The GOP presidentials hopefuls criticize one sentence of President Obama's view of American exceptionalism. But the view that he articulates in his full 300-word statement is realistic. However, the GOP presidential hopefuls seem to want to return to the heady triumphalism regarding American exceptionalism that has long characterized movement conservatism.

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Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) December 17, 2010:   In my article "Reflections on Ian Morris' Book About the West and China" that was published at OpEdNews on December 13, 2010, I singled out President Obama's view of American exceptionalism for praise. I praised his view of American exceptionalism for his explicit wording "though imperfect" regarding our laws and our beliefs in free speech and equality. I suggested that the words "though imperfect" saved his view from the kind of triumphalism that Pericles expresses regarding Athenian laws and practices in his famous "Funeral Oration" (as reconstructed by Thucycides in his HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR).

As I indicated in my article, I had borrowed the quote of President Obama's view of American exceptionalism from John Dickerson's article "How He Ticks: Five of the Most Revealing Moments of the Obama Presidency" that was published online at SLATE MAGAZINE on December 10, 2010. President Obama had made his 300-word statement about American exceptionalism extemporaneously in a news conference in Strasbourg, France on April 4, 2009. Dickerson reports that the president's conservative critics criticized the first sentence of his extemporaneous remarks. However, as Dickerson notes, the substance of Obama's 300-word extemporaneous statement has not become widely known.

On December 13, 2010, Jonathan Zimmerman of New York University published an op-ed piece in the LOS ANGELES TIMES titled "Exceptionalism and the Left." He frames his essay by pointing out that "Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and other GOP presidential hopefuls have all declared Obama insufficiently attuned to American exceptionalism." Zimmerman accepts their criticism at face value and then proceeds to suggest different points that President Obama might use in making a statement about American exceptionalism. However, it appears to me that the conservatives' criticism of Obama that Zimmerman refers to is exactly the conservative criticism that Dickerson refers to. But Dickerson understands the conservatives' criticism to be based only on the first sentence in Obama's extemporaneous remarks, not on his full 300-word statement. By contrast, Zimmerman does not appear to be aware of Obama's 300-word statement about American exceptionalism. I myself was not aware of Obama's statement until I read Dickerson's article.

In light of the fact that so many GOP presidential hopefuls are making an issue out of this, I think that Obama's full 300-word statement deserves more media attention and discussion. Apart from the seemingly weak opening sentence, it contains much to be admired in my estimate, so I propose to quote it in its entirety below and then discuss certain points that Obama makes in it. However, I first want to discuss American exceptionalism during the Cold War, with special attention to anti-communist hysteria in the United States and in American foreign policy.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008), a key figure in the emergence of movement conservatism during the Cold War, helped popularize the slogan coined by the German-born American political scientist and philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985): "Don't immanentize the eschaton." The term "eschaton" refers to the end-time envisioned in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. In the apocalyptic tradition of thought, the end-time was envisioned as occurring when through divine intervention God would bring about justice of this earth. In short, God would intervene to bring about justice of this earth. But God is understood to be transcendent.

The term "immanent" is used as the contrast with the term "transcendent." So if mere mortal human beings envisioned bringing about justice on this earth without divine intervention, such a vision would involve immanentizing the end-time by making it sound as though mere human effort without divine intervention could produce justice on this earth.

Voegelin thought that communist ideology envisioned justice as occurring on earth without divine intervention. In this way, communist ideology immanentized the eschaton. With Buckley as a key leader in the emerging movement conservatism, anti-communism became the central tenet of movement conservatism, which is still with us to this day despite the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989. Moreover, all of the GOP presidential hopefuls mentioned by Zimmerman want to enlist the support of movement conservatism in their efforts to become the GOP candidate for president in 2012.

However, American ideology refers to liberty and justice for all. Thus the American goal of justice for all can be understood as immanentizing the eschaton, even though this is not what Voegelin and Buckley meant to call attention to. But American ideology of liberty and justice for all is an important tenet in American exceptionalism.

I, for one, am willing to credit ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought with an invaluable insight: Justice on earth will result only through divine intervention bringing about the end of the world as we know it. Unless and until this decisive divine intervention occurs, our human attempts to bring about justice on this earth will be limited and imperfect.

