American Exceptionalism

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM. The idea of American exceptionalism is an old one with many meanings. In its strictest form, it refers to the apparent departure of the United States from certain assumed historical norms or laws of development. For one reason or another, so the argument goes, the United States has failed to produce ever-sharper antagonisms between capital and labor (as measured, most commonly, by the rise of a viable socialist movement). Hence, it appears that America is an exceptional historical case, quite different from other capitalist nations. The search for reasons why this is so has taken scholars and pundits in numerous directions, looking for the flaws (or, depending on the writer, the strengths) that are unique to American politics, culture, and social relations. As a result of these searches, observers have often diluted the concept of American exceptionalism to mean something closer to American distinctiveness, concerned with all the ways the United States is different from other countries. And with that dilution has come, in the twenty-first century, a renewed politicization of the term as a shibboleth of conservative nationalism, although with some powerful dissents on the right, notably in the pronouncements of Donald J. Trump. In all, the history of American exceptionalism as a category or label is a case study of the malleability of political vocabulary, marked by startling ironies and paradoxes.

In some respects, claims about American exceptionalism date back to the earliest days of European settlement on these shores—at least as far back as John Winthrop’s famous remark to his fellow Puritans in 1630, that they would establish a “city upon a hill,” a clear break from the corrupt world they had left behind. Through the age of revolution, travelers, colonists, and home-grown philosophes explored what was special about the North American continent and its inhabitants—inquiries that culminated in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. By the nineteenth century, America had come to loom large in the imaginations of European thinkers as different as Hegel and Tocqueville as some sort of exceptional image of the future. Americans, for their part, proudly proclaimed theirs a unique political society, freed from the shackles of Old World superstition and tyranny. “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional,” Tocqueville wrote in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), “and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”

The coming of industrialism to the United States, the emergence of labor movements from the 1820s to the 1890s, the destruction of slavery, and the imposition of Jim Crow segregation forced observers to rethink some of these assumptions. Mainstream writers, and not just mainstream writers, foresaw the closing of the American frontier and the rapid growth of manufacturing as a sign that the United States was becoming more like industrializing Europe and Britain, but they also celebrated America’s supposedly exceptional lack of fixed social classes, its relatively democratic polity, and its opportunities for social mobility. Foreign commentators as different as Karl Marx, James Bryce, and Hilaire Belloc all at some point commented in one way or another about the exceptional character of American society, and in complimentary terms. (Reflecting, amid the American Civil War, on Abraham Lincoln’s career, Marx remarked on how, thanks to the political and social organization of the United States, “ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”) Prominent American radicals, however, including the emerging socialist Eugene V. Debs, measured new industrial realities against the legacy of the American Revolution, and found that the nation had departed in decisive ways from its highest ideals of equality and personal independence – a kind of betrayal an admirable American exceptionalism Late nineteenth-century European radicals, meanwhile, tended to respond ambiguously to American events: while none could deny the liveliness of American labor movements, they also tended to believe that American workers were far more attached to bourgeois political and social ideals than their European counterparts—and therefore proved an “exceptional” kind of working class.

In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the notion of American exceptionalism gathered enormous strength from writings all across the political spectrum. Conservative writers, sometimes mingling nostalgia with analysis, kindled the ideal of America as a providential nation, set apart from the rest of the world as a bastion of freedom and prosperity. Liberals preferred to focus on economic growth and cultural pluralism as the keys to understanding American distinctiveness. For a long time, however, discussion of exceptionalism revolved around issues first raised on the Left.

The German socialist Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) became a classic statement of the problem. Sombart’s answer to the question he posed—that American class-consciousness had been wrecked on “shoals of roast beef and apple pie”—reflected both the economism of the Second International and the German ascendancy within the international socialist movement. The émigré Selig Perlman, a product of the Russian social revolutionary movement, restated matters somewhat in A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928). Perlman stressed both the importance of political citizenship and the power of “pure-and-simple,” “bread-and-butter” unionism as major factors undermining American working-class radicalism and assuring American exceptionalism.

