White Out: Race and Nationalism in American Studies

Death of A Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. By David W. Noble. Minneapolis: Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 335 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

WHEN DAVID NOBLE PUBLISHED Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism in 2002, even he could not have predicted how timely the volume would be. As I sit down to write, Secretary of State General Colin Powell travels the world reiterating the doctrine of American exceptionalism in arguing the case for war against Iraq. The New York Times implicitly recognized the centrality of this doctrine in its choice of framing quotes for its coverage of Powell's speech to the international power brokers at Davos, Switzerland on January 26, 2003: "We Reserve Our Sovereign Right to Take Military Action," reads one headline, while the inset quote warns, "Multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction." Brushing aside concerns from European and Middle Eastern allies, and distancing the U.S. government from possible United Nations advice for more restraint, the general-turned-statesman said bluntly: "When we feel strongly about something, we will lead. We will act, even if others are not prepared to join us." And the basis for this John Waynesque bravado? Simply put, America's exceptional command of moral absolutes in its wars against "evil" empires: "It is not a matter of time alone. It is a matter of telling the truth, and so far Saddam Hussein still responds with evasions and with lies." ¹ President Bush followed up in his State of the Union Address for 2003 by concluding a listing of Iraq's atrocities with the claim: "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning." As Noble argues, the messy complexities of time, with all the attendant relativism of culture and history they involve, get brushed aside by an ideological identification of the nation with the space of truth and goodness. Should Powell and Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have their way, "the death of a nation" will be the unilateral verdict pronounced on Iraq. America will stand triumphant as the sole arbiter and habitation of truth, the exception that proves the rule that power without justice corrupts moral action. Events since the war, unsurprisingly, have cast serious doubts about Bush's truth claims.

The title of Noble's book, then, may be misleading, since both his argument and current events suggest that nationalism and exceptionalism are all-too alive and well, although in forms that may be quite distinct from their previous incarnations. Noble contends in his introduction, "the tradition of American exceptionalism is a variation on a transatlantic bourgeois definition of modern nations as the embodiments of a state of nature" (xxv). Noble thus claims that the United States is not exceptional in narrating the nation as originating in a special physical and cultural landscape that purportedly gives rise to a "homogeneous" people united in their special relation to truth, beauty, goodness, and God. The United States just has exceptional power when it comes to putting that nationalism to work, abroad as well as at home. Noble traces the modern crisis of American nationalism back to the rise of the "international marketplace" as the new state of nature, as well as to an increasing acknowledgement of the ethnic, racial, and cultural pluralism of the people of the United States. He contends that "bourgeois elites since the 1940s have transformed" the "hope of transcending history as an unpredictable flow of time" into a faith in "the global marketplace. For the middle classes, that marketplace now represents the end of history" (xxxvii).

But the "desacralization of the paradigm of national peoples who had sprung from national landscapes" seems not to have affected the ideology of the American government and the American media, who, like General Powell, feel comfortable invoking America's sacred right to pronounce timeless judgment on those it would condemn as "evil." It turns...