Since the crushing, truly humiliating defeat that it suffered
with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, neoconservatism, at
least temporarily, experienced a dramatic reversal of fortunes.
It isn’t, of course, that
neoconservatives have gone away; and it certainly isn’t the case that they have
lost power and influence in any substantive—as opposed to
symbolic—respect. Still, the sort of standard GOP/neocon agitprop that
prevailed during the George W. Bush days, and even into the Obama era, has been
less audible in the Age of Trump.
We should not, however, be
misled by this into thinking that some of the distinguishing ideas of
neoconservatism don’t continue to inform American domestic and, especially,
foreign policy. In fact, there is a real sense in which some of these ideas
inform the contemporary cultural consciousness.
Within
the ideological solar system that is the neoconservative view, there is one
idea specifically that is arguably the sun around which all of the others
revolve. This is the idea that America itself is an idea—or what is
otherwise known as the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” (AE).
AE
Considered
What
can it mean to say that America (or anything) is an idea or concept or
“proposition?” An idea is an intangible or incorporeal sort of
thing. Ideas, in other words, are without bodies, nonphysical. They
are without borders.
In principle, then, any given idea can be discovered and, hence, endorsed by
anyone, irrespectively of culture or history. One may become consciously aware
of an idea at a specific juncture and courtesy of culturally and
historically-specific circumstances; but the idea itself, considered as an
idea, needn’t owe anything to the contingencies of space and time.
An idea, inasmuch as it is
thought to transcend all civilizational differences, is universal.
That
the proponents of AE think of America the Idea in just this way is borne out by
their insistence that anyone can
become an American. We receive confirmation of this as well whenever the
members of Respectable Society, both “liberal” and “conservative,” talk about
immigration, whether legal or illegal: Although it is only ever recognizable
leftists who use the term “undocumented” to describe illegal immigrants, those
on the official right implicitly endorse the idea behind this term when they
too speak as if the onlymeaningful
difference between immigrants and American citizens is that the former haven’t
yet satisfied the formal or legal criteria for American citizenship.
To put it another way, as
long as a person affirms America as Idea, then regardless of where that person
resides, that person is an American.
When George W. Bush says that
“family values” don’t end at the Rio Grande, or Barack H. Obama tells us that
foreign immigrants and refugees differ from Americans only inasmuch as they
were born elsewhere, they are telling us that America is, ultimately,
borderless, for it is an Idea or Creed that, as such, can be embraced by anyone
anywhere. Borders are arbitrary lines on a map, symbolic and capricious
walls, and the requirements for official or legal citizenship are so many
bureaucratic hurdles.
America the Idea is,
essentially, the ideal of what neoconservatives and those further to their left
call “Liberal Democracy.” It is the idea of a Universal Regime of
Equality, a Democracy under which the “human rights” of all find
protection. The champions of AE maintain that the territorial expanse
that the world recognizes as the United States of America is Liberal Democracy
in the flesh.
To
put it another way, just as Plato believed that the particular, temporal
instances of imperfect justice, truth, beauty, and goodness that we find in our
world are but shadows or reflections of eternal, universal archetypes—Justice,
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—so too do the proponents of AE regard the
geographical and historical entity of America as but a shadowy imitation of
the real America,
the Idea of a Universal Nation.
Implications
& Criticisms of AE
Ahistorical
Fiction
First, AE is as ahistorical a
fiction as any of which Western political philosophy is littered. This being
said, we must resist the temptation to place it alongside such other
political-moral fictions as the State of Nature, the Classless Society, the
Original Position, and Plato’s perfect Republic, for unlike the merchants of
these imaginary devices, the peddlers of AE indicate not the slightest
awareness that their doctrine of choice is an ideal, a thought experiment, a
theoretical construct.
AE’s handlers are true
believers—or at least they sound as if they are.
Rationalization
for the Universal Empire
Second, AE is ahistorical,
but it is a fiction the political and ideological benefits of which seem to be
bottomless.
To
put it bluntly, if one is in search of an intellectual rationalization for
the UniversalEmpire, one
needn’t look any further than AE.
Being an abstraction, America
as Idea is utterly devoid of every vestige of historical contingency.
Emptied of all of those racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural
particularities, the individual and collective experiences of the generations
of human beings who made America what it is, AE is bloodless, lifeless, an
eternal, timeless category that is designed to accommodate a virtually infinite
number of pieces of machinery (human beings)—as long, of course, as those pieces
are either indistinguishable from one another or at least treated as if they
are such.