The exceptionalism question came to a head inside the Communist movement in the late 1920s, when the leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CP), Jay Lovestone, asserted that the strength of American capitalism created special conditions that precluded an American communist revolution. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sharply disagreed, and Lovestone was in time expelled from the CP, in part for upholding what Stalin called “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” Although the use was derogatory, it might astound later conservative champions of American exceptionalism to learn that the term itself was apparently coined by none other than Joseph Stalin.

The issue persisted in various dissident Communist and left-wing circles through the 1930s. Of special note were the writings of the socialist Leon Sampson, who argued that “Americanism” had become a kind of substitutive socialism for American workers. In a somewhat different vein, writers who has grouped, along with Lovestone, around the anti-Stalin Bukharinite opposition of the 1930s—including Bertram Wolfe and Lewis Corey—wrote explicitly of “American exceptionalism” while drawing on Bukharin’s general theory of exceptionalism. For these dissident radicals, America’s distinctive features, rightly understood, offered opportunities for revolutionary change. In a superficial, even cynical way, the Stalinist left seemed to adopt that insight, or at least its trappings, during its Popular Front phase in the late 1930s, with its slogan, “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism,” and then in revived Popular Front formulations during World War II.
After 1945, what had once been a debating point for left-wing intellectuals entered the mainstream of academic controversy. Young liberal historians and sociologists who had been influenced by the 1930s Left (notably Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Seymour Martin Lipset) refashioned the exceptionalism idea in the 1950s in their explanations for the apparent overriding consensus in American political life. The more celebratory strain in this scholarship in the writings of historians like Boorstin, went on to become one of the animating concepts behind academic neo-conservativism.

The New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, while arguing against the so-called consensus school, carried on with its own versions of the exceptionalism argument. While insisting that class divisions are central to American life, New Leftists also contended that one or another social or cultural factor (ethnicity, racism, party politics, mass culture) has effectively muffled working-class consciousness. Explanations for what various scholars called “the historical incorporation of the American working class” remained very much a part of New Left historical and sociological writing, whether couched in the Gramscian vocabulary of “hegemony,” in borrowings from the Frankfurt School, or in some other idiom. Then, beginning in the 1980s, and with considerable force thereafter, a new wave of writing heavily indebted to W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea that racial distinctions and the legacy of slavery afforded American white workers a “psychological wage” than reinforced white racism. By these lights, a culture and politics of “whiteness” has been the downfall of working-class class solidarity. Yet while “whiteness” studies have proliferated, a new emphasis on global and imperial history has also made the situation seem, at least in some ways, less peculiarly American.

Also in the wake of the New Left, the entire concept of American exceptionalism came under further scrutiny — and considerable attack – among historians of labor, many of them influenced by the writings of the British scholar E.P. Thompson as well as the American historian Herbert G. Gutman.. At the core of the exceptionalism problem, some scholars argued, was a fallacious assumption that the past and present ought to be judged against some preconceived notion of what ought to have happened. Continuing events in Europe and elsewhere, including the advent of mass immigration, had made the United States seem far less “exceptional” than ever before. The criteria for assessing normality—what the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills once called a “labor metaphysic,” which quickly turned into a socialist metaphysic—no longer appear as self-evident as they once did.

Several historians located a powerful, recurrent strain of American working-class consciousness, rooted in the very concepts of democratic equality and self-ownership that older historians misconstrued as “bourgeois.” Without denying the obvious differences between the United States and other industrial capitalist countries—the heritage of slavery, the impact of mass immigration, the changing structure of American politics—historians, literary critics, and social scientists began looking at class relations and social development without judging them against some predetermined model of supposedly normative results. Yet if the idea of American exceptionalism lost favor, these new writings nevertheless emphasized the peculiarly American forms of working-class culture and politics, and insisted that some powerful currents inside them could lead in highly conservative and even reactionary directions.

