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Javier E

E-Notes: American Exceptionalism… Exposed - 0 views

  • exceptionalism, a concept that is not sui generis, not very old, and not even American in conception, has come to serve as code for the American Civil Religion that dare not speak its name.
  • far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.
  • the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word.
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  • If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”[1] If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.
  • he concluded that “these distortions should not blind us to the valid elements in the theory of exceptionalism.... America represents, as I have stressed above, the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history
  • it was probably just a matter of time before somebody turned the Stalinist term of derision into a patriotic badge of honor and ait stamped it over all of American history. As it happened, that somebody was Max Lerner, a former editor of The Nation turned Cold War liberal and author of the one-thousand page America as a Civilization (1957).
  • Exceptionalism dovetailed perfectly with a new orthodoxy among political scientists that extolled what Harvard professor Louis Hartz called America’s Liberal Tradition.
  • the idea of an America set apart by Providence and endowed with a special mission to reform (not to say redeem) the whole human race dovetailed perfectly with the political rhetoric needed to rally Americans to lead the Free World in what amounted to a “holy war” against “godless Communism.”
  • Those were the years when the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” became a civilizational motto
  • how come computerized word-searches show that references to American Exceptionalism exploded—literally from hundreds to tens of thousands—only after the Cold War was over?
  • Those were the years when presidential rhetoric became steeped in what sociologist Robert Bellah called “God-Talk,”
  • the Cold War was over, globalization and multiculturalism were the new trends, and American identity got contested as never before. What made exceptionalist rhetoric ubiquitous was the fact it was now contested
  • the myth of American Exceptionalism, ironically inspired by Roman Catholics and Marxists, entered our lexicon as historical gloss for the campaign to persuade a skeptical, war-weary people that global commitments such as the UN, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were not really a break with tradition, but a fulfillment of the nation’s hoariest, holiest calling.
  • As early as 1630, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop implored his people ‘to Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.’”[12] I took for granted that my teachers and textbooks were right when they traced our national identity back to the Puritans beginning with Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity. Composed on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World, it seemed the elegant spiritual companion to the Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact.
  • he borrowed a New Testament image when he imagined New England as a city on a hill called to inspire the whole human race by its example.
  • the dogged literary excavations of historian Richard Gamble have now exposed it as myth. It turns out that Winthrop’s manuscript, far from serving as keynote address of the American pageant, was either unknown or forgotten until it turned up in the family archives in 1809. Donated to the New York Historical Society, it slept for another three decades before publication in a Massachusetts collection of colonial documents in 1838
  • The famous “City on a Hill” passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as one in a list of metaphors Jesus uses to describe his disciples. He speaks of them as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill, and a lamp not hidden under a bushel. The passage served as text for many a sermon preached by colonial divines, not least Jonathan Edwards. But those pastors were quoting the Bible to make theological points to Christian audiences; none was quoting Winthrop to make political points to American audiences. What has been lost “in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define the American identity,” Gamble writes, is “the story not of how the metaphor helped make America what it is today but the story of how America helped make the metaphor what it never was.”
  • not even the Puritans were “impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse. On the contrary, they were products of European education, European culture, European piety, and they were engaged in a great European quarrel.
  • Americans have always been tempted to think that because they live in God’s Country they must be God’s Elect. Such faith has its uses, for instance to motivate a free and disparate people to rally and sacrifice in times of crisis. But it verges on idolatry from the standpoint of Biblical religion and—if exploited for partisan purposes—verges on heresy from the standpoint of civil religion.
Javier E

AOC Isn't Interested in American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness. It connotes moral superiority
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • a resurgent left fueled by an influx of Millennial voters has launched a new challenge to exceptionalist discourse
  • 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
  • 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
  • Most of all, the challenge to exceptionalism is a response to Trump.
  • . 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.”
  • Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better.
  • While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one.
  • A few years ago, commentators rarely evoked the specter of American “authoritarianism.” Now it’s commonplace
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • This willingness to equate American white supremacy with the barbarism that occurs in other countries has also shaped the way the left describes terrorism.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
Javier E

