the Oval Office. "God didn't create this country for us as a nation to go after others. America needs to lead the world." Washington's elite do not believe "that it is our special duty to preserve our greatness in order to perfect not only ourselves but all of humanity, rebuked Sarah Palin, the ex-governor of Alaska, in her book America by Heart, which accompanied the rise of the Tea Party.
Poetry and truth
Now Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, both historians at Princeton University, have taken the furor over Obama's gentle brush against the grain as an opportunity to pick apart what they call America's myths. Historical myths in which, they write, the line between fact and fiction is becoming visibly blurred, if it does not disappear altogether in the charged discourse. An anthology edited by Kruse and Zelizer - Myth America, as it is titled in English - is intended to help redraw the line, to separate fiction from truth. "A historiography that extols a nation's strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good about itself more than thinking deeply about it, that values simple exultation over multi-layered understanding, is not historiography, it's propaganda," Zelizer writes. What conservative America draws is a caricature, "as if we were superheroes."
To put his own approach in a pithy line, he cites a movie title. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - the good, the bad and the ugly, all together, viewed in a differentiated way, yields the true picture. Only celebrating victories, downplaying conflicts, presenting a past in which everyone was happy, that is, after all, the core of "Make America Great Again," Kruse adds in an interview with the research portal The Intercept. "Everything worked well in the past, nothing works today. So let's go back to that - albeit misdescribed - past."
Now, most Americans are quite proud of the fact that their United States, unlike the nations of Europe, invokes in its founding history not a common ancestry, such as the assumed blood brotherhood of a people, but principles and values representative of the Enlightenment. But whether their republic is unique, and if so, how much, has long been a non-issue for political debate. "American Exceptionalism," was a thesis that the world of academia engaged in, well into the eighties and nineties, when conservatives like Newt Gingrich began to see in the emphasis on American exceptionalism a kind of creed. In today's highly politicized debate, the term usually serves only as a label to denote one's own supposed superiority, writes David A. Bell, also a history professor at Princeton University, in Myth America.
Lack of patriotism?
To make the point, Bell strikes an ironic tone. Hadn't the Serbs traditionally seen themselves as a defensive shield of Christianity? Weren't Haitians proud because their country was the first whose inhabitants freed themselves from slavery? Didn't China have its uniquely rational Confucian culture? "In other words, the idea of American uniqueness fits exactly a common pattern. Nothing is unique about it." Bell, one of the 20 contributors to the collection of essays, speaks of it as a cudgel that can be easily wielded in the toxic political disputes that characterize the United States today. As if it were a matter of making a kind of profession of faith. And to suspect anyone who refuses to take the oath not to always sing "America the Beautiful. Hardly anyone has wielded said cudgel more vigorously than Sarah Palin, who tried to make a populist name for herself as the voice of the "true" America, the America of the provinces, before the populist Donald Trump spoke of the "forgotten men and women" who would no longer be forgotten with his entry into the White House.
In the fall of 2010, two years after her failed bid for the vice presidency, Palin gave a speech at a private Christian school in Pennsylvania in which she accused anyone who doubted America's uniqueness of lacking patriotism. Most countries, she said, are the result of historical contingencies - of wars, conquests, peace treaties. Not so the United States. "America is so different. We are not the product of a historical accident. We are the product of a plan. We are the only country in history founded on an idea. And that idea, that ideal, is freedom." Perhaps, Palin said, young people are not being taught all this decently. This is troubling, she said, because nothing less is at stake than "our republic and our freedoms."
The thing with empire
Given the polemic, it might be surprising where the term "American Exceptionalism" comes from. Historian Bell flashes back to the 1920s, when Joseph Stalin demanded answers. Jay Lovestone, one of the leading members of the U.S. Communist Party, tried to explain why things weren't going so well with his party, why it was having such a hard time organizing the factory workers of Pittsburgh or Detroit. American capitalism, he argued, was exceptionally productive and stable, so that workers' class consciousness was slow to develop and proletarian revolution took longer than elsewhere. Stalin castigated Lovestone for this as a deviant and condemned any thought of "American Exceptionalism" as an expression of ideological delusion.
Closely interwoven with Exceptionalism is the thesis that America was never an empire. Never could be, or even wanted to be, anything like the British Empire. On the one hand, because the founding of the United States was the result of an anti-imperialist rebellion. On the other hand, because the country was already standing up for democratic values when the rest of the world was still dominated by imperialist powers. As plausible as this sounds, Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University Illinois, speaks of a founding myth that is particularly persistent. After the wars of independence against the British, so the glorified view, the United States took on the fight against empires time and again - against the Japanese, against the German Reich, and finally against the Soviet Union.