Regardless of these scholarly critiques, however, and in the long aftermath of the American debacle in Vietnam, the idea of American exceptionalism enjoyed an enormous resurgence in a new form on the political right. In the 1980s, melding regressive, anti-labor supply-side economics with a militant Cold War internationalism, pro-Ronald Reagan conservatives, who had been marginalized during the long New Deal era, forged a powerful national coalition that included a considerable portion of formerly Democratic white workers. For Reagan, as for his followers, the idea of American exceptionalism became an article of faith, emblematized in by Reagan’s misleading but emotionally powerful evocations of Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” Even after Reagan departed the presidency, followed soon after by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism, talk of American exceptionalism buoyed the Republican right both to energize military adventures abroad (notably after the Islamist terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001) and to stigmatize dissenting liberals and leftists as unpatriotic. A left-wing term that had referred to the character of class relations inside the United States became linked as never before to celebrations of the nation’s global power and prowess. One telling sign among thousands was the appearance of a book in 2015, entitled, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, co-authored by former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had done so much to push the country into the invasion of Iraq in 2003,

Meanwhile on the left, the substance as well as the symbolism of American exceptionalism, suspect since the Vietnam era, became equated by liberals as well as leftists with oppressive militant chauvinism. Even policymakers and commentators who could still envisage America standing as an exceptional beacon of freedom and justice asserted that the nation had long ago squandered any claims on that score. “We’re neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers,” the writer and soon-to-be diplomat Samantha Powers observed in 2009. “It’s going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism.”

The advent of Donald Trump in 2016 brought another turn of the screw, and with it came ironies galore. In a sharp break from Republican and conservative foreign policy since the onset of the Cold War, Trump propounded an isolationist “America First” foreign policy that hearkened back to Senator Robert Taft in the late 1940s and, even more, to the original America First movement led by Charles Lindbergh at the outbreak of World War II. Trump’s isolationist super-patriotism proclaimed the United States the greatest country on earth -- indeed, in world history -- while it also rejected the concept of American exceptionalism as it had developed under Reagan and his successors. Turning away from the Western alliances forged in the aftermath of World War II, Trump seemed more drawn to authoritarians around the world for whom alluding to surpassing moral purposes in government and world affairs was bogus.

In 2013, one of the authoritarians Trump most admired, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times criticizing a speech by then-President Barack Obama. To help justify American military and humanitarian intervention amid a severe crisis in Syria – a direct challenge to Putin -- Obama had referred to American exceptionalism. Putin pushed back hard, calling it “extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation,” Trump, quietly harboring his presidential ambitions, declared Putin’s Op-Ed “a masterpiece.” And so, as president, Trump would retrench American military power (notably in Syria) in ways advantageous to Putin and the Russians, while straining the foundations of the Western alliance, above all NATO. To Trump, America might be the world’s greatest nation, but it was not an exceptional one when it came to confronting geo-politics. Eighty years earlier, albeit in a very different context, Stalin had coined the term “American exceptionalism and renounced it. Now, inside the framework of foreign affairs, Putin and Trump renounced it as well.

How American leftists and liberals were to respond would not be clear for some time to come. A portion of the Left, holding to by now ingrained assumptions that assertions of American exceptionalism were just covers for American imperialism, actually embraced Trump’s policy, as a break with what one writer called “the neo-liberal/neo-conservative globalist project that Hillary Clinton and many Republicans support.” Other liberals and leftists would set about trying to repair the nation’s long-standing alliances and restore America’s influence. But how much they would try to build an alternative exceptionalist ideal, along the lines Obama had ventured, remained to be determined.

The only certain thing was that the idea of American exceptionalism had mutated profoundly since Jay Lovestone squared off against Joseph Stalin, let alone since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. With the retrocession of leftist politics around the globe, apart perhaps from the Scandinavian countries, it became unclear what social model or what laws of class development the United States took exception from. For the first time in its history, with its nation’s democratic institutions under terrible stress, the American Left would have to think of itself and debate its future, in a brave new world where no norms let alone historical laws seemed to exist anymore.

Cheney, Dick and Liz Cheney, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.

Foner, Eric. “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop Journal 17 (Spring 1984).

Laslett, John H., and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974.

Perlman, Selig. A Theory of the Labor Movement. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1928.

Sombart, Werner. Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906). White Plains, N.Y.: International Aptitudes and Science Press, 1976.

Wilentz, Sean. “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920,” with critiques by Nick Salvatore and Michael Hanagan and reply by Wilentz. International Labor and Working Class History 26–27 (1984–85).