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November 3, 2011 at 11:30 am 
Ed Brayton Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, had a really compelling op-ed piece in the LA Times a couple weeks about the concept of American exceptionalism and how it has become a necessary position for any politician. He looks at the issue as one of Christian nationalism, but with no support at all in the Bible.
So the claims made by Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in a recent speech at the Citadel managed to be both striking and unexceptionable. “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,” Romney announced. “America must lead the world.” Absent the “clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place,” with freedom itself in jeopardy. To avert this catastrophe, Romney declared, “this century must be an American century,” with the United States economically preeminent and wielding “the strongest military in the world.”
Whence do these insights derive? “Why should America be any different than scores of other countries around the globe?” Romney asked rhetorically. His answer captures the essence of our present-day civic religion: “I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world.”
The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God’s instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land.
For anyone aspiring to high office, professing fealty to this Third Testament has become all but obligatory. And Romney took care to do so in his Citadel speech. Genuflecting before the “generations that fought in world wars, that came through the Great Depression and that gained victory in the Cold War,” he summoned his listeners to “seize the torch” their forebears had held aloft, continuing the inexorable advance toward “freedom, peace and prosperity.” This, he made clear, defines America’s calling, one to which citizens of all religious persuasions (or none at all) can subscribe…
Now duty confers prerogatives. And God’s elect are not bound by rules to which others must submit. Among other things, they need not admit error. “I will never, ever apologize for America,” Romney promised. Apologies imply misjudgments, mistakes or wrongdoing, none of which figure in the Third Testament’s depiction of a nation unsullied by malign intent or sordid action.
Above all, the United States need not apologize for its pursuit of permanent military supremacy or for its propensity for violence. “When America is strong,” Romney declared, “the world is safer.” The post-Cold War era, with unquestioned U.S. military preeminence going hand in hand with widespread disorder, offers little to substantiate this proposition. Even so, an insistence that American military power and its application are conducive to peace remains one of the Third Testament’s central tenets. So, whereas a single Chinese aircraft carrier poses a looming danger, a dozen American aircraft carriers make the U.S. Navy a global force for good. A brief Russian incursion into Georgia threatens peace; protracted wars resulting from the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan advance it…
No leading contender for the Republican nomination will challenge the positions that Romney laid out. After all, they share his certain knowledge that God has designated America as his earthly agent. They endorse Romney’s emphasis on enhancing U.S. military power as the key to perpetuating an American century. And they mirror his lack of interest in the world as it is, indulging instead the pretense that it’s still 1945.
The eventual Republican nominee, whoever that may be, will argue that President Obama believes none of these things — hence his unworthiness for a second term. For his part, the president will exert himself to prove otherwise. As he has done before, Obama will signal his own allegiance to militant exceptionalism, offered as positive proof that he is authentically American. Rival messianic visions will compete.
He does ignore Ron Paul, who will be the only major Republican contender to not use such rhetoric and to be opposed to nearly all foreign military adventures. Indeed, he has spoken loudly and often about the effect of America’s interference in the rest of the world and how it fuels terrorism and anti-American sentiment. But Ron Paul isn’t going to get the nomination or even come close. And American exceptionalism will still be an article of faith on the right long after he is gone.
America behaves in the world like all those incredibly insecure men we have all known in our lives, the ones that feel the need to bluster and strike macho poses at every turn. The ones who makes themselves feel strong by bullying the weak and need to constantly remind themselves and others of how special and powerful they are. The kind that everyone else rolls their eyes at and wishes would just shut up.
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I definitely like the “Third Testament” label. That really puts it in perspective, since far too many insane nationalists treat America’s infallibility like a tenet of faith. They act as if depicting America as infallible matters far more than truth or morality.
The one biblical reference I recall, even as a small kid, was claiming the American totem of an eagle is proof the Bible prophesies the eventual creation of the U.S. and Romney’s version of both exceptionalism and militarism. The biblical passage was Isaiah 40:31 where I quote in context [RSV]:
Christianist standards for proofieness remain stellar as always.
Ron Paul may not believe in overseas military interference, but I doubt he will otherwise reject exceptionalism – at least not publicly. I’m sure, just like all the other politicians, he’ll tell you that the US is more free than anywhere else, and that the US can learn no lessons from the successful societies in Western Europe and Scandinavia.
Of course as a Mormon Romney presumably believes in a literal third testament dealing with America.
