Abstract
This article provides an overview of U.S. exceptionalism, the rhetorical habit of portraying the United States as God’s chosen city upon a hill, and thus as a nation better than, stronger than, and more righteous than all others. Linking post-World War II reactions to Communism to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism–with a detour through Mark Twain’s critique of the Spanish-American War and John L. O’Sullivan’s celebration of the Mexican-American War–the essay argues that the habit of invoking U.S. exceptionalism encourages a dangerous form of rhetorical absolutism in which political disagreements are escalated into eschatological threats to life itself, thus justifying a recurring pattern of waging war in the name of nation and God. Despite his promises of Hope and Change, the article finds President Barack Obama particularly susceptible to this rhetorical dynamic. The essay closes with common-sense suggestions for how to begin debunking exceptionalism, hopefully creating space for re-thinking America’s role in the world.
Keywords
Mark Twain stands among the nation’s most famously outraged critics of the folly of empire. Surveying a century’s worth of unbridled national expansion, and spurred in particular by the slaughter-in-the-name-of-democracy-and-God known as the Spanish-American war, Twain quipped that “the Finger of God was visible in it all, as usual.” In the days following 9/11, President George W. Bush confirmed Twain’s worst fears when he referred to the perpetrators of the attacks upon America as “a new kind of evil” that warranted the United States launching “this crusade, this war on terrorism.” While much of the world was shocked by the President’s “crusade” comment, and by his then spending the next 8 years invoking the “Finger of God” as cover for his murderous actions, remembering Twain’s lament helps us recognize that President Bush was reprising the long-standing narrative of exceptionalism, which underpins our national consciousness. 1
Indeed, the myth that America is exceptional— a transhistorical giant endorsed by God and destined to rule the world—stands at the heart of the American national experience. In 1787, when the Federalist Papers were published in an effort to persuade wary Americans to support a beefed-up federal government, Alexander Hamilton assured his readers that the new arrangement would help the tottering nation become an “empire.” By 1844, as the nation stretched westward into lands occupied by indigenous peoples and the Mexican government, Senator James Buchanan announced that “Providence has given to the American people a great and glorious mission to perform, of extending the blessings of Christianity and of civil and religious liberty.” Buchanan called for aggressive action in order “to fulfill our destiny.” The notion of Manifest Destiny was soon popularized by John L. O’Sullivan in the pages of The Democratic Review, where he regularly linked U.S. ambitions with “the manifest design of Providence.” While these instances spoke to continental ambitions, such bold talk soon went global via the Spanish-American War and then World War I. By the post–World War II era, Secretary of State Dean Acheson could write with cheerful clarity about the need to “save the souls of the heathen Chinese.” In its globalizing formations, Manifest Destiny would morph into President Truman’s “containment” strategy against Communism only to resurface later as President Bush’s crusading War on Terrorism. Thus, when President Bush threatened a “crusade” against terrorism in 2001, with the obvious implication being that the United States would soon launch multiple wars in Islamic lands, he stated the obvious: Empire is in our national blood; waging war in the name of God, Providence, and Liberty is our birthright. 2
Those Americans who hope to see the nation become something other than a permanently indebted garrison state in hock to weapons manufacturers, security contractors, and various third-world bandits would do well to realize that even the thinnest, weakest notion of democracy can no longer survive the pressures of empire. Providence does not smile upon the invasion of Iraq. Manifest Destiny cannot support the boondoggle in Afghanistan. Invoking the “Finger of God” while “saving” the “heathens” still will not pay the bills or bring back the dead or build a functioning civil society in Kabul and Baghdad, much less Detroit and Phoenix. If America is to pull out of its economic doldrums, reenergize its democratic habits, burnish its international reputation, and reinvest in the education, health, transportation, science, and market infrastructure that once made this nation great, then it must cease to act like an exceptional empire and begin to function like a humble republic. I will pursue this thesis in two parts, first by watching as Manifest Destiny morphed into anti-communist globalization in the immediate post–World War II era, and then by examining how anti-communist globalization turned into an anti-terrorist “crusade” following 9/11. I will close by offering common-sense proposals for dismantling the nation’s imperial ambitions in favor of more pedestrian aspirations. 3
Globalization as Anti-communist Containment
In the aftermath of World War II’s epic carnage, the great powers were left surveying the wreckage and contemplating the construction of a new world. France’s lightning-quick capitulation to and then cooperation with Hitler left that nation disgraced and in no position to play a prominent postwar leadership role. Britain was victorious but battered, both militarily and financially sapped and thus on the verge of sliding into second-power status. Stalin’s massive Red Army occupied Berlin and most of eastern Europe and stood proud at bearing the brunt of the fighting, yet Stalin’s regime inspired faith in no one—what Joseph Nye calls “soft power” was sorely lacking. Writing in a triumphant mood in 1955, Joseph M. Jones observed that “Germany did not exist . . . defeated Italy did not count, and the smaller countries were not important.” America was bogged down on three continents, with troops scattered across East Asia, all of Europe, and Northern Africa, yet the Yanks seemed to have caught fire; the curve of history appeared to be bending their way. As Jones put it, the United States stood as the lone “giant.” And so, with the destruction of Hitler’s imperial ambitions in Europe and Hirohito’s in Asia, the dissolution of the hyphenated empires that predated World War II, and the dissolving of the chains that held British, French, and Dutch colonies in check, much of the world was up for grabs. As Dean Acheson later recalled, “The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone.” But instead of seizing the moment as a historical blessing, an unprecedented occasion for rethinking global norms of governance, the United States set about, once again, square-jawed and deadly serious, on fulfilling what Robert Ivie describes as “America’s holy mission . . . to make the world right in the eyes of the Christian God.” 4
