July 1, 2014
On the basis of a Fox-news poll last week, I belong somewhere on
the far left (at least by current neoconservative standards). In what Fox
describes as a “stunner” and blames entirely on you-know-whom in the White
House, only 44% of Americans polled said that “they are proud to be Americans.”
Even more shockingly, only 28% of the respondents stated they consider “the US
to be the greatest nation on earth,” and no more than three in ten are willing
to recognize “American exceptionalism.” In recent conversations with GOP loyalists,
I learned that these shockingly low figures reflect the attitude of a president
who dared to say in an interview in Strasbourg in 2009: “I believe in American
exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believed in British
exceptionalism and the Greeks believed in Greek exceptionalism.” What’s this
country coming to if we all can’t agree on certain first things and above all
that the US, with its vast government bureaucracy, centralized media and
sprawling cultural industry, is the greatest thing in the solar system?
On Wednesday night I watched the
All-stars on the Fox- evening news affirm with the solemnity of true believers
that America is the greatest nation that has ever existed anywhere at any time.
We are exceptional in a way that no collection of bipeds has ever before been.
This is not only a new litmus test of “conservatism” but a belief that someone
may have thought up in order to unify Fox-news groupies after the awful
non-event in Mississippi on Tuesday night. Whoops, perhaps I shouldn’t have
alluded to what was done to Chris McDaniel by Senator Thad Cochran and the
Republican establishment in the Mississippi Republican primary! I mean the
contest in which the party regulars got black Democrats to cross party lines to
vote for Cochran, who promised more food stamps and close cooperation with
President Obama. The GOP establishment ran ads aimed at blacks accusing
Cochran’s small-government opponent of being a racist. This non-event, which
hardly registered with the Murdoch press, is now being investigated for voter
fraud, because it seems that some of the black Democrats who voted for Cochran
against the “racist” McDaniel had voted in the earlier Democratic primary. Even
with the open primary system that exists in Mississippi, one is not allowed to vote a second time.
But I’m glad that “conservatives” could
put this behind them in order to focus on the declining belief in American
exceptionalism. A Republican friend asked me why I couldn’t agree with the
Fox-news’ credo, given that Kaiser Wilhelm uttered something similar about
Germany at the height of World War One. Although I think the last German
emperor has received an excessively bad press (and Churchill an extravagantly
good one), I’ve never regarded Wilhelm as a tactful statesman. There is also a
difference between the hyperbole that a war leader, surrounded by enemies, may
engage in and a vainglorious assertion that is turned into the benchmark of
American patriotism. How is it that I’ve never heard war veterans say anything
even remotely as silly as what I’ve now been urged to profess? My late
father-in-law was a paratrooper during D-Day and I doubt he ever said anything
like what came from the mouths of the Fox-news Allstars on Wednesday evening.
Yes I’m sure Senator McCain has said such things while trying to get us to bomb
some Middle Eastern country. But then I don’t know McCain personally and I have
no desire to meet him.
Allow me to explain why I couldn’t pass
the Fox-news litmus test, even if I tried. As a child in the 1950s the only
people I recall blowing air about American exceptionalism were insecure
immigrants who wanted to be accepted as Americans. When I and my friends heard
these individuals speak in broken English about this country being the greatest
ever, we thought they were just trying to fit in. Never would I have expected
to hear the families of the older settlers going on about America as the best
nation ever. Later I heard prominent figures of the right praise certain
aspects of the original American political design. But I couldn’t possibly
conceive of any of them, whether George Kennan, Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard,
Robert Nisbet or Robert Taft, making the same noises as the ones I heard on
Fox-news. Indeed these thoughtful figures were deeply troubled by the direction
in which they saw the US moving, and they warned repeatedly about the loss of
our freedoms and our once sound constitutional government.
But there is one group that is
delighted with all the fatuous boasting in question. It is the neoconservative
custodians of the GOP and the Republican media, who are both insecure in their
identities and hell-bent on pushing us into new crusades for our supposedly
exceptional values. Please check the relevant Wikipedia entry, which properly
labels the doctrine in question as a neoconservative invention. GOP propaganda-junkies
have absorbed quintessentially neoconservative bombast about why we are better
than the rest of the human race. Needless to say, that special grace is
supposed to bring with it the duty to make others like us, that is, to make
them the way we are right now, as enlightened progressives. After all Americans
have undergone progressive changes that the neoconservatives delight in and
we’re now being asked to engage in new military conversionary missions on behalf
of what neocons believe makes us exceptionally exceptional. Let’s also not
forget too that we’re a propositional nation that is driven by the foundational
belief in universal human equality. That presumably makes us different from and
better than traditional nations like the benighted Poles or unredeemed
Estonians. We’re also (not least of all) the best nation ever because the
neocons form a major element in our ruling class. If I were a neocon exercising
their power, I’d be tempted to sing their tune.
Oh yes, lest I forget, I applaud
President Obama for making an accurate historical statement about how empires
at the zenith of their power view themselves. His observation on this topic is
more reflective and more genuinely conservative than what I’ve heard on Fox.
But I must express alarm that as much as 28% of respondents accept the
identifiably neocon drivel about America in its present form being the best
thing ever. I hope this figure isn’t as high as it seems and that some of the
respondents were just trying to please the pollsters. I’m trying to repress the
thought that millions of Americans actually believe what they say they do.
Paul Gottfried [send him mail]
is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and
author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right.
His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends
and Teachers.
Copyright © 2014 by LewRockwell.com.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full
credit and a live link are given.
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