The Souring of American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Near the end of a much more terrible national ordeal, Abraham Lincoln urged Americans: "Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from.” Good advice.
  • A traditional theme of the rhetoric of the Fourth is the celebration of “American exceptionalism.”
  • hat phrase has acquired a boastful overtone, which is why President Obama famously handled it so diffidently. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
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  • “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”
  • Non-Marxists took up the inquiry after World War II. With a Labor government nationalizing railways and steelworks in Britain—Germany shattered by Nazism—and communism holding Russia, China, and half of Europe in its grip, the United States stood out as a lonely beacon of liberalism. Again America seemed a special case that needed explaining. This time the explanations came from fellow-liberals who admired the American exception, which is how the phrase acquired its secondary and more positive meaning.
  • “American exceptionalism" began its career, however, not as a boast, but as a question.
  • Even pre-Trump, it was hard to argue that the United States was a consistently more liberal society than Germany or Britain
  • Free speech is more protected in the United States than other places. In some ways, no: The right to vote is better protected almost everywhere else in the democratic world than in the United States.
  • But most of the compliments Americans paid themselves half a century ago ring hollow in the 21st century.
  • Who your parents were and where you came from matters probably more in the United States than in most other advanced economies, at least if statistics on upward mobility are to be believed.
  • Marco Rubio delivered the keynote address at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He told his own inspiring personal story and credited it to the unique opportunities of the United States. "The result is an America where—which is the only place in the world where it doesn't matter who your parents were or where you came from. You can be anything you are willing to work hard to be. The result is the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed against rich people in the marketplace and competition.” None of that is true, and in important ways it is the opposite of the truth.
  • It is more violent than other comparable societies, both one-on-one and in the gun massacres to which the country has become so habituated
  • It has worse health outcomes than comparably wealthy countries, and some of them most important of them are deteriorating further even as they improve almost everywhere else.
  • America’s average levels of academic achievement lag those of other advanced countries.
  • Fewer Americans vote—and in no other democracy does organized money count for so much in political life.
  • “Why was the United States vulnerable to such a person when other democracies have done so much better?” Part of the answer is a technical one: The Electoral College, designed to protect the country from demagogues, instead elected one.
  • How did Trump even get so far that the Electoral College entered into the matter one way or another?
  • If, as I believe, Donald Trump arose because of the disregard of the American political and economic elite for the troubles of so many of their fellow-citizens, it has to be asked again: How could the leaders of a democratic country imagine they could get away with such disregard?
Javier E

World War One and the Death of American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “American exceptionalism,” as Americans began talking about it in the 1950s, rested on a series of claims about American history.
  • It was claimed that because America had never known a feudal aristocracy, the United States had evolved as a uniquely classless society, at least for its white citizens. Because America was classless, the United States was uniquely immune to socialism and communism. This achievement came at a price however: a society uniquely indifferent to high culture, uniquely characterized by mass production and mass marketing.
  • These claims don’t seem very robust today. The United States is more, not less, class-bound than other developed countries. Socialism and communism are dead ideas everywhere in the developed world. Nor does American culture look so different from that of other rich countries as it did when Henry James lamented of the United States: “no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.”
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  • As Americans have become more uncertain of their nation’s continued hegemony, their leaders and would-be leaders have insisted ever more emphatically upon the doctrine of “American exceptionalism.”
  • As a guide to action, however, the concept is proving of dwindling utility in the 21st century. The American state can still mobilize and deploy resources vastly greater than those of any other state. American policymakers, however, do not face a different geostrategic map from the policymakers of other and adversary countries, and American society does not belong to a different category than do the societies of other developed societies.
  • The debate over healthcare reform unfurled with an almost surreal indifference to the rest of the world. Ditto for the debate over financial reform after the crisis of 2008. Ditto the debate over social mobility, over school performance, or over policing of disadvantaged communities.
  • Lincoln was not preaching the ignorant doctrine that history repeats itself. (As the great medieval historian Roberto Lopez used to caution his students, history never repeats itself; it only appears to do so to those who don’t pay attention to details.) He was urging the importance of emancipating one’s mind from the narrow bounds of time and place. Good advice then. Good advice now.
Javier E

