Struggling with American exceptionalism
“It can’t happen here” is an enduring refrain in American culture, a reflection of the idea — whether invoked ironically or in earnest — that the U.S. has a special destiny and stands apart from the forces shaping the rest of the world.
Now, with a devastating global pandemic definitely happening here, much of the nation is asking how and why and what it means that a country that sees itself as the world’s wealthiest, most powerful and most scientifically advanced leads the world in both cases and confirmed deaths.
It’s a reckoning that has stirred debate about health policy, inequality and partisan politics but also extends beyond it, touching on history, values and national identity. And for some, the severity of the crisis — and the slow, disjointed government reaction to a danger warned about for months — has also upended their conception of the country, shattering the already battered idea of American exceptionalism, if not turning it on its head.
“My perception is that we should have been able to just knock it out of the box like a walkoff home run because this is the United States, and we hold ourselves in high regard,” said Clinton Jackson, 66, a retired Caterpillar worker in Decatur, Ill.
The government’s lack of preparedness was “embarrassing,” he said, before reaching for a metaphor right out of the more heroic story the nation tells about itself.
“We didn’t get no Paul Revere saying ‘The British are coming’ type of thing,” he said. “We got, ‘Don’t worry about it; we got this under control.’”
Reactions to the current crisis vary widely and are inflected by partisan, generational and other divides. But interviews with more than three dozen historians, writers and Americans from all walks of life expressed a struggle to reconcile the crisis with the nation’s self-image.
David Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War,” said events had laid bare the degree to which we’ve “starved the public sector.” But he also wondered if the sheer scope and pace of the disaster defied any easy analogies from U.S. history.
“It’s as if a lightning storm struck the country from coast to coast,” he said. “The velocity, the time scale — it’s in the category of the unprecedented.”
Still, Americans have a way of turning to history as a kind of consolation, to give knowable shape to frightening, chaotic events. And since the crisis began, leaders have reached for analogies such as Pearl Harbor and 9/11, which both capture the sense of shocking suddenness and appeal to an idea of the American story as a series of challenges that make us stronger, better, more united.
U.S. like everyone else
Such analogies also underline the idea of American specialness — that we are under attack, as the post-9/11 refrain went, “because of who we are.” But an attack by pathogens resists that kind of selfflattering narrative. And for some, the coronavirus crisis, instead of affirming our distinctness, is revealing how much we have in common with the rest of the world, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.
Since the crisis began, RussianAmerican journalist Masha Gessen has been having regular video gatherings with friends in Moscow. And what has struck her, she said, is the similarity of what they were experiencing, starting with the feeling that “we’ve been entirely left to our own devices.”
“In the United States, we have all this infrastructure, and we think that all these things are going to work the way they’re supposed to when push comes to shove,” she said. “In Russia, we always knew they wouldn’t.”
The idea of American exceptionalism is a squishy but durable concept going back as far as John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon warning his fellow Massachusetts Bay colonists that their settlement would be a “city upon a hill” whose success or failures would be seen by the world.
For the mid-20th-century scholars who developed the concept, it referred to the fact that the U.S., alone among the wealthy Western nations, never had a working-class party or developed the kind of welfare state and safety net that exist in most European countries.
It was during the Cold War that it hardened into a belief of the superiority of America’s brand of free market democracy, which would be protected by projecting U.S. power around the world.
The idea of American exceptionalism has long been in ill repute among critics on the left. But since 2011, there has also been a steady slide in the share of Americans who agree that “America stands above other countries,” according to surveys by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the image of the U.S. has declined precipitously in a number of other countries.
Who is ‘us’?
To some, the crisis reveals the failure of the post-9/11 support to homeland security, with its emphasis on external threats and military solutions.
“We’ve built a national security apparatus that turns out to be irrelevant to those things that actually threaten us,” said Andrew Bacevich, a historian and author of “The Age of Illusions: How American Squandered Its Cold War Victory.”
Novelist Jhumpa Lahiri said the pandemic has highlighted one positive characteristic that distinguishes the U.S.: its openness to newcomers, as exemplified by the number of immigrants and children of immigrants who are on the front lines as health care workers and scientists.
But she questioned the assumptions behind wondering why the crisis was happening “to us.”
“If you’ve grown up in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in India, and you haven’t absorbed the reality of the blows of history,” she said, “you are a naive person, an ignorant person.”
“When we as a world come out of this crisis,” she added, “the real danger is going to be going back to that way of thinking why is this happening to us as opposed to them.”
And then there’s the question of just who “us” is anyway. The crisis has intensified the conversation about inequality, especially as data has emerged in some states showing that African-Americans and Hispanics account for a disproportionate share of deaths.
Alondra Nelson, a sociologist and president of the Social Science Research Council, said scenes such as thousands of cars lining up outside food banks had pulled the rug out from under the American “ideology of middleclassness.”
Inayiah McKay, 22, a direct support professional in New York City who works with older patients, said she initially thought the virus would be handled quickly, as swine flu had been. But the panic shopping, shortages of supplies and the uncoordinated political response, she said, only confirmed her belief that American capitalism is a sham.
“I’ve never actually had faith in this country,” she said.
Wilfred McClay, a historian at the University of Oklahoma and author of the new textbook “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story” (intended as a conservative riposte to authors such as Howard Zinn), expressed skepticism about premature doomsaying about the meaning of U.S. history.
What makes the U.S. distinctive, he said, is its mistrust of centralized authority and its many different levels of political organization. And it is too soon, he said, to say that has failed.
“The resulting pluralism can be messy, as we’re seeing on the national stage right now, with quarreling governors and local officials and the like. But thank goodness for that messiness and contentiousness,” he said. “It allows us to make our local leaders accountable and responsive to us.”