I think that “Don’t be evil” might be the business of the government. Prevent murder, rape, etc. If someone is evil, the government can put them in the Panopticon until they are ready to rejoin society. Sure.

“Be good”? I don’t know about that. Does that mean accepting gay marriage or protecting traditional marriage? Does that mean accepting community standards or does that mean asserting a deep right to privacy? Does that mean respecting freedom of expression or does that mean protecting The Children?

“Don’t be evil” strikes me as a great rule of thumb.

“Be good”? Eh. I wouldn’t want you to have a single power to make me be a better person that I wouldn’t want in the hands of Ted Haggard.

No offense.

That said, there are quite a few powers that I wouldn’t mind you (or Ted Haggard, for that matter) having to prevent evil.

Mark: To be honest, this is the first thing that came to mind upon reading just the title of your post,

…the fact that many of the images are on postcards. The people who approved of or participated in these crimes sent photos of them via the U.S. mail, to share their subhuman pleasure with others. One of the postcards reads: “This is the barbecue we had last night.”… That ordinary people did these things is deeply disturbing; that they manufactured a social rationale for their acts is more disturbing still. Look for a while at the picture of the lynching of Rubin Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1930. Look first at Stacy, then turn to the little girl in the summer dress, looking at Stacy, and then to the man behind her, perhaps her father, in the spotless white shirt and slacks and the clean white skimmer. They will stand there forever, admiring the proof of their civilization.

That is to say alongside, the founders and all that good stuff of American civilization, is the profoundly troubling – as you acknowledged “a scale with an unforgivable oversight, allowance of slavery.” But I want to make a claim that both are a part of the American identity; to me, America is ambiguous in a way that isn’t fully captured in statements like, “Other nations would not lose their identity if they ceased to be liberal democracies; the US would.” Or, “those moral ideals lie at the very foundation of what makes the US, well, the US.”

Slavery, Jim Crow, the father-daughter pair also lie at the foundation of what makes the US the US. They are part of what make the US (like its peers & their atrocities) an aspirant to the title, liberal democracy – not a rightful claimant. The project of normative exceptionalism appears to skim off the best bits, incorporate them into American identity and fail to grapple with the deep ambiguities at America’s core – well, fail to grapple in the sense that they are stepping stones, or chapters, or past, or overcome. Under a rubric of exceptionalism the brutality becomes transitory and the ideal becomes an ever present fixture; the brutal are out-of-character elements in the American experience. I’d contend that both the brutal and the sublime are ongoing themes; the brutal is never vanquished.

This is all coming out a lot less clearly than I’d have liked, I’ll just add that Graham Greene’s the Quiet American also came to mind. There’s something dangerous brewed in the mix of innocence, self-righteousness, and power that ‘American exceptionalism’ calls forth. Perhaps raft is right, exceptionalism is simply too loaded, to full of other baggage to quiet fit the gap between the ideals of America and the reality of America. “the United States is just another country,” – brings to mind the quip: Remember your unique. Just like everyone else.

Shorter CC: It is just as wrong to tell ourselves we’re the superhero as it is to claim we’re the supervillain. We are merely human, with all the courage and the cowardice that that entails – as is vividly evidence by the torture memos. Our carefully crafted institutions, checks and balances, are as fragile a human project as any other.

Well, the primary answer seems to me to be “to govern with the consent of the governed.”