My Essay on "American Exceptionalism" in "Myth America"

Yesterday was the publication date for an edited volume I have an essay in: Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Now, since I am historian of early modern France, most of the edited volumes I have contributed to have sales figures in the low three figures (also sometimes price tags in the low three figures—could there be a connection?) and are lucky to get reviewed anywhere other than the reliable and wonderful H-France website. Myth America is different. It is edited by my terrific, prolific, and very media-savvy colleagues Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, and is published by Basic Books, which is mounting a serious publicity campaign for it. Since the “biggest lies and legends” of the title are principally ones retailed by the GOP, we can also expect that it will stir up a bit of controversy.

My own essay is on “American Exceptionalism,” which was a fascinating topic to study. The history of the concept is well known, thanks to the work of Daniel Rodgers, Abram Van Engen, and others. There have been many, often contradictory narratives about the supposedly special place America holds in the world. Oddly, one of the first people to use the actual phrase “American exceptionalism” was Joseph Stalin, in the course of smacking down American Communists who were arguing that America’s exceptional historical circumstances meant that it would need to take an exceptional route towards socialism. American social scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset later seized on it as an explanatory category, and by the 1980’s it was entering the political mainstream.

Although my essay goes over some of this familiar territory, I tried to do two different things as well. First, in keeping with the spirit of taking on legends and lies, I offered an explanation for why “American exceptionalism” is an exceptionally pointless concept. An exception implies a rule—but what rule? What are we “exceptional” in regard to? Many of the social scientists and nearly all of the politicians who talk about “American exceptionalism” never even mention other countries, let alone try to seriously define world-wide patterns of development that hold for everywhere else, but not for us. Besides, it is in the very nature of nationalism for a country to stress the things that make it unique. That’s why, in addition to “American exceptionalism,” historians are familiar with concepts like “l’exception française” and “der deutsche Sonderweg.” In the essay, I quipped that if scholars of Britain and Japan don’t have similar catchphrases, it is simply because they take those countries’ exceptional natures so utterly for granted.

The second thing I tried to do was to explain why this rather strange and unsonorous phrase became so influential in American politics. The reason, it turns out, has to do with a single, influential politician—a Stalinist of sorts in his own way, although no socialist: Newt Gingrich. Starting in the early 1990’s, he started using the phrase in nearly all his speeches and found that attacking his ideological adversaries for not believing in “American exceptionalism” was a very useful political cudgel to wield. It was certainly more acceptable than just calling them traitors. In response, many Democrats fell over themselves protesting that yes, yes, they too believed in American exceptionalism. The most enthusiastic of them, perhaps not surprisingly, was the reliably triangulating Hillary Clinton (“If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United States is an exceptional nation”). Meanwhile, the one prominent Republican who explicitly rejected the idea was Donald Trump. For Trump, international relations are a brute, zero-sum competition between states who fundamentally differ only in their degree of toughness and strength. The point is not to be better than, or different from everyone else, only to beat them.

Scholars have often proclaimed “the end of American exceptionalism.” Amusingly, I found that one of the earliest to do so was my father, Daniel Bell, in a 1975 essay of that title for The Public Interest (“Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation’s future”). As I conclude: “The diagnosis was understandable, but the obituary was premature…. The very vacuity of the notion has been its strength… There is little reason, then, to think that it will pass away in the new season of despair that we are living through today.”

If you buy a copy of Myth America you will make Kevin, Julian, the contributors, and our editor all very happy.