The Blind Spots in American Exceptionalism
What made the American political experiment, in the late 1700s, unlike any other that had preceded it, was its deeply radical nature—diverging from nearly all patterns of human political behaviour that came before. In spirit, the birth of the United States, was a movement away from the Old World and its quibbling ways. Its founding fathers consciously made a break from what they viewed as the corruption and tribalism of Europe and embraced a fresh, rights-oriented, more universalist approach to a polity inspired, to some degree, by French and English political thinkers.
This basic philosophical DNA of the Americans made them forward and future looking from the get-go, rather than oriented to the past, to heritage and tradition, and the hierarchies that came with that. This manifested as a font of permanent optimism. They looked forward to where something new and positive might arise. Released to some degree from the strictures of tradition, this also furthered pragmatism where one is empowered to innovative and create what is useful, rather than repeating ritual or catering to older patterns and dogmas.
Of course, many other factors played into the development of the American character. The early colonising and pioneering spirit and the need to fend off hostile nature and indigenous inhabitants also helped forge a practical spirit and capacity. The pilgrims’ battle with and flight from the old churches of Europe also required a hardiness and impelled a search for the new.
All of this combined into America as the 'can-do' nation par excellence, with its sense of endless possibility and the capacity for individuals to author their own future. The effort was of course abetted by the enormous bounty of a rich continent which was viewed as empty and available for them, despite the presence of its first peoples.
Today this spirit has waned as a consequence of its own triumphs. Americans have achieved material and economic success globally but, by aiming to continue to repeat the same formula, they risk overshoot when conditions may demand new responses.
For example, MAGA is a tired attempt to reinfuse some of the DNA of old America back into today. It is colliding head-on with a population that is increasingly dependent on the state and that has a growing sense of entitlement most clearly demonstrated by the fixated and rigid Woke ideology. Yet both MAGA and Woke are reflective of decline. As Sir John Glubb and William Ophuls have articulated in their writing, fading empires try to apply ever-narrower versions of themselves, or pursue old dreams, in a bid to stop a spiraling decline—failed responses that abet and accelerate, rather than soften, the fall.
In international relations, this has played out as a sort of franchising of the American success formula. From the beginning, Americans viewed themselves as the creators of a unique nation, one that stands in ‘exception’ to the tribal follies and hierarchical oppressions of the Old World—and therefore to the cycles of history from whence the term “American exceptionalism” arises. The United States did become a kind of empire, if an odd one, and yet it has retained this sense of exceptionalism in its outward dealings. Internationally, it has manifested this by trying to infect others with its brilliant original premise and formula: individualism, rights, high economic productivity, and endless bounty and optimism.
But, for all its verve, even American exceptionalism has its limits and blind spots in grasping or comprehending what lies outside itself. America’s original conscious departure from the Old World, its resulting forward-looking attitude, and its sense of can-do pragmatism have a built-in weakness: it is less capable than other cultures to read the more intangible tribal identity codes and motivations of other societies. The success formula diminishes Americans’ ability to recognize the socio-cultural imperatives of other nations, including that a people's self-image and honour, derived from history, are primary and worth dying for. This is one reason why the United States has become notorious for making errors in its foreign and military policies—whether in Iraq, moving NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders, and perhaps in a future collision with China over Taiwan.
Globally, America’s pragmatism and incredible ability to get things done peaked with its victories in World War Two and the Herculean execution of the Marshall Plan that followed. US strength remained sufficient to defeat the Soviet Union two decades later, but not before American overshoot and unravelling commenced in the Vietnam era. The blind spots in American exceptionalism, its excessive short-term practical and material, rather than cultural, considerations, will now show most intensely in its current struggles with Russia and China. We may have already had a glimpse and foreshadowing of future outcomes in the American withdrawal from Iraq, and its effective defeat in Afghanistan.
If the United States is to forestall and soften the inevitability of further debacles—even sudden, fatal, sweeping ones—American society needs to see through the illusory panaceas of the re-engineering schemes of both the left and right, of both Woke and Maga. It must chart a future course based on a different compass reading that is more adjusted to the realities of the world rather than, ironically, to its unique past, exceptional as it was.
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