Thus, we find American
Exceptionalists enthusiastically supporting relentless and potentially
limitless immigration from practically anywhere and everywhere in the world,
but mostly from countries and cultures whose mores, histories, and traditions
are often not only distinct from, but antagonistic toward, those of Americans.
Yet
at one and the same moment, American Exceptionalists swear to us that America,
being the Liberal
Democracy par excellence, must
make war, or threats of war, so as to make the rest of the planet safe for
Liberal Democracy, for Equality, for Human Rights.
So, since Americans are
constantly in danger of being destroyed by non-Americans who despise “our
values” (Liberal Democracy), we must make sure that the threat of American
force is omnipresent. However, in the meantime, we need to continue to
allow into the United States millions of non-Americans, often from these very
same lands that American Exceptionalists assure us pose an existential threat
to it.
AE squares this circle.
Learned
scholars, like my friend and esteemed scholar, Paul Gottfried, have long argued
that contemporary America (along with other Western societies) are presided
over by regimes that are best characterized as “administrative/managerial”
States. This characterization is true as far as it goes. However,
in light of the centrality with which AE figures in our political universe, it
is most apt, I believe, to see the first role of the American government as
that of Educator.
More
specifically, it has assumed the persona of a Trainer.
As
the philosopher Michael Oakeshott was quick to note, between a genuine
education and a training there is all of the difference. An educator
seeks to teach his students how to
think—regardless of what it is they choose
for themselves to think about. A trainer, a seminar
instructor, in dramatic contrast, is essentially concerned with teaching his
students what to
think. And because he wants to make it stick, because training requires
far less time than an education, the content of the training must consist
of propositions, statements
that are explicit and
that, therefore, can be seared into memory.
The doctrine of AE, the
doctrine that America is an Idea, a Proposition of Equality or Human Rights
that anyone can affirm, delivers in spades:
Those foreigners who want to
destroy us, who “hate us for our freedoms,” differ from those foreigners who
continue to pour into our country insofar as the latter have endorsed AE while
the former have repudiated it. Immigrants, even illegal immigrants, are
enlightened and, thus, good Americans. Those non-Americans who detest us
haven’t yet been instructed in the Truth. Like Socrates, the supporters
of AE think that evil (or evil as they understand it) must be a function of
ignorance.
According to the logic of AE,
America is the Great Teacher. Actually, given that it is only
content that can be learned by rote that she is interested in imparting to her
students, America here is the Great Correspondence School: After she has
scrubbed the minds of her subjects clean, making of them blank slates, America
seeks to drill a small handful of propositions into the minds of the
Uninitiated.
Against
Patriotism
Third, the champions of AE
have been remarkably successful in convincing Americans, particularly self-described
“conservatives,” that the affirmation of AE is nothing more or less than the
expression of patriotism. Yet not only is a commitment to the ideology of
AE and a commitment to America two different sorts of commitments; they are
mutually incompatible.
Alasdair
MacIntyre, a Catholic philosopher of the Aristotelian-Thomist persuasion and a
proponent of patriotism makes the point. He observes that insofar as the
patriot has “a peculiar regard…for the particular characteristics and merits
and achievements of” his nation because they are his nation,
“the particularity” of the patriot’s relationship to his country is “essential
and ineliminable.”
The patriot’s morality is “a
morality of particularist ties and solidarities,” of “a class of loyalty-exhibiting
virtues” like “marital fidelity, the love of one’s own family and kin,
friendship, and loyalty to such institutions as schools and cricket or baseball
clubs.” The morality of patriotism demands of the patriot “a peculiar devotion”
to his country. It demands that he “regard such contingent social facts
as where I was born and what government ruled over that place at that time, who
my parents were, who my great-great-grandparents were, and so on, as deciding
for me the question of what virtuous action is [.]”
AE, in glaring
contradistinction, is a species of what MacIntyre calls “liberal morality,” an
outlook that demands of moral agents that they abstract “from all social
particularity and partiality” in rendering “impersonal” judgments. Yet
“liberal morality” is not only “systematically incompatible” with viewing
patriotism as a virtue, it actually “requires that patriotism—at least in any
substantial version—be treated as a vice.”
AE is
a species of “liberal morality:” America the Idea has no history, no particular
culture, religion, ethnicity, or nationality in which to ground it. AE,
comprised as it is of abstract propositions, is a universal creed.
Affirmation of its principles requires an attitude of, not partiality,
but impartiality.