American exceptionalism ordained by god is right up there with the Easter Bunny, UFO aliens piloted by demons from hell, and that Mormonism is the True Xianity.
Oh for Cthulhu’s sake. Romney is a Mormon.
The Mormons moved to Utah for form their own country. It was going to be called Zion or Deseret or some such. To this day, a lot of Mormon owned companies have Zion in their name, Zion bank, ZMCI, and so on.
They also fought a war with the USA. The Utah war. It didn’t get very far. About all that happened is the Mormons massacred 120 civilian men, women, and children at Mountain Meadows and tried to blame it on the Indians.
Needless to say, all this was high treason against the USA.
The USA built a fort right above the capital, Salt Lake City, Fort Douglas, to keep an eye on the Mormons. It’s the only city in the USA where the guns point down at the city. It’s still there to this day.
History and theology are pretty flexible. God wants them to seccede and have their own country and a century later, the USA is god’s chosen country.
I definitely like the “Third Testament” label.
I like it too, in (possibly vain) hope that it will awaken the not-hopelessly-insane component of American Christians to the fact that this hyper-nationalism is a heresy to their religion — an add-on in violation of eg. Revelation 22:18.
Of course, I’ve been wishing that ever since I was of that religion, 30+ years ago. I thought the idolatry of Reagan was bad enough, at the time — but Bush II and the current crop make RR look positively good.
The USA is an exceptional country. World’s largest economy, leader of the free world and all that.
It has nothing to do with an Imaginary Sky Fairy.
It has a lot to do with our lead in….SCIENCE.
The USA with 4.8% of the world’s population spends a phenomenal 1/3 or so of the entire world’s science R%D. That, coupled with our culture of entrepreneurial capitalism, gives us a huge scientific, technological, and commercial edge.
Of course, in fundie xian death cult circles, these days science and scientists are hated, right up there with Moslems and Pagans.
If we replaced science with weird religious cults, we would inevitably slide into New North American Somalia, a third world backwater.
While I don’t disagree with the thrust of this piece, this statement is a bit disingenuous. The post-Cold War era has not been particularly “disorderly” from a historical perspective, nor particularly violent. The Pax Americana is not entirely a myth (just as previous Pax Etceteras have been real; it is not a particularly controversial thesis to observe that when one superpower dominates, there tend to be less petty territorial squabbles, there is a strong incentive for peace, etc.)
It’s somewhat of a nitpick, I suppose, but I wouldn’t want it to undermine this otherwise very important point about American Exceptionalism. A world with a single dominant superpower often is typically a safer world — that doesn’t mean said superpower is doing everything (or anything) right, it doesn’t mean that such an arrangement doesn’t carry its own risks, etc.
It has a lot to do with our lead in….SCIENCE.
Well, that and a history that conveniently includes access to a resource-rich continent of hospitable climate, that no one else happened to be using at the time.
Well, no one that mattered, anyway.[/sarcasm]
Not a bad way to go through life.
Oh, we’ll eventually get over the whole “sun never sets on the American Empire” thing, just as the British did. That is, in the same way: our determination to cling to empire will bankrupt us (we’re off to a good start) until we end up forced to beg others for help.
Come to think of it, we’re off to a good start there, too.
The religion of the Third Testament also has it’s own martyrs, holy ground, and holy days (see 9-11). It’s even got complementary denominations with adherents in other countries (see Stephen Harper and his fellows).
It’s amazing to me that the very clowns who claim American exceptionalism are the same ones who’re doing their level best to turn the US into a third-world country.
Stephen M. Walt: The Myth of American Exceptionalism
That is what ended the Soviet empire.
They had a first world military sitting on top of a third world economy. It wasn’t sustainable.
Empires are expensive and end up bankrupting themselves sooner or later.
@12: I react with mingled amusement and horror whenever I hear one of our Northern subspecies of wingnut echoing Christian Destiny rhetoric from south of the border. Not only is it wrong in every possible way, it reinforces the trope of everything Canadian being just a cheap knockoff of something the Americans did first. Of course, this sort of thing generally emanates from the folks who love to fellate American cock anyway.
Andrew Bacevich is a real asset to my alma mater.
It is worth pointing out that his son was killed by an IED explosion while fighting in Iraq, which might make some question his objectivity on these issues. However, Bacevich’s viewpoints on war and US military action have been consistent and based on the intellectual framework he developed while analyzing such actions from a historical framework.
