American Exceptionalism Revisited: Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

One year into the Obama administration is an especially good time to revisit debates about American exceptionalism. On the one hand, George Bush repeatedly invoked not only the wound of 9/11, but also a providential national mission to advance freedom as justification for unilaterally exercising American military power to remake the Middle East. He also endorsed an “ownership society” as a uniquely American alternative to European social democracy. Scholarly emphasis on neoliberalism should not obscure how, by joining the trope of the redeemer nation to a market vocabulary, he regenerated the two central elements—contract and rebirth—in the historic idiom of American liberal nationalism, even as his policies in fact accelerated eroding national power in the global economy. On the other hand, Barack Obama has invoked other aspects of an inherited exceptionalist language: he links a special national promise to immigrant mobility and multicultural diversity, insists that the US seeks no colonies as he escalates military power in Afghanistan, and vows to regain America’s moral authority by renewing its democratic exemplarity. At the same time, he is called “un-American” by critics who, lamenting “we have lost our country,” and equating blackness and despotic state power, repeat inherited jeremiads to narrate national corruption and imminent descent into despotism.

The theoretical challenge is to grasp the relationship between a prevailing and complex language of exceptional nationhood, and political action by constituencies mobilizing to use the state for different ends. What range of claims, tropes, and narrative forms has comprised this language of “America” as an exceptional nationality? How has it justified state power or held it accountable? What kinds of “imagined (national) community”—and political projects—has it been used to sustain? To pursue these questions now means tracing how this hegemonic language has been revised during the long Cold War era, which entails analyzing the meaning of Vietnam, the failure of the New Deal coalition, the emergence of neoliberalism and the (Christian) New Right, and the collapse of communism and the acceleration of globalization. We also must ask: is the language of exceptionalism losing credibility and so being repeated as farce, or is it quite alive—and dangerous? If we are to engender democratic projects now, must this language of exception—and indeed a specifically national frame for politics—be reworked, or contested and relinquished? Is the political task to revise, or take exception, to American exceptionalism, the historic form of American nationalism? This cluster of questions animates the books by Hodgson and Pease, who take almost antithetical approaches to language, politics, post-World War II history, and the contemporary moment.

Hodgson’s text is not a theoretical exercise, but political in a journalistic sense. Writing as a “friend of America” who believes “something went wrong” in American politics with the ascendency of the New Right (xvii), he asks: “was . . . the hubris and the undemocratic instincts I saw so widely deployed . . . somehow the consequence of the triumph of this exceptionalist tradition, or of a debased version of it?” (xv). Neither antiexceptionalist nor postnationalist, he addresses the nation as a subject: “it is not good . . . for individuals or nations to believe things that are not quite true. . . . It is dangerous, for oneself and others, to create a myth that seems to justify, even demand, domination, whether it is called empire or not” (xvi). He calls his book “a plea for looking with a skeptical and humble eye at the many and subtle dangers of self-praise” (xvii). His goal is to chasten idealization of a national self-image, as if to say an individual or national subject should not (and need not) misrecognize itself (15).

By giving a short account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, Hodgson identifies different claims about “what constitutes the exceptionalism of America” and assesses each claim empirically (11). He notes claims about the presence of abundant material resources, social equality relative to Europe, economic mobility, pioneer experience of initiating new settlements, customs of popular sovereignty, and cultural...