Nothing seems to cause one of the neocon talking heads to
fall into a rage more than discussing a politician or political candidate who
“doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism!!” Sean Hannity seems
especially unhinged under such circumstances. This is because “American
exceptionalism” has long been the ideological underpinning of – and
justification for –the American empire and all of its military
adventures. As shills for the American military/industrial complex and
the empire that it is forever expanding, Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and all
the rest are required by their masters to express outrage – outrage! –
whenever anyone questions the propriety of American imperialism and empire
building.
All empires claim to be “exceptional” in some ways, and
that such exceptionalism gives them license to invade, conquer, and plunder
other lands, usually hidden behind the false propaganda of benevolence (i.e.,
“peacekeeping,” “making the world safe for democracy,” rooting out the next
Hitler, etc.). The American version of “exceptionalism” has a long
history. Abe Lincoln arrogantly claimed that his government was “the
last best hope of Earth.”
Ronald Reagan said America was the result of “a divine plan’ to create “a
shining city on a hill.” “Into the hand of America God has placed the
destinies of an afflicted mankind,” said Reagan.
This is a major theme of American exceptionalism – the
notion that politicians like Reagan or George W. Bush (who claimed God spoke
to him and told him to run for president) know what is in the mind of
God. “We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom,”
said Bush (or at least his speech writer). The United States is
“indispensable to the forging of stable political relations” in the world,
declared Bill Clinton. These “stable political relations” are on display
today in the Middle East and in Europe where American military intervention
in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere, has caused a historic refugee crisis.
Dick Cheney’s new book in which he makes a case for a
massive increase in American military interventionism and war-making all
around the world is entitled, naturally, Exceptionalism. His
concluding chapter is entitled “The Last Best Hope of the Earth.” When
neocons start quoting Lincoln, you know that some country somewhere is about
to be bombed.
The Origins of American Exceptionalism
This arrogant, elitist, imperialistic impulse of the
American foreign policy establishment has a long history. The writings
of several scholars – Clyde Wilson, Forrest McDonald, Thomas Fleming, Robert
Penn Warren, and Murray Rothbard – are especially insightful in explaining
the origins of this idea.
In an essay entitled “The Yankee Problem in America” Clyde
Wilson wrote of “that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders,
who can easily be recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of
congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around . . . . they are
the chosen saints whose mission is to make America and the world, into the
perfection of their own image. . . . Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a
Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee –
self righteous, ruthless, and self-aggradizing.” The “Yankee temperament, it
should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into
the Deep North by later immigrants,” wrote Wilson. By this he meant the
communist ideologues who were centered in New York City in the mid twentieth
century and whose children, many of whom became the pro-communist “campus
radicals” of the ‘60s, were known as “red diaper babies.” David
Horowitz was one, and writes about this phenomenon in several of his books.
To such people, “anything that stood in the way of American
perfection must be eradicated . . . liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the
Masonic Order, meat-eating, marriage,” wrote Wilson, referring to various
crusades of the “Yankees” (by whom he does not mean all Northerners, only
this special breed).
The renowned historian Forrest McDonald made similar
observations in a 1985 essay entitled “Why Yankees Won’t (And Can’t) Leave
the South Alone.” “The first thing to understand about the Yankee,”
wrote McDonald, is that “He is a doctrinal puritan, characterized by . . .
pietistic perfectionism. Unlike the Southerner, he is constitutionally
incapable of letting things be, of adopting a live-and-let-live
attitude. No departure from his version of Truth is tolerable. .
.” The Yankees “embraced totalitarian republicanism and thought thereby
to establish God’s kingdom on earth” by using governmental force to eradicate
“sin.” They “formed the backbone of the Republican Party of Abraham
Lincoln.”
Thomas Fleming is the author of more than 50 books, including The New Dealers’ War and most
recently, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought
the Civil War. In this latter book Fleming writes of how wealthy and influential
New Englanders in the 1850s abandoned Christianity ad embraced the
mentally-deranged mass murderer and self-described communist John Brown as
their new “savior.” Brown preached that blood must be shed – and lots
of it – in order to eradicate all sin in the world. He was “descended
from Puritans, and was the personification of a Puritan,” says Fleming.
The “prevailing attitude” of such people, said Fleming, was “that they were
inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with
them.” For decades they denounced the South and Southerners for their
alleged “violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity . . .
strikingly similar to the public frenzy that gripped Massachusetts during the
witch trials.”
In his essay, “Just War,” Murray Rothbard also wrote of
the “Yankees” as “the North’s driving force” who were “driven by a fervent
postmillennialism which held that as a precondition for the Second Advent of
Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.”
This “kingdom” must be free of sin, and “government is God’s major instrument
of salvation,” or so they believed. These “Yankee fanatics” during the
“Civil War,” wrote Rothbard, “were veritable Patersonian humanitarians with
the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.”
The famous novelist Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King’s Men and nineteen other novels, wrote in his 1961 book, The Legacy of the Civil War, that
history must be “forgotten” in order to believe in the myth of “American
exceptionalism.” The “Civil War,” he said, left the North (which is to
say, the U.S. government) with a “treasury of virtue.” But this
“virtue”depends on ignoring the facts that Lincoln and both houses of
Congress repeatedly declared that the war had nothing to do with slavery;
that Lincoln pledged to enshrine slavery explicitly in the U.S. Constitution;
that his political speeches were filled with white supremacist language that
would make any Ku Klux Klansman blush; and many other falsehoods.
Nevertheless, this “moral narcissism,” this “plenary indulgence for all sins,
past, present and future” was “justification for our crusades of 1917-1918
and 1941-1945,” wrote Warren. And it was all done with “our diplomacy
of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal
spiritual rehabilitation for others.”
This “treasury of virtue” was also the fundamental
“justification” for all other wars and military interventions since then, up
to the present day.
This “treasury of virtue,” another way of saying
“American exceptionalism” provides the “moral” cover for the unmitigated
greed for war profiteering by the American military/industrial complex and is
therefore a perfect example of the “bootleggers and Baptists”convention that
economists talk about. The originator of this convention is economist
Bruce Yandle, who explained that alcohol prohibition was supported by
bootleggers who profited from selling illegal alcohol and by religious people
(“Baptists”) who opposed drinking on moral grounds. Pure greed won’t
garner much public support; it has to be hidden behind a veil of
pseudo-morality such as the phony “American exceptionalism” canard.
