AOC Isn't Interested in American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness. It connotes moral superiority
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Embedded in exceptionalist discourse is the belief that, because America has a special devotion to democracy and freedom, its sins are mostly incidental. The greatest evils humankind has witnessed, in places such as the Nazi death camps, are far removed from anything Americans would ever do
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America’s adversaries commit crimes; America merely stumbles on its way to doing the right thing. This distinction means that, in mainstream political discourse, the ugliest terms—fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, terrorism, imperialism, genocide—are generally reserved for phenomena beyond America’s shores.
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when the anti-war and other protest movements of the 1960s faded, so did their challenge to exceptionalist language. By the 1980s, Democrats were playing catch-up to Ronald Reagan’s flag-waving patriotism
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During the Barack Obama years, questioning American exceptionalism was considered a career-imperiling transgression. When Republicans questioned his commitment to the creed, Obama in 2014 replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”
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a resurgent left fueled by an influx of Millennial voters has launched a new challenge to exceptionalist discourse
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Partly, it’s because a higher percentage of Millennials are people of color, who generally look more skeptically on America’s claims of moral innocence
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Partly, it’s because the financial crisis has cast doubt on whether America’s economic model is preferable to those practiced in other nations. Younger Americans—a majority of whom embrace “socialism”—believe it’s not
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. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.”
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Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better.
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While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one.
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A few years ago, commentators rarely evoked the specter of American “authoritarianism.” Now it’s commonplace
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With his embrace of foreign authoritarians and his cultivation of conservatism’s xenophobic and racist fringes, Trump has become a galvanizing figure for the left, which for the first time since the 1960s has begun regularly evoking the specter of American “fascism.
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Fascism didn’t seem like an American problem. That’s no longer the case. Leftist street activists now embrace the term antifa, and the movement has grown dramatically under Trump.
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they’re also reinterpreting the American past. New scholarship has, for instance, muddied the distinction between German Nazism and early-20th-century American white supremacy.
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Adam Serwer excavated the work of World War I–era racial theorists such as Madison Grant to show that the “seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.”
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This willingness to equate American white supremacy with the barbarism that occurs in other countries has also shaped the way the left describes terrorism.
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Now it’s become common, not only among leftist commentators but among Democratic politicians, to apply the term to violence committed by native-born white Americans.
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When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.
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They are challenging not only the physical and legal barriers that Trump is erecting against immigrants entering the United States, but also the conceptual barriers that American exceptionalism erects against seeing the United States as a nation capable of evil