Damon Linker: Taking Exception to "American Exceptionalism"
[Damon Linker is a Senior Writing Fellow in the Center for Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He also blogs about religion, culture, and politics for The New Republic.]
Every now and then a piece of writing captures the mood of the moment and the essence of an ideology so completely that it warrants special attention. This is certainly the case with “An Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” an essay (and cover story) by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the March 8 issue of National Review. Lowry and Ponnuru’s thesis—that President Obama is an enemy of “American exceptionalism”—is hardly original. It is so widely held and so frequently asserted on the right, in fact, that it can almost be described as conservative conventional wisdom. Still, NR’s treatment of the subject stands out. Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments. It’s hard to imagine this key conservative claim receiving a more cogent and rhetorically effective defense. Which is precisely what makes the essay’s shortcomings so striking. While its authors clearly mean it to stand as a manifesto for a resurgent conservative moment, the essay far more resembles a lullaby—a comforting compilation of consoling pieties set to a soothingly familiar melody. The perfect soundtrack to a peaceful snooze....
Follow the bouncing ball: the fact that “a profit-seeking company” founded Jamestown and that Puritan merchants wrote “In the name of God and of profit” at the top of their ledgers; that, in a “telling coincidence,” Adam Smith’s “free-market classic” The Wealth of Nations was published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence; that Benjamin Franklin’s name “comes from the Middle English meaning freeman, someone who owns some property”; that Abraham Lincoln supposedly hated few things more than “economic stasis”—all of these and many other anecdotes are supposed to add up to an endorsement of “the American economic gospel” (read: libertarian economic gospel) about “wealth and its creation.” Meanwhile, other cherry-picked facts in later paragraphs serve to highlight the American fondness for democratic elections, the country’s incorrigible patriotism and religiosity, and its “missionary impulse” to “export our model of liberty” to the world, often at the point of a gun.
If Lowry and Ponnuru merely wished to trace the origins of several influential strands of economic and political thinking in American history—the strands that the modern conservative movement has woven into a politically potent ideological tapestry—the story they tell would be unobjectionable, if a little quirky in its emphases. But that is not their aim at all. What Lowry and Ponnuru want to accomplish is something far more pernicious—namely, to relegate contrary voices in our national narrative to the periphery of our history, and perhaps even to read them out of our history altogether.
It’s a very old ideological trick—one that conservatives have mastered over the past several decades. From Allan Bloom blaming the campus violence of the 1960s on Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede to Sarah Palin’s twangy tributes to the folksy wisdom of average Americans, it has been deployed in various idioms for various purposes over the years. But the picture it presents is always the same. On one side of an unbridgeable divide stand true Americans, devoted to God and country, liberty and virtue; on the other is an insidious assortment of liberals, leftists, radicals, secularists, and foreigners. Yes, foreigners. At its most effective, the narrative has always traced the origins of national corruption not to an aspect of American history or culture but rather to the influence of harmful foreign ideas....
Yes, America’s principles are admirable, and the vast majority of liberals admire them deeply. But it is most certainly not the case, as Lowry and Ponnuru piously write, that America’s creed of liberty—including the principle of equality of opportunity and respect—was “open to all” from the beginning. On the contrary, it was closed to many until quite recently. Indeed, it remains nearly closed to this day in the impoverished, blighted ghettos of West Philadelphia, just blocks from my office at the University of Pennsylvania, where thousands of pampered students live and study in a profoundly different world—one structured to provide them with all the knowledge and skills they’ll need to take full advantage of the countless unequal opportunities that our country places before them....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Every now and then a piece of writing captures the mood of the moment and the essence of an ideology so completely that it warrants special attention. This is certainly the case with “An Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” an essay (and cover story) by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the March 8 issue of National Review. Lowry and Ponnuru’s thesis—that President Obama is an enemy of “American exceptionalism”—is hardly original. It is so widely held and so frequently asserted on the right, in fact, that it can almost be described as conservative conventional wisdom. Still, NR’s treatment of the subject stands out. Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments. It’s hard to imagine this key conservative claim receiving a more cogent and rhetorically effective defense. Which is precisely what makes the essay’s shortcomings so striking. While its authors clearly mean it to stand as a manifesto for a resurgent conservative moment, the essay far more resembles a lullaby—a comforting compilation of consoling pieties set to a soothingly familiar melody. The perfect soundtrack to a peaceful snooze....
Follow the bouncing ball: the fact that “a profit-seeking company” founded Jamestown and that Puritan merchants wrote “In the name of God and of profit” at the top of their ledgers; that, in a “telling coincidence,” Adam Smith’s “free-market classic” The Wealth of Nations was published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence; that Benjamin Franklin’s name “comes from the Middle English meaning freeman, someone who owns some property”; that Abraham Lincoln supposedly hated few things more than “economic stasis”—all of these and many other anecdotes are supposed to add up to an endorsement of “the American economic gospel” (read: libertarian economic gospel) about “wealth and its creation.” Meanwhile, other cherry-picked facts in later paragraphs serve to highlight the American fondness for democratic elections, the country’s incorrigible patriotism and religiosity, and its “missionary impulse” to “export our model of liberty” to the world, often at the point of a gun.
If Lowry and Ponnuru merely wished to trace the origins of several influential strands of economic and political thinking in American history—the strands that the modern conservative movement has woven into a politically potent ideological tapestry—the story they tell would be unobjectionable, if a little quirky in its emphases. But that is not their aim at all. What Lowry and Ponnuru want to accomplish is something far more pernicious—namely, to relegate contrary voices in our national narrative to the periphery of our history, and perhaps even to read them out of our history altogether.
It’s a very old ideological trick—one that conservatives have mastered over the past several decades. From Allan Bloom blaming the campus violence of the 1960s on Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede to Sarah Palin’s twangy tributes to the folksy wisdom of average Americans, it has been deployed in various idioms for various purposes over the years. But the picture it presents is always the same. On one side of an unbridgeable divide stand true Americans, devoted to God and country, liberty and virtue; on the other is an insidious assortment of liberals, leftists, radicals, secularists, and foreigners. Yes, foreigners. At its most effective, the narrative has always traced the origins of national corruption not to an aspect of American history or culture but rather to the influence of harmful foreign ideas....
Yes, America’s principles are admirable, and the vast majority of liberals admire them deeply. But it is most certainly not the case, as Lowry and Ponnuru piously write, that America’s creed of liberty—including the principle of equality of opportunity and respect—was “open to all” from the beginning. On the contrary, it was closed to many until quite recently. Indeed, it remains nearly closed to this day in the impoverished, blighted ghettos of West Philadelphia, just blocks from my office at the University of Pennsylvania, where thousands of pampered students live and study in a profoundly different world—one structured to provide them with all the knowledge and skills they’ll need to take full advantage of the countless unequal opportunities that our country places before them....