It used to be that the idea of American exceptionalism stemmed from the real possibility that you could work hard, learn much, and over time do things in America that were unlikely to be done anywhere else. No guarantees, but working hard, learning (formally or informally), having a little talent, and having a little luck often paid off and paid off well.
Somehow A) “I believe in myself and my abilities, so watch me do the hard work of figuring this out and ultimately achieving it”
…has become…
B) “I believe in myself and my abilities so much that I don’t have to work hard or figure this out. Let the rest of the world work hard and figure things out.”
This reminds me of the statistics of students in the US. One of the few indicators that have actually gone UP is student CONFIDENCE in themselves, in exact contradiction to the fact that their actual abilities have gone down. I’ve had first hand experience with this teaching high school–it’s a routine affair to convince a student that a single page with no paragraphs, little punctuation, no thesis statement, etc, is not an acceptable 3-5 page essay. They think they should at least get a D (and many, many students actually want you to tell them step by step everything they must do to get a D AFTER they have written a paper that is totally unacceptable and AFTER it has been painstakenly taught how to write the paper and what the requirements are–as if I would be inclined to teach them twice, the second time tailoring my lesson to how to get a D).
One such student even had his mother call me since neither she, nor he, understood why he needed a final draft when he had the first one (a scribbled, incoherent mess of one page as described above). It took everything I had to keep myself from telling them both, “Because if I accept his rough draft as the final draft, he will get 5% on it, and that would be out of the generosity of my heart. Be glad I returned it for a rewrite.” Instead, I repeated what I had already told her, which was the truth: “He’s trying to do the very least he can do and still get away with it.”
Still, I got the sense, as I often did, that she didn’t really care if he learned anything or not–she only cared that he PASSED, which was why HE only cared that he passed (I got the sense that in his mind, as in so many others, he felt like “I can learn it if I want, but that’s a lot of hard work, so I’ll just skate by knowing I could have learned it if I wanted to and that’s close enough–I’ll learn it later if I really, really need to”). The fact that I was a road block to passing was the only reason she was calling me and, sadly, it seemed to me, the only reason she became concerned that he do better.
(And I’m sure it is only a coincidence that many of these students voiced support for people like Palin.)
Conversely, the statistics also show that the students in other countries who are doing the best academically have the LEAST confidence–they always question themselves, their abilities, and their conclusions…which, of course, leads to harder work to understand better. Dunning-Kruger in action, I guess.
@raven
Also the country with the highest crime rates, incarceration and execution rates of the industrialized world, highest teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates, etc, etc, etc.
Also the world’s largest military and largest collection of nuclear weapons, which we invented.
No we aren’t perfect and it could be better but it could also be much worse.
Today, the USA is the world leader in lunatic fringes. We have the largest and craziest lunatic fringes in the world. They have their own political party, the Tea Party/GOP. They may end up running the country and running it into the ground.
I used to be proud to be an American. We sent people to the moon decades ago and robots to Mars and Saturn. These days, it seems like the USA is one giant insane asylum, being run by the inmates.
A century? Heck, Rick Perry wanted to secede practically last week*, and now he’s running for President.
———-
* a couple of years ago
No the US just supplied the place and resources. The inventing part was a multinational effort that can be traced back to Leo Sizlard whilst crossing a street in London in 1933.
Crap, I spelled Leo’s last name incorrectly it should be Szilárd, I always get the i and the z the wrong way around, bummer.
Bullcrap. A lot of the scientists, Fermi, Sizlard, Teller, Einstein, that did key work on the Manhattan project were foreign but a lot were American too.
And it happened in New Mexico. The resources, scientific, technical, and financial, weren’t just an afterthought, it made it all possible.
The next nuclear effort didn’t succeed until 1949.
If you want to trace the development of atomic weapons back far enough, you could blame Newton and Michael Faraday.
You also forget that not only foreign scientists were involved but other foreign powers as well, it was an allied effort not attributable to any one country, granted the US were the majority share holders so to speak, but without the contributions of everybody involved, and a poor choice of neutron moderator on the German’s part we would probably be living in a very different reality right now.
Eamon Knight “Of course, this sort of thing generally emanates from the folks who love to fellate American cock anyway.”
Hey, it could be worse.
