Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
Getting the Left to Embrace US Exceptionalism
October 24, 2017
Exclusive: Neocons have deftly used the Lefts hatred of President Trump and
the demonizing of Russia to lure liberals and progressives into an
interventionist mindset to defend American exceptionalism, observes James
W. Carden.
By James W. Carden
Last year, Donald J. Trump triumphed over 15 Republican primary opponents
and a Democratic candidate with an impressive résumé largely on the strength
of a simple four-word message: Make America Great Again.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a
campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Trumps slogan worked even though President Obama offered the rejoinder,
America is already great, and Hillary Clinton made the counterpoint that
America is great because America is good.
Since Trumps victory nearly a year ago, the major American media has often
reprised the Obama-Clinton messaging that America is already great as though
Trump, the most unabashedly jingoistic president since perhaps Ronald
Reagan, needs reminding.
Yet in Trumps Washington, where the bipartisan foreign policy consensus is
wrongly perceived to be under attack, the Establishment has been circling
the wagons in order to fend off what is viewed as Trumps frontal assault on
the core tenets of American exceptionalism.
Soon after the election, political and media elites, particularly those
within Democratic Party circles, began to express their dismay at Trumps
seeming disregard for what, to their way of thinking, America represents to
the rest of the world.
Two months into the Trump presidency, a former Obama State Department
official whose specialty is described by the most amorphous and flexible of
constructions, human rights, took to the pages of The Atlantic magazine to
inform readers that since the November election the global club of
autocrats has been crowing about Trump because he, like they, takes a dim a
view of democracy, human rights, and transparency.
Autocrats, declared Tom Malinkowski, now a Democratic candidate for Congress
in New Jersey, were said to be delighted by Trumps election because,
theyve heard him echo their propaganda that America is too crooked and
corrupt to preach moral standards to others.
This, wrote Malinkowski, makes me sad.
Likewise, Obamas National Security Adviser Susan Rice also has expressed
alarm that the administration has been busy jettisoning American values and
abdicating United States leadership of the world.
Rice believes that The network of alliances that distinguishes America from
other powers and has kept our nation safe and strong for decades is now in
jeopardy. We will see the cost when next we need the world to rally to our
side.
Fears for American Hegemony
A number of liberal journalists have been quick to join the fretting. At The
Intercept, a foreign affairs analyst worried that Trump is letting American
global hegemony slip away.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.
Through a network of nearly 800 military bases located in 70 countries
around the globe, in addition to an array of trade deals and alliances,
wrote Murtaza Hussain, the U.S. has cemented its influence for decades
across both Europe and Asia. American leaders helped impose a set of rules
and norms that promoted free trade, democratic governance in theory, if
not always in practice and a prohibition on changing borders militarily,
using a mixture of force and suasion to sustain the systems that keep its
hegemony intact.
Over at Slate, Yascha Mounk, opined that, with regard to Russia, Trump
likes Putin because he admires his strong (read: autocratic) leadership. And
he sees him as an ally because he shares Putins disdain for the liberal
order, preferring a world in which strong powers do what they like in their
spheres of influence without having to worry about obeying much less
enforcing international norms or human rights.
Similarly, when The New Republics Jeet Heer recently delved into the realm
of U.S.-Russia relations, he warned readers that The problem is not just
the nature of Putins autocratic government, which uses social conservatism
and nationalism to hold together a nation frayed by massive economic
inequality.
The problem is that Russias foreign policy threatens to
export many of the Putin regimes worst features, particularly xenophobia
and homophobia.
For Heer the proper response to Putins foreign policy is obvious: Fighting
Trumpism in America is not enough. Leftists have to be ready to battle it in
all its forms, at home and abroad.
In other words, its time now to undertake yet another global crusade
against Russia.
By this point it should be clear that what these worthies are doing is
conflating a vision of a liberal, tolerant America with American hegemony;
their concerns always come back to their quite unfounded worry that Trump is
in the process of repudiating the unipolar fantasy that they themselves buy
into and seek to perpetuate.
Innocents Abroad?
Among many other problems, the hubristic nature of American Exceptionalist
ideology feeds delusions of innocence, which serve to prevent a critical
rethinking of Americas recent, mainly catastrophic adventures abroad. We
can see how this tendency manifests itself in the mainstream media.
At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush
ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on
Baghdad, known as shock and awe.
In July, The New York Times published a piece that whitewashed the motives
behind the decision by George W. Bushs White House to invade Iraq. When
the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, wrote
reporter Tim Arango, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic
and Western-facing Middle East.
This is now par for the course. The media critic Adam Johnson has rightly
pointed out that nominally down-the-middle reporters are allowed to
mind-read U.S. policy makers motives so long as they conclude that those
motives were noble and in good faith. Never are reporters allowed to ascribe
sinister motives to U.S. officialsthis is only permissible when covering
Americas enemies.
Similarly, the illegal American intervention in the Syrian war was portrayed
as self-defense when U.S. forces shot down a Syrian fighter jet over Raqqa
in June. The Syrian regime and others in the regime need to understand,
said White House spokesman Sean Spicer (who has now since mercifully
resigned), that we will retain the right of self-defense, of coalition
forces aligned against ISIS.
Time was, during the early years of the First Cold War, that public
intellectuals often looked askance at Americas belief in its innate virtue.
Within a decade of the allied victory in the Second World War, during which
time American power and prestige was at its zenith, prominent Anglo-American
thinkers, including Graham Greene, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr were
already casting a gimlet eye on the pretenses of the American Century.
Where are the contrarian voices such as these calling for restraint and
reflection now that we are in the throes of a Second Cold War? They are
almost utterly absent from mainstream American political discourse.
A Bipartisan Pretense
Part of the reason Trump won, of course, is that he plays and feeds into the
very same pretenses that the both the Establishment and the public does
though in cruder form. There is only a difference in degree, not in kind,
between Make America Great Again and America Is Already Great since both
are premised on the same line of reasoning: America, due to its providential
founding, cannot be and is not a normal country: it is exceptional, a
shining city on a hill.
President Trump speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 19,
2017. (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)
The idea that Trump himself hasnt embraced and internalized the core tenets
of American exceptionalism is laughable and even some neoconservatives,
like Bloombergs Eli Lake, have begun to notice. Lake, observing Trumps
September speech to the United Nations General Assembly, cracked, For a
moment, I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard
editorial meeting.
Yet theres an insoluble problem that remains for the adherents of the myth
of American exceptionalism: the presumption that the rest of the world buys
into the myth which largely rests upon a willful misunderstanding of the
past, and blinds us to available alternatives, such as realism.
Some on the Left see little cause for concern. America, by their lights,
should intervene all over the world on a values crusade. Leftist journals
like Dissent and Jacobin have endeavored to excuse the Trotskyite impulse to
political violence. In this way neoconservatism, the American variant of
Trotskyism, is not dead yet, it remains a zombie ideology that haunts the
country.
Forget anti-imperialism, some Leftists say, its Trumpian nationalism that
is the real problem. And there are indeed elements of Trumpian nationalism
that are troubling. But is the answer a crusade to impose, in the felicitous
phrasing of neocon propagandist Max Boot, the rule of law, property rights
and other guarantees, at gunpoint if need be?
In the end, the ideology of American Exceptionalism feeds delusions of
American Innocence and prepares the ground for military intervention the
world over. Is that really the right way to oppose Donald Trump?
James W. Carden served as an adviser on Russia policy at the US State
Department. Currently a contributing writer at The Nation magazine, his work
has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Quartz, The American Conservative and
The National Interest.