In addition to the postwar political free-for-all, it was clear that massive economic reconstruction was needed if the standing parties wished to avoid the same despair that led to World War II in the first place. While the prospect of redrawing the world’s political boundaries and economic patterns was daunting, the moment was also rich with possibility: Here was a genuine opening, an occasion for rethinking the foundations of national security, international relations, and global economics. But the moment was ripe with other opportunities as well, for as Stephen Ambrose has noted, “Where American soldiers went, American businessmen would follow.” Formerly closed markets would be opened. The Middle East’s oil would fall fully into U.S. control. Commerce would flow across a Mediterranean Sea and Pacific and Atlantic Oceans controlled without question by the U.S. Navy. And, because President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been both so slow to go to war and so halting in his application of American troops and resources once in the war, the United States met the moment as an unscathed industrial colossus that was “producing 45 percent of the world’s armaments and nearly 50 percent of its goods. Some two-thirds of all ships afloat were American-built.” Militarily superior and economically ascendant, suffused with images of the Old World in ruins, dreaming of democratic revolutions to come, and armed with the awesome power of the bomb, many Americans happily embraced the illusion that a grueling multiparty triumph in war would lead to breezy unilateral U.S. influence in peace. Rather than rethinking their relationship to the globe, Americans relied upon the habits of exceptionalism, and so slid, as Ambrose describes it, into “the strange belief that everyone in the world wanted to be just like them.” 5
The fact that the Communist Russians and Chinese—to say nothing of the myriad postcolonial movements soon to come—did not want to be “like them” was cause not for Americans to reevaluate the premise of their exceptionalism but for confirming one of its underlying beliefs: that the Communists suffered from political delusion, lacked historical perspective, and ignored common sense. Faith in America’s exceptionalism was so strong, so taken-for granted, that it appears not to have occurred to the nation’s postwar leaders that something like global, multilateral, inclusive, and democratic governance was possible. As Hanson Baldwin trumpeted in the New York Times in March 1947, in a perfect example of American hubris mixed with provincialism and grandeur, the United States “alone may be able to avert the decline of Western civilization, and a reversion to nihilism and the Dark Ages”—the U.S. alone. Saving the heathens would mean conquering them, ideally with words and goods, but with weapons if needed. Henceforward, globalization would be synonymous with fighting Communism and spreading Christianity, thus saving “civilization.” 6
By the spring of 1947, President Harry S. Truman was ready to make this position formal. Communists had been harassing the Greek government via what the President called “terrorist activities” that sowed “an atmosphere of chaos and extremism.” Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Truman said, “Greece must have assistance” that “no other country is willing and able to provide.” Knowing that Americans were weary of war, but fearing the economic cost of demilitarizing, Truman needed a reason for the United States to continue its wartime military expenditures in peacetime. And so the peripheral situation in Greece was escalated into nothing less than a turning point in global history: “If Greece should fall,” Truman warned, Turkey would go next; then “confusion and disorder” would hit the Middle East; soon, “discouragement and possibly failure” would spread, infecting perhaps “the world.” Local Communist agitation was thus turned into “the seeds of totalitarian regimes” spreading globally. In the line that encapsulated the spirit of what has since become known as the Truman Doctrine—a template of millennial hope spurred by world-threatening fear—the President proclaimed that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” While it was not widely discussed at the time, 62% of the President’s US$400 million request was slotted for military aid. Truman later explained that “it would be our policy to support the cause of freedom wherever it was threatened,” but he chose to omit the fact that Greece had not been, either prior to or during the war, a functioning democracy. In fact, the corruption-riddled monarchy had long since descended into civil war, with republican, Communist, and monarchical factions bidding for United States, British, and Russian aid. Despite this messy fact, Truman used the situation to define U.S. foreign policy as opposing Communism everywhere by supporting “freedom” anywhere. Dean Acheson, one of postwar America’s leading evangelical exceptionalists, leapt at the millennial implications of Truman launching what he later called “one of the greatest and most honorable adventures in history.” And so, in a dramatic expansion of the former continental versions of Manifest Destiny—and offering a template reprised by President Bush more than 50 years later—America was pledged to the grand “adventure” of policing the globe, even if that meant shipping vast economic aid and military support to what Garry Wills has called “rather questionable regimes.” 7
In sum, Truman’s speech signaled that the moral clarity of World War II was dimming in a Cold War haze and that the brief and localized engagements against Germany and Japan were giving way to a state of perpetual and global war. James Reston thus reported in the New York Times that Congress was “bewildered,” “grim and even resentful.” Senator Harry F. Byrd (Democrat, VA) allegedly asked, “Can it mean World War III?” As the shock of spring gave way to a summer of big questions, Secretary of State George C. Marshall tried to soften the blow in his Harvard commencement address of June 5, 1947. In the speech that launched what became known as the Marshall Plan, the Secretary stressed the larger humanitarian goals of U.S. foreign policy, claiming that “our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Despite Marshall’s efforts, Truman’s hard words and Acheson’s evangelical fervor hung in the air: henceforward, spreading democracy would be the justifying claim for America’s postwar globalization, but its founding causes were opposing communism and opening foreign markets to U.S. extraction (of resources), exploitation (of labor), and profiteering (via saleable goods). Moreover, the assumption that this U.S.-driven version of anti-communist globalization would bring God to the “heathens” meant, as William Appelman Williams observes, that this “new crusading spirit” not only echoed the antebellum period’s grandiose Manifest Destiny but also “stress[ed] the virtues (and necessities) of Protestant Christianity”—a crusade indeed. 8
There can be little wonder, then, that international critics feared that globalization and democratization could more accurately be called Americanization or that domestic critics feared that Truman has just written a blank check that would soon bankrupt the nation. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1952, for example, America’s leading newspaper man, Walter Lippmann, argued that because of the Truman Doctrine’s excessive reach, the Truman administration had become “a bad case of fatty degeneration.” It has “acquired more and more powers and has spent more and more money but it has had less and less control over the use of that power and of that money.” Like many Americans at the time, Lippmann hoped the just-elected Dwight Eisenhower might “clear up” the “mess.” Despite Marhsall’s attempt to portray U.S. foreign policy in benevolent tones, and despite all the tough questions asked by Lippmann and his peers, the Truman Doctrine’s blithe talk of saving the world left some observers aghast at the likelihood that more war was on the horizon, albeit not to stop fascism but to spread capitalism and Christianity. The poet George Oppen recognized the dangers of this formulation, and so linked the evasions and euphemisms of polite political conversation with their inevitable mass destruction when he observed
It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn.