Deen “[The US is] Also the country with the highest crime rates, incarceration and execution rates of the industrialized world, highest teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates, etc, etc, etc.”
Yeah! We’re #1! Wooo! U! S! A! U! S! A!
Actually, I got a chill when I read about how Fermi set up the first self sustaining nuclear pile under the abandoned west stands of the original Alonzo Stagg Field stadium, at the University of Chicago… Absolutely amazing stuff, and bloody dangerous.
@26: Hey, it could be worse.
Othankewverymuch, what did I ever do to you that you have to remind me? Watching it at the time (being held prisoner in the TV room of some elderly relatives at the time) was enough.
The US’ military objective – to be able to fight against its enemies in two theaters at once – is eerily similar to Britain’s military objective to have a navy stronger than it’s two largest rivals.
Doesn’t sound familiar? That was Britain’s position in 1908. Back when they were one of the preeminent military and economic powers on the globe. Back when they so believed that they were manifestly destined to bring the light of western thought to the rest of the world, that they leaped wholeheartedly into other countries. To, you know, improve them.
History. Study. Else rinse and repeat.
Re Doug Little @ #25
and a poor choice of neutron moderator on the German’s part
Actually, the German nuclear program had been put on the back burner in 1940. This was because of an erroneous estimate by Werner Heisenberg who calculated that 100 kilograms of pure U235 was the critical mass for sustaining a chain reaction. When this number was brought to the attention of the Nazi leadership, it was concluded that it would take 30 years to extract that mass of U235 and thus it was unlikely in the extreme that a bomb could be developed in time to have any effect on the war effort. As it turns out, that number is too large by a factor of ~50! The correct calculation was performed by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Leo Szilard and Otto Frisch while they were living in Britain.
After the German surrender, a number of German physicists who were working on a bomb were arrested and placed in a room in a private house in Scotland which was bugged. They were informed of the successful test of a nuclear device at Alamogordo and then were left alone in the room and their subsequent conversation monitored. They were flabbergasted to say the least and could not believe that the US was able to produce 100 kilograms of U235 in just 3 or 4 years, still laboring under the incorrect Heisenberg computation (Heisenberg was one of the sequestered physicists, along with Otto Hahn and Carl von Weizsäcker.
“The kind that everyone else rolls their eyes at and wishes would just shut up.”
By George, I think you’ve got it. Now if you can just get the rest of the world to agree that you are so exceptional and should be the leader……..
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain could have been the scripture for the 3rd testament. After all, they are literally a Christian country, and they were taking over large parts of the world, bringing it under the dominion of the Crown, and — by extension — the Christian God. They were a chosen people, too, having risen from an island country to having an empire upon which the sun never set. The victories over the Spanish Armada and over Napoleon as well as the restoration of the British royalty only proved how much God was on their side.
… etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah…
And before the British in the 18th and 19th centuries, it could easily have been the Spanish, having re-conquered their kingdom from the unGodly Moors, discovered new lands and claiming them (also) in the name of King (and God), and bringing back oodles of gold.
I’m sure that you could also find references in the Bible as to the Godliness of these two countries’ histories and achievements over hardship. … and I’m sure that you can find such in other countries that will rise in power in the future. (I’m also sure that you can find references to all these countries in any holy scripture if you squint hard enough. Heck, you’d probably find something in Principia Mathematica, too.)
Hardly, umlud, the UK was Anglican. That’s barely even Protestant. And Spain was Catholic. And both of them were foreigners!
“The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable.”
Have you ever wonder if god isn’t just tricking us? Perhaps he’s, in reality, just a minion of some really powerful diety, cruel and terrible.
Clearly this god ain’t all that powerful. He only gets to fiddle at the edges of creation and can’t even manage to create an index (something that humans have managed)!
:) Dingo
“America behaves in the world like all those incredibly insecure men we have all known in our lives, the ones that feel the need to bluster and strike macho poses at every turn. The ones who makes themselves feel strong by bullying the weak and need to constantly remind themselves and others of how special and powerful they are. The kind that everyone else rolls their eyes at and wishes would just shut up.”
Bingo.
[...] America: With God on our side — Presidential candidates feel no shame in asserting divine purpose in U.S. policies and actions. In this ubiquitous view of American exceptionalism, the nation is not bound by rules to which others must submit. (Snurched from Dispatches From the Culture Wars.) [...]