And because it saw itself as a beacon of light to oppressed peoples around the world, military interventions would be cloaked in the aura of goodness, of charity. "But is that true? Is the United States fundamentally different from the violent empires of the past that were all about conquering foreign lands?" Aside from the fact that the U.S. did indeed occupy foreign lands, such as - until 1946 - the Philippines, Immerwahr recalls expansion on its own continent. The gradual expansion from the Atlantic coast to the west.
For decades, the country west of the Mississippi consisted not of free states but of dependent territories. On average, it took 45 years for an annexed territory to become a state. Until then, Immerwahr writes, so many white settlers had settled the terra incognita, which was not a terra incognita, that the Union was ready to accept the respective territory as a state. In the case of Oklahoma, it took much longer, until 1907, because Oklahoma was "Indian Territory," created in the course of the expulsion of the native peoples, the deportation of the 1830s, in which thousands of people died on the "March of Tears.
Fear of socialism
Or the thesis that socialism has given America a wide berth. "America will never be a socialist country," Donald Trump declared in a State of the Union address, at a moment when it looked as if leftist Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist in his own words, might win the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in place of Joe Biden. Trump, one may assume, will repeat the "never socialism" slogan to excess in a possible duel with Biden in 2024 as well.
In fact, as Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, documents, socialists have pushed some of the very reforms that a majority of Americans would never consider reversing. Medicare, for example, taxpayer-funded health care for seniors. Or the statutory minimum wage. According to Kazin, the idea of a public pension goes back to Victor Berger, a Transylvanian immigrant who, as a congressman, wanted to legislate a guaranteed income for the elderly. In 1901, Berger founded a party: the Socialist Party of America. (Frank Herrmann, 5/20/2023)
Source (derstandard.at) | Archive
Frank Herrmann
May 20, 2023, 15:00
The euphoria of the new beginning had not yet dissipated when Barack Obama dared to knock a myth off its pedestal. At least to shake it. "I believe in America's uniqueness, just as the British believe in the uniqueness of Great Britain and the Greeks believe in the uniqueness of Greece," he replied to a reporter's question, not in Washington, by the way, but in Strasbourg, on the sidelines of a NATO summit. He added that he was proud of his country and the role it had played in history, barely three months after moving into the White House. That all of this, though not perfect, was exceptional. The garlands of words with which he framed his key sentence did nothing to change the storm of indignation that washed over Obama. It was as if his opponents in the conservative camp had only been waiting for such a sentence, and they promptly used it as an opportunity.
The quiet doubt about American uniqueness seemed to fit into a mosaic that they were trying to assemble from quickly picked puzzle pieces. To a black-and-white picture, glaring contrasts, no shades of gray. The picture was supposed to show Obama as a stranger in his own country. As an outsider who, with his misgivings, his academic both/and, does not fit in with the proud United States.
Obama is a president who believes America is just one of many nations, rebuked Republican Mitt Romney, who ran against the incumbent in 2012 for the duel for the Oval Office. "God didn't create this country for us as a nation to go after others. America needs to lead the world." Washington's elite do not believe "that it is our special duty to preserve our greatness in order to perfect not only ourselves but all of humanity, rebuked Sarah Palin, the ex-governor of Alaska, in her book America by Heart, which accompanied the rise of the Tea Party.
Poetry and truth
Now Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, both historians at Princeton University, have taken the furor over Obama's gentle brush against the grain as an opportunity to pick apart what they call America's myths. Historical myths in which, they write, the line between fact and fiction is becoming visibly blurred, if it does not disappear altogether in the charged discourse. An anthology edited by Kruse and Zelizer - Myth America, as it is titled in English - is intended to help redraw the line, to separate fiction from truth. "A historiography that extols a nation's strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good about itself more than thinking deeply about it, that values simple exultation over multi-layered understanding, is not historiography, it's propaganda," Zelizer writes. What conservative America draws is a caricature, "as if we were superheroes."
To put his own approach in a pithy line, he cites a movie title. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - the good, the bad and the ugly, all together, viewed in a differentiated way, yields the true picture. Only celebrating victories, downplaying conflicts, presenting a past in which everyone was happy, that is, after all, the core of "Make America Great Again," Kruse adds in an interview with the research portal The Intercept. "Everything worked well in the past, nothing works today. So let's go back to that - albeit misdescribed - past."
Now, most Americans are quite proud of the fact that their United States, unlike the nations of Europe, invokes in its founding history not a common ancestry, such as the assumed blood brotherhood of a people, but principles and values representative of the Enlightenment. But whether their republic is unique, and if so, how much, has long been a non-issue for political debate. "American Exceptionalism," was a thesis that the world of academia engaged in, well into the eighties and nineties, when conservatives like Newt Gingrich began to see in the emphasis on American exceptionalism a kind of creed. In today's highly politicized debate, the term usually serves only as a label to denote one's own supposed superiority, writes David A. Bell, also a history professor at Princeton University, in Myth America.