Randall Jarrell put the matter even more succinctly when remembering the bombing runs that incinerated much of Germany:
In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school. . . They said “Here are the maps”; we burned the cities.
Oppen and Jarrell thus argued for the obvious linkage: aggressive talk of National Destiny and Providential Mission means folks in far-away lands are going to die in large numbers—the “Finger of God” rests upon a trigger. 9
“The Forever War” and the Costs of Empire
World War II’s bomber squadrons have given way to an age of solitary predator drones, some of them as large as aircraft armed with guided missiles, some as small as a hummingbird and weighing “less than a AA battery.” Burning the cities of America’s perceived enemies has been replaced with allegedly surgical strikes launched from such drones—I say “alleged” because despite glowing coverage in the mainstream press, the fact is that the drones, as noted by Michael Jones, “tend to kill an awful lot of civilians too.” Jones reports that for every suspected terrorist killed in a drone strike, 10 civilians die. On his “Return Good for Evil” website, Derrick Crowe presents evidence that the drone-kill ratio of civilians to supposed terrorists could be as high as 15-to-1. Much as in World War II, then, the technology of empire appears to administer death in a predictably indiscriminate manner. Such facts are not widely known, however, and most of the fighting and reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan has been farmed out to private, and in many cases, secret contractors, making this the first generation of Americans to live through two wars on different continents without being asked to enlist to fight, sacrifice on consumption, or invest in the war effort. Presidents Bush and Obama’s war on terror—what Mark Danner has called “the forever war” because of its indefinite goals and elastic boundaries—thus grinds along as if in a parallel but obscure universe, one where mounting deaths, destabilizing regimes, and unfathomable costs are little more than background noise to another day of life as usual. 10
In contrast to such delusions, I argue that our current economic crisis is a direct consequence of unchecked imperial hubris. The United States is broke for many reasons, but chief among them is the cost of empire. Moreover, our moral malaise may also be attributed to living through a decade wherein the President routinely ordered torture, then denied doing so despite the mounting evidence, only to later brag about his actions. For example, the former president claims in his memoir, Decision Points, to have literally shouted “damn right” when asked by CIA Director Tenet if the CIA could waterboard Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Torture, deny it, then brag about it—that is a template for moral hypocrisy and squandered national prestige. I am arguing, then, that America’s ingrained sense of exceptionalism, its unquestioned belief that it can do whatever it wants wherever it wants to whomever it wants because that is what the world needs, regardless of the cost in dollars or moral standing—damn right—has led us into both financial ruin and moral peril. To pursue this claim, I offer below three subsections: one on “empire and financial madness,” one on “torture and moral confusion,” and one on “Obama and the pleasures of exceptionalism.” 11
Empire and Financial Madness
We have already seen how Walter Lippmann regarded President Truman’s bloated Cold War ambitions and expenditures as a case study of “fatty degeneration.” Let us turn now to the post-9/11 scene to see how our own generation’s version of the Cold War has led the nation down the path of fiscal madness. Leaving aside the baseline annual budgets of the U.S. military apparatus and its numerous intelligence agencies (the CIA, NSA, and various boutique agencies, 16 in all), the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since 2001, and as of September 16, 2011, has been estimated at US$1,250,419,648,156—that is one trillion, two hundred and fifty billion, four hundred and nineteen million, six hundred and forty-eight thousand, one hundred and fifty six dollars. If readers go to http://costofwar.com, they can see a ticker enumerating these costs, with the dollar numbers whizzing upwards like a gas-station pump on steroids. The portion of this stunning number that has been spent on the war in Iraq—US$797 billion—could cover the entire cost of President Obama’s economic stimulus package (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). The U.S. Congress veered dangerously close to shutting down in September 2011 because the Democrats and Republicans could not agree on meager emergency expenses for the victims of Hurricane Irene, but just the cost of the Iraq war for 2011—US$47 billion and counting—could cover all Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) expenses since 1999. The cumulative cost of the war in Afghanistan—estimated at roughly US$459 billion—could cover the health insurance for every one of America’s 50+ million uninsured citizens for 2 years. In short, the nation’s political class has chosen to dump astronomical amounts of taxpayer money into foolish wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while flood-ravaged families in Pennsylvania and Vermont live in mud-filled squalor and 50+ million of our neighbors have no access to affordable health care. “Fatty degeneration” indeed. 12
