America’s ‘exceptionalism’ has led us to a dark place

The version of American exceptionalism we have come to know and love paints a picture of a country that, by dint of its unique goodness, can do no wrong. A country like no other.

This bit of national flattery, now a doctrine, is useful for keeping citizens complacent when they are at odds with

James Rothenberg, of North Chatham, writes on U.S. social and foreign policy. The essay’s concept is owed to Otto Hinckelmann (otto5.com). government public and foreign policy.

Is there a plausible explanation for this doctrine? Besides the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, what in the American historical experience could account for this difference? What makes us exceptional, and what has it led to?

The United States is the only Western country where slavery was legal from the day it was founded in 1776. As just one alternate example, the French republic was founded in 1789, the same historical era as the U.S., but without legal slavery. After more than 200 years of evolution, the two states are quite different. In two areas of public policy, France has federal universal health care, a legal communist party and, at least until the 1990s, a large communist industrial union.

In slavery, the slave is the property of the owner. The maintenance of the slave, as property, is the responsibility of the owner and, specifically, not

the state. In the evolution of such a state away from slavery, where the slave evolves into an employee and the slave owner into an employer, the slave owner’s provision of medical care to slaves would naturally evolve into the employer providing medical care as a fringe benefit to employees. In such a state, evolved from slavery, it would be alien for the state to provide universal medical care to its citizens.

Another U.S. historical experience that can be traced to its evolution from slavery is the violent U.S. reaction to communism. The slave-era analogue would be the slave owner’s violent reaction to the pre-civil War abolition movement.

In 1945, the United States became the only country to ever drop atomic bombs on cities full of people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the proof of what the blasts’ initial heat output — hotter than the surface of the sun — could do to a city and its inhabitants, while the Soviet Union learned the lengths a country could go to when it no longer feels obliged to have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

How has this unique and exceptional national experience affected the evolution of the United States in its foreign policy, and how does it differ from countries that have never dropped atomic bombs on cities?

As a result of their defeat, Japan adopted a pacifist constitution and Germany enacted very liberal asylum laws. The United States went on to develop more atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union, the country that played the greatest role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, didn’t make it into the 21st century. With no more rivals in sight, the United States pushed the NATO bloc steadily east toward Russia.

Becoming world hegemon, the U.S. is unrestrained by international laws and conventions, or even domestic law. Spying on citizens, indefinite detention, torture, and waging a war of aggression against a sovereign nation gets state sanction.

The Declaration of Independence held certain truths to be self-evident. Truth, as a concept, can be an intellectual tool useful in winning arguments, and this is how it is used in the Declaration.

As seen from the perspective of a state evolved from strict power concepts, truth is the weapon of the weak. This explains why purveyors of American exceptionalism have no need to resort to it.