The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.
.. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.
.. We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
.. My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the
Donald Trump and the Death of American Exceptionalism
Goldwater is heralded as the father of modern conservatism, but he could occupy that niche only because successive generations of his heirs refined and streamlined his message, buffing away the elements that the public saw as extremist. The modern Republican Party staked its claim on conservatism, not on Goldwaterism.
.. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings.
.. Implicit within dog-whistling is enough respect for democratic norms and those outside one’s base to speak to that base in terms that the mass populace can’t readily decipher.
.. Trump is doing the opposite of this. He is an exhorter in a midsummer tent revival: direct, literal, and speaking at a decibel that makes it impossible to misunderstand his intentions. The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history.
.. Trump is doing the opposite of this. He is an exhorter in a midsummer tent revival: direct, literal, and speaking at a decibel that makes it impossible to misunderstand his intentions. The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history.
.. The old presumptions hold that some element of national humiliation and decline predisposes nations toward fascism, or at least the appeals of fascistic movements. But in the U.S. this movement sprang up on the contrails of the first black Presidency—a moment that was, perhaps naïvely at the time, thought to be one of national affirmation and triumph. The unsavory implication here, of course, is that, for the cornerstone elements of Trumpism, that triumph was a national humiliation, that the image of an African-American receiving the deference and regard that the Presidency entails invalidated these Americans’ understanding of what the U.S. is, or at least what it is supposed to be.
.. An exceptional nation would have better reflexes than this, would recognize the communicable nature of fear more quickly, would rally its immune defense more efficiently than the United States has in the past sixteen months.
.. The problem of Trump is not simply that his opinions far exceed his knowledge; it’s that what he does know is so hostile to democracy, not only in the Republican Party or the United States but in the world. Whatever happens on November 8th, we are at the outset of a much longer reckoning.
The Un-American Essentialism of Donald Trump
The Republican candidate’s attacks on a federal judge directly undermine the principle on which America was founded.
.. what is deeply un-American about it, is its essentialism. Trump is saying that because of who you are, in an ethnic or hereditary sense, he will make judgments about what you think and what role in society you can play. The related assumption, as Garrett Epps explains to irrebuttable effect, is that people’s public roles cannot separated from their ethnic or religious identities. A “Mexican” judge will think and act as a Mexican, not as a judge.
There is no more un-American concept.
Sanders, Trump, and the War Over American Exceptionalism
Trump and Sanders campaigns both represent insurgencies against party elites, they represent insurgencies aimed at taking America in radically different directions. One way of understanding those different directions is through American exceptionalism. Sanders voters want to make America more like the rest of the world. Trump voters want to keep America a nation apart.
.. American exceptionalism has meant different things at different historical periods. But today, it generally denotes Americans’ peculiar faith in God, flag, and free market—a religiosity, a nationalism, and a rejection of socialism and class-consciousness that distinguishes the United States from other advanced democracies. The Sanders campaign represents an assault on all three.
.. A 2011 Pew Research Surveyfound that while Americans 65 and older favored capitalism over socialism by 39 points, Americans under 30 favored socialism.
.. Chroniclers of American exceptionalism have long argued that the reason Americans eschew socialism is because they don’t see themselves as members of a fixed class. Instead, they see their economic position as fluid.
.. Young Americans, the population to whom Sanders appeals most, don’t believe that. Polls show that they are far more likely than their elders to believe that the rich got that way because they “know the right people or were born into wealthy families” than because “of their own hard work, ambition and education.” Older Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as “haves.” A majority of younger Americans, by contrast, call themselves “have nots.”
.. Sanders is succeeding as a secular candidate because the young are making America—and especially the Democratic Party—more like Europe.
.. “The U.S.,” he declared upon announcing his presidential campaign, “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”
.. Trump’s supporters like the fact that he’s rich, blunt, and hasn’t spent his life in politics. But his pledges to keep the rest of the world at bay are core to his appeal.
.. While grassroots Democrats and Republicans remain divided over the size of government, increasingly, what divides them even more is American exceptionalism. In ways that would have been unthinkable in the mid-20th century, the boundaries between American and non-American identity are breaking down. Powered by America’s secular, class-conscious, transnational young people, Democrats are embracing an Americanism that is less distinct than ever before from the rest of the world.