During World War II and the Cold War, Americans liked to think of their nation as the “arsenal of democracy.” The phrase indicated our commitment to making war in the name of freedom, sacrificing so that others might benefit, and working hard for the collective good. Weapons systems were then still industrial, meaning the arsenal looked like a factory, with good jobs at good wages for all. The post-9/11 War on Terrorism has produced a different configuration, however, as reported in chilling detail in “Top Secret America,” a three-part exposé published by Dana Priest and William Arkin in The Washington Post in 2010. Priest and Arkin chronicle “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America,” wherein 1,271 government organization and 1,931 private contractors swim in a yearly budget estimated at US$75 billion. As Priest and Arkin note, this immense apparatus is “hidden from the public view, lacking in thorough oversight, and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.” Moreover, the clandestine, often internationally based, and super high-tech nature of such work means the economic beneficiaries of “Top Secret America” tend to be highly credentialed, well-connected, white-collar experts, not the hard-hit working class. And so, even while state budgets crumble, while schools are shuttered and roads closed, while the income gap between the richest 1% of Americans and the suffering many accelerates to unprecedented levels, “Top Secret America” rolls along with a US$75 billion budget—it is hard to imagine how the national treasury can long survive such excesses or how the habits of democracy can long survive such institutionalized secrecy and fear mongering. As Allison Stanger argues, such arrangements tend to produce three consequences: “gross fiscal irresponsibility, dangerous apathy among the public at large, and the inadvertent militarization of American foreign policy.” 13
These consequences represent only the tip of the iceberg of war-related fiscal and political madness. Consider President Obama’s September 8, 2011, address to a joint session of Congress, wherein he unveiled his plan for the “American Jobs Act.” The President began his speech by noting that the United States is mired in “an economic crisis” fueled in part by Washington’s escalating “political circus”; he then offered a series of proposals meant to make “America number one again.” Pursuing economic recovery is necessary, but couching it in terms of being “number one”—a phrase he repeated, to raucous applause—indicates how U.S. exceptionalism is an unquestioned cultural fiction, as if being economically solvent is a global competition the United States must win. What is most startling about the President’s speech, however, is not its repetition of the myth of American exceptionalism but the fact that in the most important speech of his career, with the nation’s economy hanging by a thread, President Obama said not one word about the costs of U.S. empire—not one. As noted above, the entire scope of the President’s economic recovery plan could be covered with a fraction of the resources the nation spends to make wars around the world, yet even Barack Obama, the President of change and hope, accepts the premise of U.S. empire as unquestionable, off the table, beyond discussion even in the face of the worst economic recession in eighty years. Hence his closing homage to Manifest Destiny, were, again to rousing applause, he ended his speech by proclaiming that “the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth.” 14
Scholars and critics may respond that celebrating this mandate of greatness amounts to required boilerplate for all presidents, yet Barack Obama seems to embrace this mantra with particular relish. When speaking to the Annual Conference of the American Legion in August 2011, he offered the assembled veterans a number of vote-seeking promises regarding better health care and postwar benefits, but he could not refrain from trumpeting his belief that the American military is “the best-trained, the best-led, [and] the best-equipped fighting force in history.” Such claims are so ubiquitous in presidential discourse that they may elude notice, they can make the eyes droop, yet they indicate how deeply exceptionalism is buried within the national consciousness. For example, when President Obama spoke about America’s role in Afghanistan, in June 2011, he referred not to America’s current role in the world but to its “singular role in the course of human events.” When he spoke about Iraq in October 2011, he called the U.S. military “the very best in the world.” When speaking about Libya in March 2011, he observed that the world is led by many forces and nations but that “the United States of America is different.” Repeated year after year, generation after generation, these notions of being “singular,” “the very best,” and “different” amount to a recipe for transcendence: America is an exceptional nation that stands above and beyond all others. 15
I was feeling guilty about harboring such critical thoughts about a president I wish well, and so went to see him speak on October 26, 2011, in the gym on my campus. The University of Colorado Denver students came out in droves to bathe their President in love; the occasion felt electric, like a rock concert. Denver got hammered with the season’s first snow storm the night before, and so everyone stood in line in slush for hours, happy and excited while the Secret Service wrapped the President in airtight security—we even spotted snipers on adjacent buildings. When President Obama leapt up to the lectern and made a joke about being able to go sledding for Halloween, the room exploded. I have never seen a politician so adored. He was funny, he was angry, he was encouraging, he knew his facts, his tell-tale preacher’s cadence was working, and the audience was shouting back “yes, sir,” “uh huh,” and “that’s right” in all the expected places. It was a masterful performance that made his point (about college loans, mostly), blasted the do-nothing Republicans, and slathered up the local Democrats, yet right at the end, in the second-to-last sentence of the speech, President Obama could not refrain from shouting—he was shouting by now, in order to be heard above the roaring, adoring crowd—“let’s go once again show the world just why it is the United States of America is the greatest nation on Earth.” He did not need to say that. He had us eating from his hands. The speech was a success beyond even the highest expectations, the room was won. Yet President Obama, as if by habit, chose to end his speech by again repeating the core assumption of exceptionalism: that America is somehow better than, more special than, more dear in the eyes of God than any other nation on earth. Thus even President Obama repeats the recipe of fiscal madness and foreign adventurism: fight in the name of God and Freedom, fight in the name of being “the best” and “the greatest,” and the mightiest nation ever, all while the cost of such exceptionalism rockets skyward, with the consequences of such hubris cordoned off from conversation. 16
