How Did "Exceptionalism" Become a Conservative Shibboleth?

(Actual Right-Wing Infant Wear)

"On the right, the word 'exceptional' - or 'exceptionalism' - lately has become a litmus test for patriotism. It's the new flag lapel pin, the one-word pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution. To many on the left, it has become birther code for 'he's not one of us.'"

-- Washington Post conservative columnist Kathleen Parker,  Jan. 30, 2011

In recent years, the idea of American exceptionalism has become strongly associated with the American right, an association nicely captured by Kathleen Parker in an otherwise deeply silly op-ed about President Obama's recent State of the Union Address.  Parker's focus was not on whether Obama believes that the U.S. is exceptional, nor even on whether he indicated that belief in his speech, but rather on Obama's failure to use the word itself.  "He didn't say it," Parker begins,

That word: "exceptional." Barack Obama described an exceptional nation in his State of the Union address, but he studiously avoided using the word conservatives long to hear.

Conservatives' obsession with Obama's relationship to exceptionalism goes back to an April, 2009, press conference in Strasbourg (previously discussed by Mike O'Connor on this blog), but the conservative appropriation of the term is of longer standing...though not by much.  

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.

Daniel Bell: Neoconservative?

Daniel Bell has been remembered twice here in the past week. First, briefly by Ben Alpers, and second by Andrew Hartman in a reflection on Bell's 1992 analysis of the Culture Wars.

My contribution to this conversation is to point you toward a Slate.com essay on Bell by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg worked on a project about Dwight Macdonald, and had an occasion to interview Bell (among other New York Intellectuals). The article paints Bell as an engaging, honest, skeptical, and predictably bright member of his intellectual community. But Weisberg adds to our ongoing discussions about neoconservatism and neoliberalism by

Sarah Palin Meets Thomas Jefferson: For Your Viewing Pleasure

Today I begin my offerings with a little (dark) U.S. (anti-) intellectual history humor:



My favorite line from the clip: "What's a Tea-ocracy?" - TL

[I stumbled on this courtesy of John Fea.]

Town and Gown Black Power

Thought you all might be interested in this review.

Stefan M. Bradley. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Illustrations. ix + 249 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03452-7.


Reviewed by Angela Ryan
Published on H-1960s (November, 2010)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-Smith

Town and Gown Black Power

Harlem, the northern tip of the New York City borough of Manhattan, has been a predominantly black neighborhood since the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century, and the neighborhood has become synonymous with black cultural and political achievements. However, without access to wealth and resources because of racism and discrimination, black residents of Harlem have remained tenants, and not owners, of the land and buildings that characterize the pinnacle of black achievement. One of the largest landlords in the western Harlem neighborhood of Morningside Heights is the elite Ivy League institution Columbia University. The intertwined histories of Harlem and Columbia have been characterized by acrimony and mistrust, and for a week in the spring of 1968, student and community activists brought the university to a standstill as they protested Columbia’s aggressive expansion plans. The student-community alliance was chiefly concerned with thwarting the university’s plan to build a new gymnasium in the adjacent Morningside Park--a swath of precious green space that was primarily used by Columbia’s African American neighbors in Harlem.

Read the rest here.

Humbled by History

The revolts in Tunsia and especially Egypt make a mockery of the American wars for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. I acknowledge the great sacrifice made by those who have served, fought, and died in these wars from many countries. Yet as Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times on January 31, "It's quite possible that if Murbarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing." 9/11 happened not because of some grand showdown between those who "hate our freedoms" and those who defend those freedoms, as George W. Bush argued. Hate undoubtedly permeates many societies that harbor terrorists, but such hate is for the regimes that have treated millions of proud people like serfs--regimes that have been aided in no small part by the United States. As Anne Applebaum wrote in Slate, "The 'stability' we have so long embraced in the Arab world wasn't really stability. It was repression...In Cairo, police were firing 'Made in the USA' tear gas at protesters."

The history of such support cannot be erased or forgotten, but as Douthat suggests at the end of his brief essay, the revolts in Tunsia and Egypt have happened despite the notorious involvement of the United States. History has humbled the U.S. once again by happening without it.

Still More on the Myth of American Religious Freedom

Readers might be interested in a blog interview I did over at Religion in American History with the blogmeister and the scholar of religion at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, Paul Harvey. A bit from the interview:

PH: You spend a good amount of time criticizing positions on the left and on the right of our current politics, in terms of how they employ religious history to make their favored points about religion/state issues (and moral issues generally). What do you think each side gets basically wrong about history, and if you were anointed Historical King, what would you tell your subjects about how to use history properly in framing arguments about present-day concerns?

DS: My problem with much of the political debate over the role of religion in public life, especially when that debate invokes history, is that the various parties are simply enacting the culture wars rather than using history to frame their arguments in a meaningful way. As a result, the history is bad on all sides. Liberals are too tendentious when they claim a separation of church and state in the past. To them, I say that Christianity was so thoroughly entwined with law and government that Protestant Christianity had significant power through its connection with the state. And I have to say that when conservatives claim that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, in a certain sense they are right. But I also have a problem with religious conservatives, because the past was not the Christian utopia that some of them claim. Christians relied upon law to protect their religion. And what law involves, above all else, is the coercive capacities of the state. So if we say that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, we must also say that it was a coercively Christian nation.

The full interview (in two parts): Part I, Part II.

Why Liberal Jurisprudence Needs History, or More on the Myth of American Religious Freedom

More on the Myth of American Religious Freedom from my blog post with the American Constitution Society, the liberal counterpart of the Federalist Society. As many of our readers know, conservative legal thinkers have argued that law has a particular orientation to the past. They seek to determine the original meaning of the law, particular in constitutional law, in order to apply that original meaning in the present. Originalism, as this idea is called, has come up several times on this blog, most recently in the comments on my post about Jill Lepore and Gordon Wood. Because of their originalism, conservatives routinely return to the past to justify their opinions in the present, and in the process they often make dubious historical claims. Liberals, in my view, attend to history in law much less often, especially on the subject of religion, but when they do their appeal often features equally dubious claims. That's because the history of religion and law is a particularly tricky subject for liberals. Liberals claim that the First Amendment separated church and state, which it could not have done since the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not apply to the states prior to 1940 and almost all the issues of church and state would come up on the state level. As a result, there was rampant religious coercion in law prior to the actions of the mid-twentieth century Supreme Court. But as I argue in the post, acknowledging that history of religious coercion does not necessarily aid the cause of conservatives. In fact, the most powerful argument for liberal jurisprudence is historical. Quoting from the post: "In the not-too-distant past, religious dissenters were subject to religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state. In the mid-twentieth century, after over one hundred years of activism, the Supreme Court acted by applying the religious clauses of the First Amendment to the states in order to guarantee the rights of the individual as part of a larger effort to create a liberal democracy in the United States." Understanding this wider context of jurisprudence and the historical burdens out of which liberal decisions arose shows why liberal jurisprudence is necessary.

Read the entire post here.

A Quote for Tuesday

"'If you signify that you subscribe to the statement, which will have the status of a plea in mitigation, the Rector will be prepared to accept it in that spirit.'

'In what spirit?'

'A spirit of repentance.'

'Manas, we went through the repentance business yesterday. I told you what I thought. I won't do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.'

'You are confusing issues, David. You are not being instructed to repent. What goes on in your soul is dark to us, as members of what you call a secular tribunal, if not as fellow human beings. You are being asked to issue a statement.'"

J.M Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 57-58.