During my time off, I took the opportunity to catch up on some podcast listening, in particular the televised Guernica that is the McLaughlin Group. John and crew get a bit shouty for me, but I appreciate how they take a pull no punches approach to the discussion and generally feel like all of the participants offer good faith arguments on the issues discussed.

In one particular episode, it sounded to me like Monica Crowley’s response to any and every issue had to do with American exceptionalism.

The current excursions in Iraq and Afghanistan? America is the world’s sole military superpower and if we don’t get in there and clean these cesspools up, no one will.

Economic policies that inherently favour the status quo? America is the world’s sole economic superpower and if we don’t hue to the principles that have made this nation strong then we risk not only our own demise, but the demise of the global economy writ large.

Abhorrence around the possibility of even just a public option in health care reform? Americans receive first rate, unsurpassed health care and any public option will takes us down the road of single-payer, socialized health care that backwards nations like Canada and the UK settle for.

No matter what ails ya, it seemed that Monica had the necessary tonic: American exceptionalism. Except that, it seems to me, the US obsession with being the Joneses hasn’t just been damaging to the country’s reputation globally, but is also starting to bankrupt the country in numerous ways. [Read more →]

I have a confession to make.  Despite all my criticisms of waterboarding, American foreign policy interventionism, and a whole host of other aspects of the modern federal government, not to mention my refusal to consider most of Europe to be a socialist hellhole, I am a proud American exceptionalist.  Which is to say that I do believe there is something exemplary about the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and that as a result the United States can and should be a “shining city upon a hill.” 

Don’t get me wrong – I fully understand the roots of those documents in European intellectualism.  But so far as I know the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation were the first attempts to implement all these ideas on a truly wide scale, albeit a scale with an unforgivable oversight, allowance of slavery.  That these ideals have since taken root to varying degrees throughout the world is a tribute to their power. 

The difference between me and other exceptionalists is that I’m serious about it.  If the US of A is to be the “shining city upon a hill” rather than merely a mirage in the desert, it must act that way.  If it wastes precious resources trying to force other cities to be just as shiny, it will find that it has lost some of its own shine in the process; if it tries to, chameleonlike, change its colors to defend against jealous neighbors, it will likewise lose some of the very shine that made those neighbors so jealous; and if it builds its walls too high, no one will see the glow that lies within.

To be sure, at some point that city has to have walls and archers if it is to protect against those jealous neighbors.  Compromises sometimes really must be made if the shining city is to retain any shine whatseover.  But the proud citizen will recognize that this tradeoff is being made and will lament it; he will not pretend that the city’s shine will be unaffected, only argue that the shine will lessen more if the tradeoff is not made.  He will not begrudge his fellow citizens their opposition to the tradeoff but will instead seek to convince them, as friends and neighbors, that the tradeoff is truly necessary.   Perhaps most importantly, the truly proud citizen will not do anything to dull the city’s shine without the approval of his fellow proud citizens.

It is this idealism of mine, this deeply engrained belief in American exceptionalism, that drives me to such anger and sadness over the interrogation and detention programs, amongst many other things, our leaders have implemented – in secret, usually – over the last several decades.  Being a shining city takes a lot of work to keep the shine polished – it is not, as Julian Sanchez explains so magnificently,  cost-free:

If you refrain from savage acts in wartime only when brutality would gain you nothing, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. Vague talk about “saving lives” obscures a vital question: What kinds of costs are you willing to bear, what risks will you accept,  in order to avoid doing evil? If you’re prepared to discard a principle as soon as there’s some significant benefit to be gotten by doing so, then it’s a principle of expediency, not morality. If you’re ready to resort to torture, or to targeting civilians, as soon as there’s some chance it would “save American lives,” then you’re declaring a commitment to abide by moral constraints, so long as observing them is free.

We are required, it seems to me, to choose: We can accept that we’re one more country like any other, guided by pure rational self interest, in which case “if it might save even one American life…” is as much justification as we can ask for any policy, and the only question (though still, of course, a difficult and complex question) is how we go about it.  If, on the other hand, we think there’s something exceptional about the United States—that we’re defined by a particular moral vision beyond the universal desire for comfort and safety—we need to accept that hewing to a moral vision sometimes comes with costs, and then ask how much ours is worth to us.

I couldn’t agree more.  If you think the United States is just another country, or even just another Western country, then the moral issues of whether waterboarding is torture, or whether it was a war crime to drop the atomic bomb, can and perhaps should be either irrelevant or only of minor significance compared to whether those actions saved more lives than they cost.  But if you are a true believer in American exceptionalism, then you must accept that maintaining that exceptionalism comes with costs, perhaps sometimes in human lives. 

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