Torture and Moral Confusion
Much has been written about how 9/11 opened the floodgates to a new era of enhanced interrogation techniques, what critics, including myself, have called torture. While the U.S. press has downplayed the news, it is important to remember that in 2010 Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, ordered an official inquiry into his country’s roles in the global post-9/11 internment, rendition, and torture complex. Assuming the inquiry is not a whitewash, the British people will learn the names, places, dates, and techniques of those in their government, military, and secret service who committed war crimes. Such knowledge will form the foundation for further conversations about the methods and morals of gathering intelligence in times of both war and peace, hence enabling future generations to make informed, balanced, and hopefully legal decisions about how to handle suspected enemies. The United States will not benefit from such informed debate because President Obama has refused to open any hearings into the matter, Congress has chosen not to act, and the press has been handicapped by layer upon layer of secrecy supported by war-time executive powers. In a bizarre twist to this story, however, the Bush administration’s key advocates of torture—including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorneys General John Ashcraft and Alberto Gonzalez, CIA Director George Tenet, and others—remain, as David Cole put it in an acid line, “free to travel the lecture circuit and publish books bragging about their crimes.” Part of the current version of U.S. exceptionalism, then, is the inability of anyone in high office to notice that torturing prisoners only adds fuel to the global fire of resentment directed at U.S. actions. In sum, the American belief in our unquestioned righteousness, our innate right to break the law in times of need, has led to a torture complex that confirms our enemies’ worst suspicions: that America only upholds the law when it is convenient. In this sense, the Bush administration’s actions and the Obama administration’s lack of action reveal the U.S. government as riven with hypocrisy. 17
One of the downsides of globalization is that such moral confusions can be exported around the world. And so, even while many in the United States have already forgotten Abu Ghraib and the horrors of institutionalized torture, the same forces that produced that scandal are quietly but consistently reproducing the same tactics in Afghanistan. In fact, in October 2011, the United Nations released a scathing report detailing systematic torture in Afghan prisons; covering the story, the New York Times noted that “American and other Western backers provide training and pay for nearly the entire budget of the Afghan ministries running the detention centers.” In sum, the Afghan military, police, and intelligence agencies—trained by the United States and paid for by the United States—continue to implement Abu Ghraib–style torture. In fact, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) interviewed 379 former prisoners representing 47 detention facilities in 22 provinces, finding “systematic” torture and other “serious human rights violations,” including the widespread use of “suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains . . .) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks . . . . Electric shock, twisting and wrenching of detainees’ genitals . . . removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse. . . . Routine blindfolding and hooding. . .” The UNAMA report notes that the implementation of these torture practices “poses obstacles to reconciliation and reintegration processes aimed at ending the armed conflict in Afghanistan,” meaning that the victims of torture (along with their friends and families) are much less likely to trust the Afghan government and its U.S. and NATO backers, who preach democracy in public but practice torture in private. While the torture further destabilizes Afghanistan, there is a global political cost as well, for as such charges ricochet around the world, the U.S.’s moral prestige accelerates on its nose dive: It is hard to claim to be the beacon of global democracy when much of the world sees you as a prison guard addicted to torturing those who want your military forces off their land. 18
In an equally revealing story, Dexter Filkins reports that when a U.S. predator drone fired on the village of Ghwa Khwa, in the badlands of Pakistan’s South Waziristan—one of the so-called “tribal areas” that continue to elude any U.S. or NATO control—the missile killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a known terrorist (as usual, the death count exceeded the target, as Filkins reports that locals found “many bodies”). Just 4 days earlier, the prominent Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad had been tortured and then murdered by Pakistan’s dreaded ISI in reprisal for his stories linking the ISI to Kashmiri and other terrorists. Many observers have argued that the ISI plays a double game of claiming to help the United States hunt Al Qaeda members while secretly training, arming, and funding them as agents for the ISI’s ongoing war against Indian control of Kashmir, U.S. influence in Afghanistan, and secular, democratic governance in Pakistan. In short, the ISI is one of the driving forces behind what observers routinely call “the disintegrating relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan.” Filkins speculates that the United States acted on information the ISI provided to the CIA in an effort to mend bridges between the two intelligence agencies. Moreover, Filkins speculates that the ISI likely gleaned this information through its torture of Shahzad, who, as part of his reporting, was known to have had extensive contact with Kashmiri. In sum, the United States may have used information from a tortured Pakistani journalist to kill a foe without setting foot in the village—imperial death is administered from afar, with bloodied information possibly gleaned from the torture of one of the nation’s treasured truth-tellers. Most Americans will never learn the details of this sordid affair, but the Pakistanis, Afghans, and Indians will learn them well, and the lesson they take away will be simple and unforgettable: The United States is a morally muddled, murderous machine that will not hesitate to use tainted intelligence provided by the double-dealing ISI. Surely, this is not a route to winning hearts and minds. 19
Obama and the Pleasures of Exceptionalism
The financial and moral contradictions discussed above are powerfully and painfully embodied in President Obama. He campaigned on the promise to close Guantanámo Bay, yet it remains open. He repeatedly questioned those policies of the Bush administration that many of us believe amount to illegal assassinations, yet it has been reported that “there were more missile strikes [launched by predator drones] inside Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office then in George W. Bush’s eight.” He received the Nobel Prize for Peace while overseeing two wars on two continents (this before he authorized a third military intervention in Libya), thus leaving many observers in a state, so the London Times reported, of “astonishment” and “bafflement.” Despite this last embarrassment, at the Nobel award ceremony the President gave a rousing speech about America’s righteousness, celebrating the nation’s post–World War II leadership of global affairs as a “burden” that has been “borne” because of “enlightened self-interest.” In short, the President said in this most international of moments that the United States has sought to shape the world in its own image because that is what the world needs to prosper. The Nobel would appear to call forth the obligations of multilateralism and negotiation, yet the President spoke—like Buchanan, O’Sullivan, Truman, Acheson, and so many others before him—of “enlightenend” unilateralism and leading by heroic example. President Obama is a suave and literate man; to his credit, he began his speech by noting that “my accomplishments are slight”; no Texas bumpkin is he, yet the tone of American exceptionalism in this speech is nonetheless as powerful as in the most obscene ramblings of President Bush. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the speech, then, was when President Obama told his audience that a “Holy War can never be a just war.” Portraying Al Qaeda as a form of religiously based extremism that has “no need for restraint,” the President depicted U.S. actions since World War II, by contrast, as a form of necessary realism pursued to protect “those aspirations that are universal.” In short, U.S. hopes are self-evident universals while the hopes of others are deluded and dangerous; they have a murderous God, we have unquestioned justice; they are extremists, we are righteous protectors of truth and justice. In some cases, such conclusions may be well founded, but when they become embedded in the national consciousness as a catch-all explanation for literally every situation, then the nation is in trouble, for this is a formula for endless war. Indeed, as Peter McLaren has argued in these same pages, this combination of hysterical and escalatory rhetorical absolutism means that “America’s enemies must therefore always already be the enemies of civilization.” 20
The Washington Post noted that the Nobel Committee bestowed the award upon President Obama not because of what he had accomplished in his short stay in the White House, but rather as “a clear rebuke of the Bush administration’s aversion to international organizations and treaties.” If my analysis here is correct, however, then the Nobel Committee, along with so many others, must be sorely disappointed. Indeed, I have shown here how the Obama administration’s embrace of exceptionalism, the inherent right of the United States to wage war anywhere against anyone at any cost and by any means—all while invoking a perceived mandate from heaven, what Twain spoofed as “the Finger of God”—is as strong as in the Manifest Destiny–fueled presidencies of Polk and Tyler, or in the anti-Communism-fueled ambitions of presidents stretching from Truman to Reagan, or in the post-9/11 anti-terrorism-fueled presidency of George W. Bush. In short, the President who campaigned on hope and change turns out to be yet another exceptionalist. Those readers who feel betrayed by this turn of events may find some solace in recalling Twain, whose disgust is as relevant, and whose critique is as trenchant, today as when he wrote it in the early 1900s:
It was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her . . . to endure with apathy the like treatment at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich . . . the suffrage was become a mere machine. . . . There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.
I hope, contrary to Twain, that it is not “impossible to the save the Great Republic,” yet the clock is ticking on our window of opportunity. 21
Three Steps Toward “Saving the Great Republic”
As a first step toward recognizing the folly of fighting for providence, hence initiating a long-overdue rethinking of the premises of American exceptionalism, I will close this essay by making three common-sense proposals, which touch upon the nation’s rhetorical habits, economic practices, and sense of self.
