Letter-92 to friends and family: Is American Exceptionalism Dead?

UPDATE: APRIL 2nd, 2017: Honor Restored
Three cheers for General Keith Alexander. While I remain sympathetic to Mr Snowden, I have been living with a cognitive dissonance for several years. General Alexander, then head of the N.S.A., apparently overstated or outright misrepresented the eventually elucidated facts about the Prism and other programs on which Mr Snowden rightfully blew the whistle.

Additionally, Glenn Greenwald documented assertions that General Alexander was a 'cowboy' who wanted to scoop up everybody's data everyday. While Mr Greenwald's arguments were persuasive, the persona and personal demeanor of General Alexander did not square with the all the nasty things being written about him.

In this testimony, General Alexander clears away that cognitive dissonance. He is an honorable man who probably over-reached in his effort to prevent terror attacks and who definitely fudged the truth at times in an effort to protect the program and his subordinates. Yet, he was humble enough to transcend his institutional hard-wiring to team-up with the head of the A.C.L.U., Geoffrey Stone, so they together could optimize liberty and security (i.e., the meta-data - akin to water meter readings - and the privacy).

The capacity to change and to stretch one's worldview at an advanced age and in a position of power is rare indeed. The good General always reminded me of my uncle and one of the relatives mightily influential for me, Thomas P. Gordon, and now I know why. Uncle Tucker and this General are each gentlemen blessed with the intelligence of a Renaissance Man; the honor of the natural aristocrat of President Jefferson; and, the affable humility of a President Ford. These things integrate into the very best of what this country can produce.

Truthfully, in retrospect, I over-reacted toward General Alexander. I still credit Edward Snowden for being a contemporary hero. After seeing the cruel and unusual punishment toward Bradley / Chelsea Manning (i.e., months in solitary confinement with the intent of the problem 'going' away), Mr Snowden did what he had to do to blow the whistle. On the other hand, General Alexander had a fearsome responsibility of heading mass murder off at the pass. Did he over-reach? Yes, he did. Would I have in his position? Yes, I likely would have. In the end, however, decency prevailed.
ORIGINAL LETTER
As I have served the country overseas for much of the past decade, far from heroically, I have had the unanticipated privilege of hearing views about the U.S., her policy and her power from those on the outside, looking in.  Over time, I have come to acquire a more remote perspective, not only of U.S. policies and actions, but also of the right-sized place of America in the world. 
Current policies look different from out-there than they do from in-here.  The ‘American exceptionalism’, though fiercely debated at home, does not seem so evident in México – even less so in Arabia or Afghanistan. Recent developments have shaken my complaisant faith in the basic decency of America; a decency of purpose never inherent to, but persistently chosen by, us.

As long as the end of history appeared to be assured with overwhelming military power and commercial might, expressed primarily in finance, such exceptionalism seemed evident.  Polite might made right.  History has this irksome habit of not ending; of passing by the powers of the day.  Inside me, as an outsider now moderately alienated from that complaisance, uneasiness not only grows but feels painfully appropriate.

That is to say: the American Century -- a period of American disruption and exceptionalism in the affairs of the world -- appears to be coming to an end after about one hundred twenty-five years.  That ending, if true, has a large impact on the idea of American exceptionalism; if we can’t bend others to our will, how then are we exceptional? 
In my ruminating over these thoughts, my sense of this exceptionalism, in its pristine state, is one not projected by commercial interests nor protected by power.  Were both the case, one could argue that such exceptionalism was just another ‘new and improved’ version the brutal ethics of might makes right.

The symptoms or precursors of the end of the American Century abound and yet no one resists the behavioral fall-out of policy; few people seem willing to push back on morally questionable policies aside from Manning, Assange and Snowden, perhaps because the courage of those three is politically and publicly pilloried away as the deviance of faggots, rapists and traitors. 
Before issuing into these precursors, let us remember that the American Century, as we see it overtly manifesting today, started around 1950, halfway into the global preeminence of American power and prosperity. These precursors include, as examples of a wider set:

