American exceptionalism

American exceptionalism, idea that the United States of America is a unique and even morally superior country for historical, ideological, or religious reasons. Proponents of American exceptionalism generally pair the belief with the claim that the United States is obligated to play a special role in global politics.

Assertions of American exceptionalism are generally made on the basis of the country’s founding. Proponents of the concept argue that the United States was uniquely founded on republican ideals rather than centring on a historical community or ruling elite (though much has been written about the privileged backgrounds of the Founding Fathers, who included slaveholders). These principles for good governance are laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, both of which occasionally are described as divinely inspired. To follow these documents in the manner prescribed by the Founding Fathers is therefore posited by many believers in American exceptionalism as the key to national success. Moreover, that approach is held to be universally applicable, so that spreading the way of life theoretically underpinned by those documents beyond the borders of the United States is considered a social good. Because believers in American exceptionalism have skewed Republican in the 21st century, this way of life is usually said to include a reverence for the Judeo-Christian God, advocacy of a free market, and the prioritization of individual rights over the needs of the collective.

Although 19th-century French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville is widely cited as the first writer to have referred to the United States as “exceptional” and is thus considered by many to be the origin point of American exceptionalism as a term, his use of the phrase is largely incidental to the concept as it is now understood. Rather, American exceptionalism was coined by communist activists in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s. They argued that while Marxist-Leninist doctrine was generally correct in asserting that countries could not make the transition to communism without a period of violent class warfare, the United States was a unique exception because of its blurring of class boundaries. In the 1950s American exceptionalism evolved into an explanation for why the United States supposedly was not given to class conflict in either the past or present. According to “consensus” historians such as Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, and Daniel J. Boorstin, the United States lacked the history of feudalism and absolutism that had ingrained class loyalty in Europeans. Moreover, they argued that it benefited from geographic and social mobility, material abundance, a general acceptance of the virtues of liberal individualism, and a pluralist political tradition, as described in Robert A. Dahl’s influential A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956). This definition of American exceptionalism held until about the 2010s, when members of the Republican Party, such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, began to use it to mean something more akin patriotism, moral rectitude, and a general sense of American greatness.

Despite the phrase’s relative recency, the idea of Americans as a specially blessed people can be traced back to the Puritan colonists of 17th-century New England, who thought God had chosen them to lead the world by example. Puritan leader John Winthrop illustrated this idea in 1630 by likening the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay to a “City upon a Hill,” a metaphor still popular among proponents of American exceptionalism.

A sense of divine purpose has remained an important component of American identity for many Americans ever since. Often U.S. leaders have appealed to that belief to justify their decisions. In the 1840s, for example, Jacksonian Democrats (see Andrew Jackson) advocated for the annexation of the American West by speaking of the United States’ Manifest Destiny—a God-given mission to extend the American people’s way of life across the continent. The same reasoning would be used again in the 1890s to rationalize expansion outside North America and, in the 20th century, to oppose communist governments worldwide.

Critics of the notion of American exceptionalism argue that belief in the concept is unwarranted and seek to reveal the fallacy of the idea of the United States as a virtuous nation by citing examples of its wrongdoing. For example, they respond to the idea that the United States has always been concerned with human rights by raising the country’s history of slavery and the expulsion of Native Americans from their land. Believers in American exceptionalism usually counter such examples of American immorality by casting them as instances of the country falling short of its ideals. Deviation from a standard, they argue, does not invalidate the standard itself.

Skeptics also compare the concept of American exceptionalism to the now-discredited views of previous world powers’ citizens. Many subjects of the British Empire, it is noted, once thought that they carried “the white man’s burden” of civilizing other peoples. French and Portuguese colonists once believed themselves to be on a “civilizing mission.” More recently, the Soviet Union rationalized its own imperialism as a Marxist-Leninist mission of liberation. Proponents of American exceptionalism reject these parallels as being apples-to-oranges comparisons.