Opinion | American exceptionalism has become a hazard to our health - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Taiwan gets the gold medal for its coronavirus strategy. It has close ties with mainland China, where the disease originated, receiving almost 3 million visitors from there in a typical year. It is a densely populated land, and Taipei, the capital city, has crowded public transit. And yet, with a population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan has had just seven deaths. New York state, with a smaller population, has had 33,000.
  • SARS also came out of China, where authorities bungled the initial response and withheld information from the outside world. The Taiwanese were caught unprepared and made several mistakes. In the aftermath, they totally overhauled their pandemic preparedness procedures. They ensured they had adequate supplies of equipment on hand. They made plans to act early, smartly and aggressively.
  • Many Asia-Pacific countries have succeeded against covid-19 — South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. All were hit by SARS or witnessed its economic damage, and they learned from the experience. The only non-Asian country with a SARS outbreak was Canada, and it, too, changed its procedures after 2003 and took precautions.
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  • SARS doesn’t explain the success of every country that has handled covid-19 well, but it reveals an important aspect of the story.
  • Consider, on the other hand, countries that have handled covid-19 badly. Anthropologist Martha Lincoln, writing in Nature, points out that several of these countries tend to think of themselves as exceptional in some way. She notes that the United States, Britain, Brazil and Chile all have strong national narratives that see themselves as separate, distinct and better than others.
  • That sense of being special makes a country unlikely to adopt the standard attitude of any business when confronting a challenge — to look for best practices.
  • Bill Gates recently wrote that he has always approached problem-solving by starting with two fundamental questions: “Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?
  • And yet the United States is remarkably uninterested in how other countries approach similar challenges.
  • Dozens of advanced countries have health-care systems that deliver better results at half the cost of America’s. Most have a fraction of our homicide rates. Many much poorer countries have better infrastructure, which they build at far lower cost. They ensure that money does not dominate their elections. Not only do we not learn from them, we barely bother to look.
  • In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Konyndyk argues that “American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States is unique among nations and that the American way is invariably the best — has blinded the country’s leaders (and many of its citizens) to potentially lifesaving lessons from other countries.
  • He quotes the eminent U.S. historian Eric Foner, who once explained that American exceptionalism translates into “hubris and closed-mindedness, and . . . ignorance about the rest of the world. Since the United States is so exceptional, there is no point in learning about other societies.” Konyndyk concludes: “That mentality is now costing American lives.”
Javier E

Mike Pence's awkward - and telling - response to whether the U.S. is 'morally superior'... - 0 views

  • this is not an easy question right now for Pence — or anybody in the Trump administration. That's because American exceptionalism is at the core of the Republican Party's brand and identity in the 21st century. Squaring that with Trump's suggestion that the United States doesn't have the moral high ground on the killing of its opponents requires all the politician-speak one can muster — and ignoring pretty much everything you've ever said about why the United States is morally superior to the likes of Russia.
  • Back in 2015, the Pew Research Center asked whether the United States "stands above all others," was one of the greatest countries, or whether there were other countries that were better.
  • Fully 48 percent of conservative Republicans said it was the greatest country in the world, compared to 17 percent of liberal Democrats. Just 8 percent of conservative Republicans disagreed that the United States is at least "one of the greatest countries."
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  • The GOP's embrace of patriotism and American exceptionalism ramped up after 9/11 and especially when Democrats began to question the war in Iraq. Some on the right fought back by arguing that this was unpatriotic or that war skeptics opposed U.S. troops.
  • And it was a fixture of the opposition to Barack Obama, whom Republicans regularly accused of "apologizing" for America.
  • This was a major theme of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign against Obama, and back in 2015, Rudy Giuliani accused Obama of believing "that American exceptionalism is no more exceptional than the exceptionalism of any other country in the world."
  • Giuliani is now a key Trump confidant, and Trump is espousing almost that exact view that Giuliani ascribed to Obama. And now the likes of Giuliani and Pence are left to explain it.
Javier E

Does the Sense of American Exceptionalism Help the United States or Hurt It? - Room for... - 0 views

  • President Vladimir Putin of Russia criticized President Obama’s assertion of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the U.S.’s heritage and policies make it uniquely able to do what it feels is right.
  • Some say the concept is crucial to America’s ability to protect national interests. Others say it has led the U.S. into military and diplomatic quagmires.
  • Does the sense of American exceptionalism help the U.S. or hurt it?
Javier E