As
eminent neoconservative Allan Bloom expressly acknowledged, given the neocon’s
vision of America as Idea, “patriotism” must be
reconfigured accordingly. Whereas traditional societies instilled in its
members “an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism,” education in
the United States has been geared toward inspiring in its citizens a
“reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty [.]” Yet this loyalty
is not to the country as such, but to its “form of government and its rational
principles [.]”
From this moral perspective,
“Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim
when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and
make them truly brothers.”
Notice,
from this vantage point, it is abstract principles and “the form” of
government that exists in America that become proper objects of the patriot’s
devotion. This form of government is the “Enlightenment” ideal of…“liberal
democracy.” “There is practically no contemporary regime that is not
somehow a result of Enlightenment, and the best of modern regimes—liberal
democracy—is entirely its product.”
Liberal
democracy is “the regime of equality and liberty, of the rights of man,” and
“the regime of reason,” and America is its epitome in that it is the first
country in all of human history to have been founded upon “rational principles.”
Irving Kristol, “the
godfather” of neoconservatism, identifies “the equality of natural rights”
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as “the principles of” America’s
“establishment,” the principles of “the universal creed” upon which the nation
is “based.” The United States, then, is “a creedal nation” with a “‘civilizing
mission’” to promote “American values” throughout the world, to see to it “that
other governments respect our conception of individual rights as the foundation
of a just regime and a good society.”
Kristol is unambiguous in his
profession of the American faith: the United States, given its status as a
“great power” and its “ideological” nature, does indeed have a responsibility
“in those places and at those times where conditions permit” it “to flourish”
to “‘make the world safe for democracy.”
However, from the standpoint
of “liberal morality,” patriotism has been decried as a vice.
Take, for example, David
McCabe, a contemporary philosopher and champion of “liberal morality.”
McCabe unabashedly declares that “liberal morality” is “fundamentally at odds”
with patriotism, for the latter “may help tempt people away from the appropriate
claims of equal moral treatment and towards something resembling group egoism.”
Paul
Gomberg is another philosopher and proponent of “liberal morality.” He is
even more to the point in remarking that “on the most plausible assumptions
about our world, patriotism is no better than racism.” After all, Gomberg explains, “moral
universalism implies that actions are to be governed by principles that give
equal consideration to all people who might be affected by an action.” But
patriotism is “a preference for one’s fellow nationals or for one’s own
traditions and institutions over those of others,” and this in turn sounds
dangerously like “ethnic and national chauvinism.”
The American patriot,
whatever else he may be, most definitely cannot be an American Exceptionalist.
Against
Christianity
Finally, as we have seen, AE
is every bit as much an expression of dogma as is the Nicene Creed. This
consideration alone should suffice to deter the traditionally religious from
embracing it. Traditional Christians especially should scorn it.
AE is, in a very real sense,
blasphemous. It is unthinkable that the doctrine of AE could have emerged
in any cultural context other than that in which it in fact did emerge, the
context of a civilization that was once known as Christendom and that, even if
largely unbeknownst to itself, continues to depend upon its Christian
inheritance for much of its self-understanding.
AE presupposes the framework
of the Incarnation. This framework has its roots in Judaism, but it
assumed center stage with the advent of Christianity. The Jews maintained
that God became embodied or “incarnate” in the Temple.
Christians, though, believe
that God did indeed become incarnate in the Temple, yet they think that this
Temple, a Temple not made by human hands, is the Person of Christ.
God became a human person in
Jesus of Nazareth. This is the uniquely Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation.
American
Exceptionalists preserve this Christian doctrine—but without the Christos.
They divest the Incarnation of the God-Man while substituting for the
latter the country of America, which is now the incarnation of the ideal of
Liberal Democracy.
Or, to put it another way,
America-as-Idea (Liberal Democracy) assumes flesh or becomes embodied, or most
fully embodied, in the admittedly imperfect and finite concrete, historical
country that the world knows as America.
Being pseudo-Christianity,
this drivel must be rejected by all Christians—and, hopefully, by everyone else
as well.
Conclusion
As I
showed here, it is exactly because it
is an ahistorical fantasy that the doctrine of American Exceptionalism serves
as the perfect justification for the Universal Empire that its peddlers want
for the United States to be. In addition, its packaging easily lulls the
unsuspecting into thinking that it is compatible with America’s traditional
Christian faith and demanded by love for America.
In reality, though, AE is at
odds with true patriotism and a perversion of Christian orthodoxy.
Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral
degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is
ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several
colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
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