Lack of patriotism?
To make the point, Bell strikes an ironic tone. Hadn't the Serbs traditionally seen themselves as a defensive shield of Christianity? Weren't Haitians proud because their country was the first whose inhabitants freed themselves from slavery? Didn't China have its uniquely rational Confucian culture? "In other words, the idea of American uniqueness fits exactly a common pattern. Nothing is unique about it." Bell, one of the 20 contributors to the collection of essays, speaks of it as a cudgel that can be easily wielded in the toxic political disputes that characterize the United States today. As if it were a matter of making a kind of profession of faith. And to suspect anyone who refuses to take the oath not to always sing "America the Beautiful. Hardly anyone has wielded said cudgel more vigorously than Sarah Palin, who tried to make a populist name for herself as the voice of the "true" America, the America of the provinces, before the populist Donald Trump spoke of the "forgotten men and women" who would no longer be forgotten with his entry into the White House.
In the fall of 2010, two years after her failed bid for the vice presidency, Palin gave a speech at a private Christian school in Pennsylvania in which she accused anyone who doubted America's uniqueness of lacking patriotism. Most countries, she said, are the result of historical contingencies - of wars, conquests, peace treaties. Not so the United States. "America is so different. We are not the product of a historical accident. We are the product of a plan. We are the only country in history founded on an idea. And that idea, that ideal, is freedom." Perhaps, Palin said, young people are not being taught all this decently. This is troubling, she said, because nothing less is at stake than "our republic and our freedoms."
The thing with empire
Given the polemic, it might be surprising where the term "American Exceptionalism" comes from. Historian Bell flashes back to the 1920s, when Joseph Stalin demanded answers. Jay Lovestone, one of the leading members of the U.S. Communist Party, tried to explain why things weren't going so well with his party, why it was having such a hard time organizing the factory workers of Pittsburgh or Detroit. American capitalism, he argued, was exceptionally productive and stable, so that workers' class consciousness was slow to develop and proletarian revolution took longer than elsewhere. Stalin castigated Lovestone for this as a deviant and condemned any thought of "American Exceptionalism" as an expression of ideological delusion.
Closely interwoven with Exceptionalism is the thesis that America was never an empire. Never could be, or even wanted to be, anything like the British Empire. On the one hand, because the founding of the United States was the result of an anti-imperialist rebellion. On the other hand, because the country was already standing up for democratic values when the rest of the world was still dominated by imperialist powers. As plausible as this sounds, Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University Illinois, speaks of a founding myth that is particularly persistent. After the wars of independence against the British, so the glorified view, the United States took on the fight against empires time and again - against the Japanese, against the German Reich, and finally against the Soviet Union.
And because it saw itself as a beacon of light to oppressed peoples around the world, military interventions would be cloaked in the aura of goodness, of charity. "But is that true? Is the United States fundamentally different from the violent empires of the past that were all about conquering foreign lands?" Aside from the fact that the U.S. did indeed occupy foreign lands, such as - until 1946 - the Philippines, Immerwahr recalls expansion on its own continent. The gradual expansion from the Atlantic coast to the west.
For decades, the country west of the Mississippi consisted not of free states but of dependent territories. On average, it took 45 years for an annexed territory to become a state. Until then, Immerwahr writes, so many white settlers had settled the terra incognita, which was not a terra incognita, that the Union was ready to accept the respective territory as a state. In the case of Oklahoma, it took much longer, until 1907, because Oklahoma was "Indian Territory," created in the course of the expulsion of the native peoples, the deportation of the 1830s, in which thousands of people died on the "March of Tears.
Fear of socialism
Or the thesis that socialism has given America a wide berth. "America will never be a socialist country," Donald Trump declared in a State of the Union address, at a moment when it looked as if leftist Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist in his own words, might win the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in place of Joe Biden. Trump, one may assume, will repeat the "never socialism" slogan to excess in a possible duel with Biden in 2024 as well.
In fact, as Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, documents, socialists have pushed some of the very reforms that a majority of Americans would never consider reversing. Medicare, for example, taxpayer-funded health care for seniors. Or the statutory minimum wage. According to Kazin, the idea of a public pension goes back to Victor Berger, a Transylvanian immigrant who, as a congressman, wanted to legislate a guaranteed income for the elderly. In 1901, Berger founded a party: the Socialist Party of America. (Frank Herrmann, 5/20/2023)
Source (derstandard.at) | Archive