From Rhetorical Absolutism to Multilateral Humility
Robert Ivie and Oscar Giner have argued that “America’s chronic impulse to war” is based in part on the nation’s sense of exceptionalism, which drives Americans into a perpetual state of righteous hysteria wherein we see Others as fundamentally wicked rather than as pursuing goals different from our own. This habituated overreaction turns political moments into eschatological nightmares. Indeed, because American exceptionalism argues that the United States is the touchstone of all goodness, God’s chosen city on a hill, then those who counter U.S. norms are repeatedly escalated into world-threatening monsters. For example, in April 1950, when the National Security Council produced NSC 68, the seminal whitepaper that defined a generation of Cold War thinking, the authors portrayed the Soviet Union not simply as holding differing goals and protocols than the United States but as “animated by a new fanatic faith” pointed toward “impos[ing] its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The stakes involved, NSC 68 proclaimed, “the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” I do not mean to belittle the seriousness of the threat posed by the Soviets, still, it is revealing to watch as NSC 68 engages in such a familiar set of rhetorical moves: (a) escalate a political difference into a world-threatening battle between reason and some “fanatic” Other, (b) engage in a process of rhetorical trans-substantiation wherein the specific interests of the United States are turned into the universal interests of the entire free world, (c) assume that the immediate political goals of the United States are synonymous with the survival of “civilization itself,” and (d) thus justify total war at any cost fought by any means. Enacting these four rhetorical steps creates situations where negotiation seems like nothing less than treason, hence creating a template for waging war again and again. 22
Seen from this perspective, Al Qaeda is only the latest in a long line of monstrous Others that stretches back to the Salem witch trials. Ivie and Giner note that one of the founding maneuvers in this rhetorical process of hysterical Othering is “demonizing adversaries by stereotyping their circumstances.” To take just one example, when the Chinese feel threatened by U.S. military support for Taiwan, which was roughly US$6.4 billion in 2010, they are portrayed as crazy Communists intent on conquering the world—an escalatory characterization they have inherited from the Russians—but when the United States feels threatened by Soviet encroachments in Cuba, we are called to act in the name of Freedom Everywhere, even if it means taking the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. China’s legitimate off-shore concerns are characterized as insane, if not Evil Incarnate, while America’s concerns are held up as beyond reproach. We can hardly be surprised when our international neighbors blanch at this high-handed hubris. Following Ivie, Giner, and others, I have tried to show here how America’s exceptionalism, our standing above and beyond all other nations and causes, leads to precisely this kind of rhetorical absolutism, wherein Other are always wrong and the United States is always right. The nation needs to realize that such rhetorical absolutism is politically unproductive: It leads to war, it escalates conflict, and it short-circuits compromise. In short, we could use less arrogance and more humility, less exceptional unilateralism and more humble multilateralism, less talk of being God’s chosen children, and more talk of mutual respect for all God’s creatures. 23
Moreover, Donovan Conley has argued in these same pages that the rhetorical patterns I have identified here are underwritten by a perverse sense of pleasure, what he calls “ecstatic vengeance.” Conley focuses on the post-9/11 speeches of President George W. Bush, wherein he discerns a “mixture of sorrow and jubilation,” an “aura of thrill-within-victimage.” While I have argued that America’s sense of exceptionalism drives a process of escalatory rhetorical absolutism, Conley adds a psychoanalytic twist and argues that we enjoy this process, we seek it out, we find if fulfilling. Recall the frenzied theater of abuse surrounding the Salem witch trials, the party-like barbeques that sprang up at lynchings, Senator McCarthy’s snarling made-for-radio accusations against alleged traitors, and the drunken crowds chanting USA!, USA!, USA! outside the Whitehouse on the night Osama bin Laden was assassinated—surely such moments of “ecstatic vengeance” fill participants with a sense of catharsis, perhaps even spiritual reverie. While being threatened by the Other is cause for alarm, destroying the Other is a blast. If Conley is correct, which I fear he is, then my call for a prudent readjustment of the nation’s rhetorical habits will only scratch the surface of his much deeper concern: that we pursue rhetorical absolutism precisely because it creates the crisis situations from which we derive so much pleasure. 24
From “Top Secret” America to a New Deal
As we saw above, the nation’s manic response to 9/11 has produced a parallel universe of Top Secret government agencies, military subunits, and corporate contractors. Subject to no governmental checks and balances, funded beyond anyone’s imagination, and beholden to no public accountability, Top Secret America has become a breeding ground of crony capitalism, redundancy, and fear-mongering. When fighting terrorism becomes one of the nation’s biggest growth industries, then we can be sure that the interested parties will produce terrorists under every rock and tree—perpetual crisis and unending secret war are the new normal, for as one recent study asserts, “selling fear” is now a lucrative career path. In fact, since 9/11 the public U.S. military budget has “almost doubled,” yet when called before the House Armed Service Committee in the autumn of 2011 to discuss the nation’s ongoing economic recession and its possible impact on the military, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned that cuts to the military budget would be “catastrophic” and would “devastate our national defense.” The democratically appointed Defense Secretary thus sounds close to the war-hawk republicans of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who announced just 9 days after 9/11 that they “urge . . . no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed . . . to win this war” (which, for the record, they said should be launched against Afghanistan, Iraq, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria, for starters). From this blank check, “whatever funds are necessary” perspective—apparently shared by Panetta and PNAC, the democratic appointee and the Republican war-mongers—the nation will be safer by waging globe-straddling wars, both hot and cold, public and secret, than by making minor cuts to the military in order to pay for schools, or roads, or hospitals back home. The consequences of this fiscal madness are neither sustainable economically nor productive of national security. In fact, according to analysis conducted by the War Resisters League, in 2009 the federal budget of the United States dedicated 54% of national spending to current and past military expense, coming to US$2.65 trillion (the “past” expenses include benefits for veterans and interest on previously accrued military-driven debt spending). This astronomical outlay of our tax dollars for war means that the United States spends as much on its defense budget as the combined military budgets of China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. 25