I, for one, am willing to say that justice is indeed a noble goal to aim for in our human striving. Nevertheless, we may have difficulty in defining and explaining exactly what all justice may mean. See, for example, John Rawls' attempts to define and explain justice as fairness. But by allowing that justice is a worthwhile goal to aim for, I am crediting both communist ideology and American ideology with positing a valuable vision of the future. Nevertheless, I have said that our human efforts to establish justice of earth will be limited and imperfect. Yet how many other Americans are willing to join me in crediting not only American ideology but also communist ideology with positing something of value? Voegelin and Buckley weren't ready to join me in allowing this. Does it threaten our sense of American exceptionalism to allow that communist ideology envisioned the goal of justice?

During the Cold War, Republican politicians and Democratic politicians seemed to be engaged in a contest to see who could sound more fervently anti-communist. For example, in the presidential election campaign in 1960, both Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon were anti-communists. More recently, in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan explicitly referred to the former Soviet Union as the "evil empire." His expression about "evil" echoed the apocalyptic thought-world of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, in which the forces of good were imagined as conquering the forces of evil to bring about justice on earth.

Still more recently, President George W. Bush echoed President Reagan when he referred to an "axis of evil" in the world today composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. I myself would have no problem with agreeing that the then-current regimes in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were up to no good. But I would resist using the term "evil" to describe them, so as to avoid employing the apocalyptic thought-world that the term "evil" has historically been rooted in.

By definition, the term "evil" means "not good," the opposite of good. In principle, it might be possible for somebody to use the term "evil" without deliberately intending to invoke the framework of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought.

But for all practical purposes, American presidents are probably going to be understood as deliberately invoking the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition of thought when they use the term "evil" to refer to another country or countries.

Next, I want to suggest that during the Cold War, American foreign policy and the attitudes of many Americans could be described as apocalyptic because many Americans understood communism and communists to be up to no good and therefore "evil." But was there any other way for Americans to understand communism and communists than to have considered them to be "evil," even though they may have been up to no good? Sure. Americans could have understood both communism and communists as misguided. But this would have taken a lot of the hot air out of anti-communist hysteria.

Anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War led the government of the United States to project a conceptual framework in which communism was envisioned as a worldwide threat to freedom and democracy. But even countries with authoritarian governments that were not characterized by freedom and democracy could be enlisted in the worldwide struggle against communism, provided that they were officially anti-communist. Of course in reality communism was not as monolithic as it was imagined to be, as the differences between the former Soviet Union and China showed.

As a result of the eagerness of many anti-communist Americans to fight against imagined monolithic communism, the long-standing American sense of American exceptionalism was expanded during the Cold War to include the anti-communist struggle against worldwide monolithic communism.

But when the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, this collapse of the "evil empire" that President Reagan had referred to did not necessarily lead to the collapse of the expanded sense of American exceptionalism that the anti-communist struggle had produced during the Cold War, especially not in movement conservatism.

More recently, under President George W. Bush, Islamist terrorists were substituted for communists as the new evil-doers to be feared. In this way, he revived the expanded sense of American exceptionalism from the Cold War as he declared a general war on terrorism and declared actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During the Cold War, anti-communist hysteria in the United States had led to wars in Korea and Vietnam in the effort to combat the spread of communism in those countries. In a similar way, anti-terrorist hysteria led President Bush to start wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as the United States used the expanded sense of American exceptionalism to lead the anti-communist wars in Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War, so too President Bush used the expanded sense of American exceptionalism to lead the anti-terrorist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it turns out that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, he was undoubtedly a brutal dictator in Iraq.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S VIEW OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Next, I want to turn to the question that Edward Luce of the FINANCIAL TIMES of London asked President Obama regarding American exceptionalism and his response. The exchange occurred in a news conference during the question-and-answer session following a presentation by President Obama in Strasbourg, France on April 4, 2009. My source for the following quotations from the exchange is the transcript posted by the White House.

Let's start with the question from Edward Luce: "Thank you, Mr. President. In the context of all the multilateral activity that's been going on this week, [at] the G20 [and] here at NATO, and your evident enthusiasm for multilateral frameworks, to work through multilateral frameworks, could I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy? And if so, would you be able to elaborate on it" (I've added the bracketed material here and substituted commas for the dashes used in the White House transcript because the dashes will not survive the translation program used at OpEdNews.com.)

