Written by John Turner   

I see that Karen Tumulty has a long article in the Washington Post today telling us that that American exceptionalism has become a big political issue. You can read the entire piece and come away not knowing exactly what American exceptionalism is. But it’s clear it’s related to other cloudy terms like “greatness,” “moral superiority,” “special in the sight of God,” and “destined for world leadership” that nobody defines adequately either.

It’s fairly definite that when American exceptionalism appears in political debate, it’s not simply a matter of declaring that America, being what it is and therefore not anything else, is exceptional. If that’s all that’s being said, then every thing and every person is exceptional, and the word dribbles away to nothing.

Tumulty quotes Mike Huckabee, who some time ago declared that “To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." I wonder what’s going on when somebody denies the heart and soul of a nation. How do you go about doing it? Are you saying the nation has no heart, and no soul? Are you saying those words aren’t applicable to the nature of nations? Are you saying that the nation in question is bad, or dead, or bland, or what? I don’t guess I should be surprised at Huckabee’s assertion. Most of the time when I listen to him I have no idea what he’s saying, and I get a strong suspicion that he doesn’t either.

Suppose you went to have Thanksgiving dinner at someone’s house and the host arose before the meal and announced, “I’m glad all of you are here, and I hope you’re having a good day. But I want it to be understood, without any reservation, that my family is superior to all of yours in virtually every way.”

Or suppose a town council somewhere in Missouri, or Oklahoma, passed this resolution: “Though there may be other towns that have virtues, our town is so exceptionally virtuous that no other town comes close to it, and any citizen who doesn’t acknowledge this town’s superior virtue, is invited, herewith, to leave the town immediately.”

What about if a state legislature passed a statement asserting that the citizens of its state were so much wiser than the citizens of any other state that they -- the citizens of the lesser states -- should have to acquire the approval of the superior state before it made any major legal changes?

In any of these cases it would be generally assumed that we were confronting arrogance seasoned liberally with dementia or, in other words, a pack of jerks. All of them would become the subject of a flood of jokes on late night TV. But when the entire nation makes similar pronunciamentos, people bow down as though they’re in the presence of the world of the Lord. When you consider that such blather can actually become a serious political issue and that people can be elected or barred from office on the basis of how devoutly they affirm it, then we have political adolescence run amok.

The concept of one nation being greater than another nation is so childish it’s hard to imagine grown-up people paying it any mind. Why would anyone bother to think such a thought, much less get riled up about it? Who cares? Why should they care?

It’s useful, at times, to carry out demographic studies comparing the specific characteristics of one group with another. If the citizens of one country find they are lagging behind the citizens of another in educational attainment, or surgical results, or in the smoothness and safety of their highways, then they might seek tips on how to improve their own performance. And if a nation discovered that it was deficient in a great array of socially desirability features, as compared with other nations, then that might occasion a healthy debate about what generally needed to be done. But the vague, and undefinable, notion of being greater than somebody else is both useless and silly. Furthermore, it is painfully vulgar.

I’m aware that there are certain propositions every politician is required to affirm, whether or not they have any basis in evidence. If he doesn’t assert them, he leaves himself open to attack. That’s one of the reasons that over a lifetime in politics most people’s intellectual acuity is flattened. If you are forced to go around making nonsensical statements every day of your life, then after a while your thinking is bound to be affected. Just imagine what it does to one’s mental condition to have to put on a solemn face and proclaim that we all should be grateful to the men and women of our armed forces for defending freedom around the world. Say that enough and one runs the risk of coming to think it’s true.

Most of us, though, are not politicians and so we don’t have to grovel to a nationalistic Moloch. Why isn’t it enough to hope to make our nation a more healthy, decent and just place to live? Isn’t that more important and more honorable, than quibbling about whether we’re number two, or number five, or so on -- whatever such a senseless hierarchy might be taken to mean?

If we can reach the position where most of our citizens are working intelligently to improve the nation rather that screaming about its glory and superiority, them we’ll have the right to be a great deal more proud of it than we are justified in being today.