Symposium: Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

This article is in response to “Reject Jingoism and Groupthink” by Daniel Larison and is part of the symposium, “Conservatism: What’s Wrong With It and How Can We Make It Right?”

I have questions about the details of Daniel Larison’s “Reject Jingoism and Groupthink.” Attention to local economy, aversion to foreign entanglements—there is much there that resonates to one with a conservative temperament. Still, mixed in with these are lines such as “[T]here is still some need for conservatives to remain engaged in national politics,” lines that—to put it mildly—alarm.

But for all of the logistical questions, Mr. Larison’s essay offers the opportunity to (re)consider an increasingly polarizing topic: American exceptionalism, in Mr. Larison’s understanding (or so I take him) a term that has lost its nuances and become an all-encompassing justification for evangelizing to the ends of the earth “the American way.”

In his 2011 New Criterion essay “Is America Periclean?” classicist Victor Davis Hanson pondered the lessons of the greatest articulation of exceptionalism, Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” to the citizens of Athens, recorded in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. Hanson observes that Pericles’ eloquence and “unabashed confidence” were, until recently, “gold standards” for Western statesmen: “Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill both emulated [Pericles’] reverence for ancestry, tradition, and cultural exceptionalism as a way of explaining why a confident America or Britain, in extremis, deserved its influence and should express it openly beyond its borders.”

But Larison suggests that American exceptionalism is no longer a healthy sense of identity, “an understanding…founded in respect for our political principles and history”; it’s an excuse, typically for the latest foreign intervention.

I suspect that, beyond a simple love of country, conservatives embrace a vigorous idea of American exceptionalism in response to liberal critics who, in Hanson’s words, reduce it to “misplaced imperialism…sexism, xenophobia, militarism, and cultural triumphalism.” But there has always been a note of “triumphalism” in the American “experiment”: “A city upon a hill,” John Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay colony; John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan imagined the whole country that way.

And perhaps rightly. America is different. It was from the moment of its founding, and it remains so today. There is a reason it has always attracted the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But was it foreordained? Did Providence breathe specially on this land? Or are our inherited blessings the unnecessary result of the unyielding labor of good men in each generation?

The tension of American exceptionalism is recognizing that, while America has received many good gifts, her future is never, simply because of that, assured.