The White House has posted President Obama's extemporaneous response as four separate paragraphs:

"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

"And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

"Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or [in] recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or [in recognizing] that other people may have good ideas, or [in recognizing] that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

"And so I see no contradiction between [on the one hand] believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and [on the other hand] recognizing that that leadership is incumbent [on], [and] depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone."

Not bad for extemporaneous remarks, eh? (I have added the material in brackets here.)

Here's the URL for the entire transcript posted by the White House: http:click here

Let me set forth two comments that I would like to make. (1) President Obama says, "And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world." Because the Christian right likes to claim to be Christian and claim that President Obama is a Muslim, despite his explicit claim to be a Christian, let me suggest that President Obama could quote the following passage from Christian scripture in support of his view of American exceptionalism in this sentence: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded" (Luke 12:48 NRSV).

(2) Next, President Obama says, "We have unmatched military capability." Even though I am not in principle opposed to reducing our military spending by ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and by making other cuts in the defense department budget, I have told students that the point of the Homeric epic the ILIAD is that if you are as wealthy as Troy was, you should have a big defense department budget in case you have to fight Achilles. Alexander the Great, whose role model was Achilles, conquered wealthy Athens, the home of the first great experiment in democracy in the Western world, along with a lot of other places as well.

As we might expect, President Obama's conservative critics have cherry-picked the first sentence alone for criticism, conveniently leaving aside the rest of his lengthy response. Nevertheless, their cherry-picking that one sentence shows that they take exception to it, as though it alone contained some kind of heresy. But what exactly is the supposed heresy in that one sentence?

A Brit had asked the question, so I assume that President Obama referred to the Brits and British exceptionalism as a way to acknowledge the questioner's heritage and to acknowledge the British empire. Has any group that started an empire ever done so without feeling a sense of exceptionalism?

President Obama's reference to the Greeks is in the present tense, so he may mean that Greeks today have a sense of exceptionalism. Perhaps the Greek sense of Greek exceptionalism today is based in part on the ancient Athenian empire at the time of Pericles. Or perhaps it is based in part on the empire subsequently established by Alexander the Great, which led to the widespread use of the Greek language in the ancient world.

Perhaps President Obama's first sentence is best understood as meaning that probably no country will long endure if its citizens do not share a sense of its exceptionalism. His answer was extemporaneous. As I have indicated above, Dickerson understands Obama's conservative critics to be criticizing him only for this first sentence, not for the rest of his 300-word statement.

As I have indicated, Zimmerman appears not to be aware of Obama's 300-word statement. As I have shown, Obama himself has no obvious problem with American exceptionalism. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he has not thus far responded directly to the line of argument advanced by the GOP presidential hopefuls named by Zimmerman.

However, the title of Zimmerman's essay ("Exceptionalism and the Left") clearly suggests that liberals apparently have a problem with American exceptionalism. But is this indeed the case?

Where do Rob Kall and other liberals today stand regarding President Obama's view of American exceptionalism? Do they join with his conservative critics in taking the opening sentence as the expression of some kind of heresy? And what do Rob Kall and other liberals today have to say regarding the rest of President Obama's lengthy response?

It strikes me that liberals today should be able to articulate and endorse a view of American exceptionalism that is free of the kind of triumphalism expressed by Pericles regarding Athenian exceptionalism, as President Obama has shown he can.

Moreover, liberals should be able to turn the tables on the GOP presidential hopefuls not only by calling attention to Obama's full 300-word statement about American exceptionalism, but also by making triumphalism the issue in discussions of American exceptionalism.

The movement conservatism that Buckley helped engender was predicated not on a realistic sense of American exceptionalism, such as President Obama's realistic sense of American exceptionalism, but on an exaggerated sense of triumphalism. The triumphalism of anti-communist conservatives was heady stuff. Movement conservatism today wants to continue to that kind of heady stuff.

By contrast, Zimmerman shows how a realistic sense of American exceptionalism has been used by the great warriors for social justice in American history. They used the idealistic claims of American ideology to critique American shortcomings.

However, at the present time, as Zimmerman says, the GOP presidential hopefuls are making American exceptionalism their battle cry. But I am suggesting that they are doing this because they want to renew the heady stuff of triumphalism.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview