I grew up believing in American Exceptionalism. It was my religion, my identity and my destiny.
Europe, as Joni Mitchell so lyrically put it, was “too old and cold and settled in its ways”.
But America, America, “my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” the beautiful country as the Chinese put it, the “land of opportunity” with “liberty and justice for all” — that was my America.
Other nations might have brutal dictators, or sponsor conquest or invasions, but not my America; we would always be the “good guys” supporting and fighting for democracy, God-given rights and “the common man” around the world.
We were not, and would never be like “the other nations”.
We stood alone on the verge of history, calling down Divine assistance as we liberated other nations.
We made some choices and compromises along the way.
And in the 1850s and ’60s, with our nation only a few generations old, we were challenged by a “cause” that literally fought to make us “like the other nations” — to premise our prosperity and, independence literally on the presumption of a racial superiority which itself was based upon a racial inferiority that was hard-wired into laws, education, voting, housing and citizenship.
We, as a nation, barely survived this insurrection against our core values, losing more lives than the next century’s World Wars.
Oddly enough, the “Noble cause” that sought to recreate many of the harshest and cruelest eras and empires of human history — and strangle the young nation in its formative stages — a few decades after the war, built statues and monuments all across the country. Even, somehow, naming military bases after those who sought to divide and destroy their own nation.
We Americans, as Lincoln put it, believed in our “better angels” and with “malice toward none” believed that we could in fact, work together and move on to our shared and generous destiny.
Unfortunately, something happened along the way. We became “like the other nations”. Instead of supporting “liberation” movements around the world, we become sponsors, trainers and providers of military equipment to authoritarian states and movements around the world. Our military even developed a policy of giving its equipment, from armored vehicles, bayonets and gas (banned from international use) to local police to be used against their own citizens.
And we the citizens of America, with roots in literally every nation, culture and religion of the world, found ourselves, in the year 2020, banned from travel to almost every one of them.
The trepidations and violations of our own values and principles are far too many to recount here, but they are too many, and too methodical to be anything but intentional.
To put it mildly, we are anything but “exceptional” unless by “exceptional” we mean living in direct violation of our own stated and proclaimed principles.
We claimed, early on our history, to be a beacon, a “city on a hill”. That part of our destiny we seem to have fulfilled — we are a beacon — a warning to the world, a reminder that no empire lives forever, no compromise of principles goes without consequences, no violation of human rights does not contaminate or infect the rest.
It is not the highest and purest ideals that make a great nation, it is the relentless attachment and pursuit of them that truly makes a nation not “like the other nations”.