1. fiscal bankruptcy evidenced by military spending out of proportion to the base of wealth to support it and national debt levels that will dry up the capital markets eventually;
2. fiscal decline with the quantitative easing program drowning both the monetary system and the capital markets, creating asset bubbles and wrecking savings, at least in the short-term;
3. unsustainable policies with, for example, universal health care laws exerting high expenses and higher uncertainty;
4. gradual displacement over time of the dollar by the renminbi and the euro, which will divert these excess dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve into a backwash-turned-tsunami onto the U.S. economy to provoke high, perhaps runaway, inflation rates in the longer-term;
5. the ‘F*ck the E.U.’ comment on the Ukraine by a senior-ranking U.S. diplomat, pointing toward an unsurprising U.S. uneasiness with the emergence of the European Union, perhaps the greatest guarantor of peace in our time, as an emerging rival to U.S. geopolitical influence;
6. arbitrary use of technology in service of expanding domestic police, commercial and domestic surveillance powers (e.g., incidental law enforcement information gathered by drones presaged by George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) to infringe upon the private dignity people’s inner lives;
7. arbitrary use of weaponized drones by civilians beyond any accountability (most notably, the Uniform Code of Military Justice) away from the battle field to assassinate enemies, even U.S. citizens (albeit not pleasant ones), secretively and outside of the rule of law;
8. an apparent tendency of thought-leaders hiding behind ideologies and simplistic world-views (e.g., creationism) that fly in the face of scientific evidence or time-tested practices or civil axioms;
9. a general coarsening of the culture where there is more publicity for Kim Kardassian’s weight problem than the Ukraine or even the Olympics (not bread and circuses but all butt, no Caucasus); as well as,
10. a sense of popular exhaustion now with apprehension of what may come.

While I am a Republican, this essay is meant to look at the current snap-shot of my country from an outside, albeit conservative and admittedly cantankerous, perspective.  Consequently, as an aside, I have taken off the table those hot-button topics more likely to de-rail intellectual debate than create the climate for it. 
There are brave Democrats (Senators Udall and Wyden) and Republicans (Senator Paul and Representative Sensenbrenner) pushing back on the erosion of our cherished republican principles in the face of over-classification, excess coercion and over-incarceration.  All of these distressing trends are enabled by a climate of fear and greed preying on that fear.

The American pie is no longer big enough or expanding quickly enough, if at all. No longer can the economic engine permit a growing middle class, indulge costly industrial age military structures and subsidize a predilection toward imperialism, if not overt colonialism.  The evidence for this unwelcome change is persuasive, at least to me.  Many of my countrymen now see America's best days as behind her; I disagree. 
In actuality, ruminating over a return to some contrived 'golden age' is corrosive to the national spirit for three reasons.

• It implies permanent decline, which will be a self-fulfilling prophecy if we refuse to adapt to the realities of things beyond our control that defy the linear beauty of engineering; an inhospitable age as fluid with opportunity as fraught with peril.
• The things we cherish but often take for granted – liberty, freedom of thought as well the desire to improve our lives and those of our loved ones – seem less and less attainable; thus people struggle to keep what they have at the expense of welcoming the future and helping others along.
• If some golden era has indeed passed, and America finds herself truly trapped in irrevocable decline, people are going to want to know why it has passed and who is responsible for that loss; concomitant with the blame-game, will be the continued politicization of everything, ranging from what we believe to how we should act on, and manifest, those beliefs.

While I am my characteristic snaggle-puss self, the next letter (perhaps few) will lay out an alternate way of looking at our situation to prescribe, in foreign policy, what Dr Lincoln Bloomfield forty years ago fittingly called the humane use of power.

In Mexico, I re-read Dr Bloomfield’s book, In Search of American Foreign Policy: the Humane Use of Power, one of the two poli-sci books that captured my interest in college.  (The other treasured tome was Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought by Alpheus T. Mason; published fifty years ago).

Dr Bloomfield wrote in a simpler time politically and, perhaps, geopolitically, during the fall of Viêt Nam and the Watergate crisis. Nevertheless, those days had their perils and anxieties, too, as many of us can recall.  Heroically, as an ‘establishment thinker’, the hawkish M.I.T. Cold War policy wonk pushed himself – and his readers – to think hard about America’s place in a changing world.

Dr Bloomfield laid out his thoughts on renovating mainstream thinking to keep the American exceptionalism going forward, by preserving the best of the evolving political theory documented by Dr Mason. America could make this change, Dr Bloomfield seemed to argue, not through the excess use of power but through the judicious application of those republican ideals that had made the United States exceptional in the first place. 
But where to start?  For me, it would be in the area of foreign and military policies since so much of national thinking and resources are bound up in these arenas of thought; since people want these resources directed to domestic growth; and, well, since I find that topic to be more interesting.