Supporters of such costs will argue that that US$2.65 trillion plays a large, perhaps even decisive, role in driving the national economy—meaning the United States has shifted from New Deal Keynesianism to military socialism. The US$75 billion poured into “Top Secret” America does not fit this profile, however, for the “top secret” nature of the work involved means that the nation’s post-9/11 intelligence apparatus has little multiplier effect on the larger national economy—flush times for spies do not translate into a dent in the unemployment rate; “selling fear” does not make for saleable commodities. And so, while healthy debate may rage regarding the public military budget, surely the nation could reallocate the billions of dollars being poured into “top secret” America toward rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. We could use a lot less Top Secret America and a lot more public works, less spies and more doctors, less drones and more road crews. This is not a call for a new isolationism but a renewed commitment to bolstering the health, education, and welfare of our neighbors. In short, America should cease its misguided and ultimately failed project of “nation building” in foreign lands and instead pursue what Norm Denzin has called “democratic reconstruction” at home. 26
By way of example, let us consider the appropriation of funds, personnel, and equipment for what Lisa Keranen calls the “biodefense bonanza.” Launched to help the nation prepare for an assumedly catastrophic attack by a terrorist group armed with biological weapons, the biodefense bonanza involves the interrelated work of doctors, scientists, police, soldiers, the media, intelligence agencies, early responders, politicians, academics, and others—a whole network of players charged with keeping the nation safe from the unthinkable. Since 9/11, Keranen observes, the U.S. government has spent “more than $50 billion” on such initiatives. However, in one report by the National Association of County and City Health Officials, Keranen finds the nation’s frontline health officials admitting that the frenzy surrounding the biodefense bonanza has “diverted significant resources away from such public health activities as prenatal care, STD prevention, and school immunization campaigns.” In short, Americans will be left to suffer from and sometimes die from easily preventable ailments while the post-9/11 biodefense bonanza creates a new wing of the military-industrial complex. It does not make one a Luddite to suggest that such choices represent the daily health of the nation being sacrificed to nightmare military scenarios that, as Keranen documents, have virtually no chance of occurring. In that same vein, Conley notes that since 9/11 and the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, which subsumed the old INS, “citizenship has been institutionally articulated as a matter of national security.” In short, Keranen shows us how health care, and Conley shows us how citizenship and immigration, have both been absorbed into the ever-expanding national security apparatus. Denzin’s call for a “democratic reconstruction” at home, like my call for a “New Deal,” thus implies the demilitarization of daily life. 27
The Political Unconscious and Realpolitick
Fredric Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious that our master narratives, the cultural fictions we use to create meaning in the world, are always driven in part by the unsayable. For Jameson, cultural productions always include “some mechanism of mystification or repression,” not because authors or speakers intentionally seek to obscure the facts but because they cannot access either their own motives or history’s deep trajectories. I have argued here—following Twain’s lead—that the political unconscious of America is pegged to deep narratives of exceptionalism, wherein the United States is the sole nation of greatness, God’s appointed redeemer, Goodness embodied, and hence a machine of righteous war-making. These impulses are so old, so deep, so taken for granted, that they underwrite all political thinking even while lurking unannounced—they hover in the background, organizing our political discourse, yet rarely leap to the fore. As worried by this process in the 1850s as I am today, Herman Melville tried to spoof the political unconscious by calling it “the metaphysics of Indian Hating.” No less an astute observer than D. H. Lawrence cackled that the political unconscious of the nation, our metaphysics of Witch and Indian—and, later, Communist and Terrorist—Hating, was so warped, so committed to violence, that the nation was literally mad: It is “always the same,” Lawrence argued, “the deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. . . [But] the American has got to destroy, it is his destiny.” If we hope to stop reproducing these same murderous processes, we will need nothing less than a psychoanalytic reckoning, a moment of self-recognition wherein the political unconscious is dragged into the foreground, named, and exposed to the light of analysis. 28
Working toward this moment of recognition and reckoning sounds difficult, yet the culture is full of moments of possibility. For one example of what this might look like, let us return again to the Cold War. By the fall of 1963, the Cold War was not going well for the United States: International actors throughout the third world found it hard to believe that America’s promises were sincere, while Soviet advances in science and technology and Mao’s assembling an unimaginably large army proved that America’s enemies would not simply roll over in the face of the Truman Doctrine’s moralizing grandeur. When President Kennedy took the lectern at the State Department Auditorium on November 14, 1963—just 8 days before his assassination on the 22nd—he seemed burdened with a heavy dose of caution. When pressed by reporters about why the United States was not taking a more aggressive stand throughout the Middle East in general, and against the United Arab Republic (UAR) in particular, Kennedy offered this suggestive answer:
These threats that the United States is going to cut off aid are a great temptation to Arabic countries to say “Cut it off.” They are nationalist, they are proud, they are in many cases radical. I don’t think threats from Capitol Hill bring the results which are frequently hoped. . . . I think it is a very dangerous, untidy world. I think we will have to live with it.
29
Perhaps feeling burned by the botched escapade at the Bay of Pigs or wisely recognizing the global complexities that Truman seemed to ignore; perhaps recalling the dangerous brinksmanship surrounding the Cuban missile crisis or remembering his own experiences with the kinds of war-time atrocities described above by Oppen and Jarrell; perhaps thinking about the (second) Berlin Wall crisis or bruised by the Russians’ duplicity surrounding nuclear weapons negotiations; perhaps pondering the slipping away of Vietnam or the complex demands of the Civil Rights Movement at home—for these and perhaps other reasons, President Kennedy’s press conference that day foreshadowed the end of U.S. globalization-as-messianic-mission. Here was the President, the most powerful man on the planet, foreswearing the Finger of God and Manifest Destiny in favor of some hard reckonings about a complex world and the limits of U.S. power. While President Kennedy did not survive long enough to put his common-sense realization into practice, it is time now to acknowledge that America’s role is neither to judge nor to save nor to destroy the world but simply to live with and in it—humbly, multilaterally, peacefully, not as the exceptional giant but as one nation among many.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
For their commentary on drafts, thanks to Norm Denzin, Robert Ivie, Lisa Keranen, and Donovan Conley; for research assistance, thanks to Nicole Palidwor and Kirsten Lindholm.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.