Exceptionalism in a Time of Stress (The Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention - 2007: American Exceptionalism‪)‬

The phrase "American exceptionalism" arouses strong feelings. For many Americans it encapsulates the best features of American life: political freedom, democracy, equality before the law, equality in social status, and equal economic opportunity. Not surprisingly, the phrase evokes patriotism and gratitude to ancestors who chose life in America over continuing to live in the "old country." Critics of the United States and of American society are equally willing to talk of American exceptionalism, but do so with less positive purpose. "Exceptionalism," to America's critics, summarizes aspects of the United States like its large numbers of citizens without health insurance, the limited extent and low benefit levels of the American welfare state, its use of the death penalty, and its high levels of income inequality. Critics assert that America is certainly exceptional in the ranks of advanced democracies, but scarcely in a positive sense. Thank goodness, such critics might contend, that our ancestors never left Norway or Sweden for the United States. It has been particularly poignant to discuss American exceptionalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As Pew Research Foundation polls indicate, public opinion has shifted quite heavily against the United States, even in countries like Great Britain that have historically looked on the United States very positively. (1) This shift in opinion owes much to the impact on opinion overseas of such things as the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture on terrorist suspects, and the misdeeds at Abu Ghraib, of which the infamous photographs were, sadly, but a limited aspect. Nor in the modern era is the negative view of exceptionalism confined to critics overseas. Some fifty years ago, Louis Hartz argued that the United States had been dominated by a consensus that privileged economic and political freedom.2 Illustrating that a free nation can never command uniform praise from its own citizens, contemporary American academics have argued that the American political tradition is characterized as much by hierarchies of race and gender as it is by equality and democracy. Racism, sexism, and intolerance are as American, they argue, as the First Amendment or contested elections. (3)