Exceptional Ism As Dealt With By Handbook Political Theory

295“But you have there the myth of the essential white America, all the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic a killer. It has never yet melted.” D.H Lawrence. It is even more striking that generations of politicians and scholars insisted that the USA has a singular and essential American soul summed up by some defining virtue and a mission of global significance, inhabited and being shaped by a continental stage that commands the attention of the rest of humanity. The American nation was to be an exceptional nation, either a community of saints or if necessary a republic of the damned. According to the logic of this exceptionalism, the exemplary, the clearly defined nature, the illumination of its essential soul is all. The phrase, the American exceptionalism was first coined in the mid 2Oth C when social scientists realized the difficulty in coming to a revolutionary response to the failure of industrial capitalism in the Great Depression. The American character differs intrinsically from the European one despite the few parallels leveled by the social scientists. The American sense of exceptionalism might find its echoes in the idea of wilderness. The USA was seen as both a former British colony and a representation of the very early human life before the advent of money and the sophistication of life aspects. And unlike those to whom wilderness stood as a insurmountable debacle before their adaptation, the New settlers tamed the wild nature of the land and made of it their at last rest. Within the Puritan patrimony, lots of instances and sayings would confirm this belief and errand towards exceptionalism, just to name few, John Winthrop promises; we shall be a city upon a hill and the eyes of the world shall be upon us. American exceptionalism has been consistently defined in reference to outsiders, the racial and the temporal others by which Americans define their identity and their mission. The Native American communities were deemed by the European Monarchs agents as Rival political communities, yet, for Puritans, those tribes lacked agency and were therefore associated with the divine scourging that is needed to identify and purify the anointed people of God. Additionally, those people who were thought to be heathens by Europeans observers served as physical borders preventing America from the uncertainty of the wilderness. America’s sense of exceptionalism was well developed in its sacred wars. Race would mark the barriers between being a chosen nation and getting exposed to the divine chastisement being a sign of God’s scourging. And even after the fall of the Puritan elites, the claimed American exceptionalism was still echoing through the sound structure it has founded upon. Hartz writes “Locke dominates the American thought”, in the sense that most of the principles and ideals connected to liberties and Human rights were mostly inspired by the Lockean philosophy of individualism. Locke conceives of America as being an exemplary image reflecting the state of the world in its beginning. Once landed on the American shores, the Immigrated Puritans found themselves stranded in a mysterious setting where almost no traces of modern life like those witnessed in their mother lands were abundant or existent even; they had to invent and to provide for the needed life facilities and requirements; schools for knowledge, currency for commerce, and other types of social codes and contracts. ‘‘Locke dominates American political thought,’’ Hartz writes, ‘‘as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché´’’ The American tradition of Liberal individualism was mostly abetted and extended in place as in time for there was no enemy or real opponent striving to denude people of those principles; no unjust feudalist system to combat or a tyrannical monarchic dynasty to oust. This would account largely for the survival and the maintenance of the typical liberalistic individualist aspect of the American society.

American Liberalism is premised on the ideal of enlightened self-rule among free people, trusting as self-evident the truth that governments exist to serve the interests of these industrious and rational citizens. For Jackson Turner, the essential American soul is rather based upon its colonial history of territorial expansion and suppression of indigenous cultures in the West. This, according to the latter, shaped to a large extent the essentials of the exceptionalist American essence. Conquering a perpetual west, an incessant battle between civilization and barbarism on the frontier is, for Turner, much more central to American identity than democracy per se could ever be. With the weakening of those expansionist momentums, the USA started to lose much of its identity traits. The American liberal citizen doesn’t believe in force and political struggle to grant his inalienable rights like equality. They tend to treat governments with much suspicion yet they view the prevalence of law and the popular sovereignty as the bedrock upon which their living rests. Hartz, following in the footsteps of Madison and especially Tocqueville, sees a profound (if somewhat shapeless) threat in American liberal democracy, a majoritarian and conformist democratic mass that destroys or absorbs the individuals in whose name it ostensibly speaks. According to Hartz, the threat posed by the American culture is duly accountable for the exceptionalist American aspect that recommends a sort of unanimity in deciding both the traits of an American citizen and those friends and enemies of the nation. Americans insist on knowing their ‘‘essential soul,’’ but this question of identity can never be decisively answered. In a society of private economic and political actors, after all, how does one ever know with whom one is dealing? Lockean liberalism provides a larger descriptive definition for America while at the same time undermining identity for individual Americans. The American republic had no ‘‘covetous’’ or ‘‘contentious’’ aristocracy, in Hartz’s account, but it did not lack a population barred from public life; and Americans legally defined African and African-American slaves, women, Native Americans, and the poor as those radically unproductive and dangerously irrational forces to whom political action had to be denied. Once having excluded those eccentric factions in the American society, American liberals experience a coming back to their lockean doctrine and self governing, demonizing all those standing against the democratic conformity, turning eccentricity into sin. They depict their enemy as being lunatic and irritating, worth exclusion, getting recourse to their trusted Lockean faith, with the state powers properly immobilized and the essential industrious and rational soul of the nation is saved and protected America clearly began not with primal innocence and consent but with acts of force and fraud. Indians were here first, and it was their land upon which Americans contracted, squabbled, and reasoned with one another. Stripping away history did not permit beginning without sin; it simply exposed the sin at the beginning of it all. Race serves as the singular contrast around which others are defined. According to Rogin, the American exceptionalism was Lockean and individualist, Nationalist and white. Race becomes, in American political life, a clear marker of who one is— rational or irrational, citizen or outsider, master or slave. The power of subjugation for Lockean liberalism, in short, comes from the ability to name, to identify precisely, who was rational and industrious and who was quarrelsome or covetous. White Americans could know whom they were by identifying Native Americans as the slothful wanderers who refused to labor the earth and African slaves as the victims of just wars, and both as examples of scientifically verified ‘‘inferior races.’’ And thus we return to racial Othering, to Indian dispossession, slavery, and blackface, at the core, not the frontier, of American exceptionalism.

Smith seems to offer us an alternative to American exceptionalism—the United States, in the ‘‘multiple traditions’’ account, is summed up by no one narrative, it has no ‘‘essential soul.’’ America has let Locke down by being racially ‘‘ascriptive’’—quarrelsome and contentious, as it were—rather than rational in its politics. American citizens are bound by duty to love their nation, at least for as long as the American republic is the ‘‘best hope’’ for the enlightened portion of mankind. As Hartz pointed out, the interventionist strain in American foreign policy has long been premised upon the exportation of exceptionalism. When the United States began the war to consolidate their control of the Philippines, Woodrow Wilson defined the occupation as a pedagogical duty: ‘‘they [the Filipinos] are children and we are men in these great matters of government and justice’’ In 2003, President George W Bush invoked these lines with approval; the idea that the American occupation of Iraq is part of a lesson in democratic self-rule is premised upon the ideal of a singular and exemplary American soul that must be learned from. Indeed, the Bush national security statement is itself an exercise in American exceptionalism, asserting that ‘‘only one model of national success’’ survived the twentieth century, and that the United States is uniquely responsible for exemplifying and extending that model throughout the world. The exceptionalist American soul is therefore summed up in a set of distinctive features; modernist, fundamentalist, blandly homogeneous and violent. The very notion of violence although aberrant and peculiarly evoked still has its echoes in contemporary contexts; the identification of crimes’ interrogators as Satan reveals the violent nature that still projects itself in various contexts. In Smith’s account, the American exceptional nature cannot be decided simply through legal studious conceptual fiats, he rather assumes it is too central to political thought. This very moot concept is only reachable and coverable according to Smith through detective narratives and romance genres.