Donald Trump's American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Trump isn’t ending American exceptionalism. He’s redefining it in ironic and disturbing ways.
  • “American exceptionalism” began as a way to explain why working-class Americans found communism less appealing than did their European counterparts.
  • For the American communist leader Jay Lovestone, who coined the phrase, it was an excuse for his frustrating lack of success. For post-war sociologists like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, it was a source of national strength. The American poor didn’t seethe with class resentment and turn to revolutionary ideologies because upward mobility gave them the chance to rise.
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  • When Newt Gingrich ran, he claimed that what made America special was its unfettered capitalism.
  • When Mitt Romney ran for president, he said that what made America exceptional was its mission to defend liberty
  • in an era of accelerating income equality, American leaders began to acknowledge that when it came to upward mobility, the United States wasn’t actually exceptional at all.
  • For Obama, what made America exceptional was its ever-expanding circle of inclusion. By overcoming its history of bigotry, and building a society where people of different races, ethnicities and religions lived in harmony, America overcame the tribal hatreds that marred other lands and became a model for the world.
  • Trump and his advisors say that what sets America apart is its sovereignty. By embracing the European Union, they argue, Europeans stopped valuing nationhood. And as a result, they admitted Muslims who are threatening the continent from within.
  • On Monday night on Fox News, White House aide Stephen Miller brought up Europe unprompted. “The most important thing to discuss right now,” he told Tucker Carlson, “is how do we keep this country from falling into the same trap as happened to parts of Europe to places like Germany, to places like France, where you have a permanent intergenerational problem of Islamic radicalism that becomes a routine feature of life in those countries, a new normal. How do we keep that from happening in America?”
  • Trump and his aides, by contrast, place the primary blame for non-integration on Europe’s Muslim immigrants themselves.
  • Miller suggests that if current trends continue, American Muslims will prove just as dangerous and unassimilable as their European counterparts. It’s a deeply pessimistic vision. Neither Trump nor any of his aides, as far as I know, has proposed policies to help American Muslims embrace opportunity and avoid radicalization
  • All they’ve done is try to reduce the number coming into the country. The implication is that what will make America exceptional is not its success in integrating Muslims but its success in keeping them out
  • For Lipset, Bell, Romney, Gingrich, and Obama, what made America exceptional were its people’s habits and ideas. For Trump, what makes America exceptional is the fact that its people are overwhelmingly Jewish and Christian.
  • For Obama, what made America exceptional was its ability to foster a national identity that transcended tribe and sect. And for Trump? Making America exceptional again requires abandoning that as a dangerous dream.
Javier E

The Profound Social Cost of American Exceptionalism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The United States is one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the history of humanity. And yet it accepts — proudly defends, even — a degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society.
  • My first column pondered why Americans didn’t care more about the nation’s income gap, so much starker than that of any other advanced democracy. I suggested that my compatriots might come to a consensus that inequality is harmful when they realized how vast inequities could gum up the cogs of economic and social mobility
  • You can bet it has gone higher, given the bull run in the stock market since then. And Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust.
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  • Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”
  • As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.
  • Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.
  • Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.
  • The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.
  • The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.
  • Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?
  • America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.
  • populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.
Javier E

Decline of American Exceptionalism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • when Americans were asked if they agreed with the statement “our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others,” only 49 percent agreed. That’s down from 60 percent in 2002,
  • among young people (those ages 18 to 29), the percentage of Americans who believed that their culture was superior was lower than young citizens of Germany, Spain and Britain.
  • most Americans believed that we aren’t simply going through tough times as a nation but are at “the start of a longer-term decline where the U.S. is no longer the leading country in the world.”
Javier E

We're Obsessed With American Exceptionalism - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

  • You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here.
  • Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.
  • people want high-status figures to invest in building the brand of their shared identity—a sort of status redistribution as noblese oblige
Javier E

Wikileaks Reaction: How The Leaks Strike At The Heart Of American Exceptionalism | The ... - 0 views

  • For the right, America is quite simply the last, best hope of mankind, and anything that is in the interest of the United States is, by definition, in the interests of humanity.
  • For the progressives, America has many flaws but it is still humanity’s best hope.
  • David Brooks wrote that he foresaw a new movement arising in America whose goal would “be unapologetic: preserving American pre-eminence. It will preserve America’s standing in the world on the grounds that this supremacy is a gift to our children and a blessing for the earth."
Javier E

