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American Exceptionalism Revisited: Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

One year into the Obama administration is an especially good time to revisit debates about American exceptionalism. On the one hand, George Bush repeatedly invoked not only the wound of 9/11, but also a providential national mission to advance freedom as justification for unilaterally exercising American military power to remake the Middle East. He also endorsed an “ownership society” as a uniquely American alternative to European social democracy. Scholarly emphasis on neoliberalism should not obscure how, by joining the trope of the redeemer nation to a market vocabulary, he regenerated the two central elements— contract and rebirth—in the historic idiom of American liberal nationalism, even as his policies in fact accelerated eroding national power in the global economy. On the other hand, Barack Obama has invoked other aspects of an inherited exceptionalist language: he links a special national promise to immigrant mobility and multicultural diversity, insists that the US seeks no colonies as he escalates military power in Afghanistan, and vows to regain America’s moral authority by renewing its democratic exemplarity. At the same time, he is called “un-American” by critics who, lamenting “we have lost our country,” and equating blackness and despotic state power, repeat inherited jeremiads to narrate national corruption and imminent descent into despotism. The theoretical challenge is to grasp the relationship between a prevailing and complex language of exceptional nationhood, and