The Coronavirus Could End American Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.
  • This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College
  • Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning
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  • Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.
  • “The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.
  • When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.
  • We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”
  • By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.
  • Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.
  • Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country
  • It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.
  • Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis
  • As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.
  • A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.
  • “Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal
  • New Zealand’s record of learning
  • His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.
  • Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing
  • In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change
  • “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.
  • as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.
  • with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”
  • Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.
nataliedepaulo1

Donald Trump and the end of American exceptionalism? - BBC News - 0 views

  • When a German Chancellor feels the need to explain the refugee convention to an American president, the speaker of British House of Commons says the leader of its closest ally is not welcome to address parliament, China positions itself as the grown-up in the room by chiding him for his blunt Twitter diplomacy and the botched travel ban is denounced not just by US adversaries, such as Iran, but allies, such as France and Canada, is it not time to sound the death-knell of American exceptionalism?
  • Trump's America might end up being a forcefully protected citadel, but will it be a city on a hill?
Javier E

What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
  • These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
  • Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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  • The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
  • Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
  • Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.
  • The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
  • Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
  • By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
  • Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
  • MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.
  • while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
  • The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
  • the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success
  • The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
  • research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
  • Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
  • it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
  • We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.
  • That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
  • Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
  • In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
  • Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.
  • Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.
  • The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age
  • Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to
  • At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.
  • success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies
  • Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
  • Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
  • It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
  • But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating
  • Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
  • Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts
  • The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.
  • Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
  • THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
  • The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.
  • It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
  • research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.
  • The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
  • But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.
  • the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Javier E

What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
  • Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
  • It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.
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  • Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force,
  • But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
  • I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.
  • We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
Javier E

The American Idea and Today's G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Today there are some conservative commentators and Republican politicians who talk a lot about American exceptionalism. But when they use the phrase they mean the exact opposite of its original meaning. In fact, they are effectively destroying American exceptionalism.
  • These commentators and candidates look backward to an America that is being lost. Ann Coulter encapsulated this attitude perfectly in her latest book title, “Adios, America.” This is the philosophy of the receding roar, the mourning for an America that once was and is now being destroyed by foreign people and ideas.
  • given the composition of the electorate, if the G.O.P. candidate won the same 59 percent share of the white vote that Mitt Romney won in 2012, he would have to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote to get a majority. That’s a daunting number, given that, as Dan Balz of The Washington Post points out, Romney only won 17 percent of that vote.
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  • American conservatism has always been different than the conservatism found on continental Europe and elsewhere. There it was based on blood and soil, here on promise.
  • American free market and religious conservatives have traditionally embraced a style of nationalism that is hopeful and future minded. From Lincoln to Reagan to Bush, the market has been embraced for being dynamic and progressive. The major faiths uplift in part because they are eschatological — they look forward to a glorious future.
  • This pessimism isn’t justified by the facts. As a definitive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans. Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate of American men.
Javier E

Hillary Clinton's Bizarre Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • For Hillary, America’s current problem is that once the Cold War ended, we “withdrew from the information arena.” As a result, across the world, a new generation no longer remembers the great things we supposedly did in the past, and America has stopped telling them about the great things we are still doing today. Her answer: “get back to telling” the story of America’s greatness, not only to the rest of the world but “to ourselves first and foremost.”
  • For more than five years, the right has claimed the major problem with American foreign policy is that it’s not sufficiently grounded in the belief that America is an exceptional nation fated to lift up humanity by spreading its power, as it did in generations past. Now, bizarrely, Hillary Clinton is leveling the same critique. Which still doesn’t make it right.
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  • the really weird part of Hillary Clinton’s claim that America must “get back to telling” the story of how great we are “to ourselves” is how much it echoes the right’s attack on Obama. Since Obama took office, a parade of conservative politicians and pundits have accused him of insufficient faith in America’s greatness. Mitt Romney entitled his campaign book No Apology: Believe in America. In 2013, Dick Cheney declared, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes in the U.S. as an exceptional nation.”
  • The problem isn’t that Bush didn’t tell foreigners about all the good America was doing. It’s that in their eyes, Bush’s behavior massively contradicted his rhetoric
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