Letter 96: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part lV (mercifully, the last)

“….[President] Lincoln incarnated the essence of American democracy: the harmonious blending of the mystical and the pragmatic within the individual soul…The harmony of these seemingly opposed realities may now be identified as the fundamental meaning of what an American is – as a human ideal…the story of America can be deepened and renewed…."

--Jacob Needleman, (The American Soul; 2002)

"....the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”  

--President Thomas Jefferson, 1789

PREVIOUS ESSAYS in this series on the ¿DEATH? of AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

• Symptoms
• Flaws
• Diagnosis 

George Harrison Disclaimer (see comment below). As I have pondered this notion of an American exceptionalism that might one time have existed but has become attenuated and needs to be right-focussed going-forward, I decided that I should re-read The American Soul by San Fran philosophy professor, Dr Jacob Needleman, because he had written that one of the unique aspects of the United States had been its founding based on an idea, not on a people.

On to today. Well, I am busted.  In re-reading this 356-page book during the past week, I found that much of what I had devised as an American exceptionalism was detail-for-detail inspired by Dr Needleman.  No, I had not plagiarized. In truth, I had read The American Soul in 2004 before my first tour to Iraq and then forgotten almost all of the details in the ensuing chaotic decade. 

So, as I chewed the philosophical cud, my notion of American exceptionalism veered away from power. Nevertheless, my eventual thesis turned out to be quite close to, if not derivative from, Dr Needleman’s masterful prose.  The American Soul reflects the same soul-searching as that of yours truly. To say the least, if you want to understand American exceptionalism, read the book!

http://www.amazon.com/The-American-Soul-Rediscovering-Founders/dp/1585422266 

Sir Ned’s 'tweener' doctrine.  We have seen that American exceptionalism is not the age-old doctrine – forever seductive in its Kiplingesque rhetoric of the day – that ‘might makes right’. This notion sounds essentially Nietzchean in its philosophy, though it utterly lacks the back-breaking burden of personal responsibility that the mad genius himself had always understood his thinking to impose. 

(That Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister and churlish brother-in-law as well as, later, the Nazis conveniently disregarded this second dimension of his philosophy of ethics is not his fault and serves as a tell-tale warning for our day.)

By extension, the idea here is that temporal supremacy in payloads and profits has derived from, or conferred upon Americans, an innate superiority. That is to assert: such supremacy is both source and reflection. What is clear, as this thinking goes, is that American military and monetary dominance is intrinsically co-relative with American exceptionalism.  Call it Manifest Destiny ending history.  

This argument has -- and is -- a tragic flaw.  Such thinking implies that we Americans – or at least those of us in the echelons of power – are the übermenchen of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, later fleshed out in Twilight of the Idols without the superior conscience rightfully to be expected of such 'natural' leaders as fully realized individuals. That means we define the new world order through our new world values that we also define. 

Of course, this “trans-valuation of values” is nothing more than a consequence of the rhetoric of self-will and self-idealization into Lord Acton’s observation that corrupted power corrupts absolutely. In the case of the United States, this contemporary trans-valuation of values -- under the power-based sense of exceptionalism -- leaves American leadership making up the rules as it goes along and deluding itself that such fluid doctrines are automatically justified by, and integral to, the American Century.

That intellectual legerdemain skates around the dark reality that expediency with power and adherence to natural law only work together in rare and momentary coincidence.  On the other hand, certain people afflicted with an equally delusional guilt for the many past wrongs, committed by our forebears (i.e., slavery, Japanese detention, genocide of Native Americans, etc.), believe that Americans can do no right out of a presumed malevolence genetically encoded or, almost as bad, out of a certain unrefined shortage of subtlety (i.e., savagery). 

Using the phrase quoted by Dr Needleman, I would say to these liberals, “You have no idea of what youhave here [in America]….”  So one side believes in a perversion of the golden rule into ‘he who has the gold makes the rules’, while the other view seems to apologize for America’s sins without progressing beyond its mea culpa for all of American history.  Both sides are off-the-mark in visibly divergent directions. 

Defining new values in a vacuum of ‘living and breathing democracy’ (as Baron Montesquieu wisely counselled in The Spirit of the Law), creates a tyranny of power. As Dr Needleman observes, if that be true, the Republic will go the way of Ozymandias. Meanwhile, wallowing in guilt at the expense of an optimism in the virtue of meaningful employment ignores President Jefferson's wise counsel expressed above.

The third President, the greatest of our philosopher-kings-as-executive-temps (the others being Presidents Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Obama), believed that the world belonged in trust to the living.  By overlooking this Jeffersonian advice, the never-forgetters fear complacency so much that they often never get around to providing the much-needed impetus toward making amends for the past; that is, changing the behavior or thinking patterns that led to a finite number of ugly excesses in our common heritage.

Finally, American exceptionalism defined.  By adding back the overlooked and wise humility of Baron Montesquieu to the thinking of aggressive exceptionalists as well as by inserting Jefferson’s dictum into supplications to those worshipping the bitch-goddess of ungainly guilt, we come to a somewhat colorless notion of American exceptionalism that will, hopefully, remain adaptive and durable, long after the ‘American Century’ has ended.

That quiet exceptionalism is best rendered as a simple statement that casts down to us, as citizens, a formidable gauntlet of republican governance at each decision point during the daily life of the country: “We can do better.  God-willing, we shall do better…”  The ‘we’ picking up this gauntlet (i.e., taking up this challenge of organic improvement) is not a particular set of genes or religious beliefs intrinsic to a particular people but the constantly changing – if not always properly engaged – citizenry of our most mongrel and blessèd of nations.

'God' is also malleable for the good to mean a deity; higher ideals and ethics they spawn (e.g., humanism); and / or, the undeniably great aspects of our common history. Together, we can emulate President Kennedy by being idealists without illusions. Thus can our exceptionalism be one of ‘taking exception’ to the conventional wisdom of the day.  This may entail standing up to aggression by pursuing potentially provocative, if not militarily kinetic, countermeasures.  It may manifest in opening immigration to people being consumed by genocide. 

In actuality, it may be any of a thousand different things clustered together by heeding a higher calling, and honestly so (i.e., under the scrutiny of daily dissent and moral debate). Man truly has part of the angel as well as the brute within him, as said another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal.  In this immediate time, come those words of President Kennedy yet again, “Never negotiate out of fear but never fear to negotiate.”

Letter #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” – Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées (1669)

Letter #95 to Friends and Familiares #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III: What American Exceptionalism is Not

The first two essays in this series have delved into the external symptoms and inward flaws that indicate the approaching end of America's exceptionalism, at least in terms of power. In my next essay, I commit to spell out what I believe American exceptionalism is supposed to be, if indeed it exists at all.  My thinking on this apparently arrogant subject has a lot more to do with principles than power. In that sense, those in our time who have espoused this concept have come from diverse backgrounds and include people as far apart as the Reverend Martin Luther King and President Gerald Ford.

To find the thread that binds together these men, and many women as well, I would like to start out by clarifying the popular notion behind the rhetorical device of this American exceptionalism. While this notion, and variants of it, has its adherents, my sense is that the leading idea of this exceptionalism is a misconception that America’s might makes right her actions or that American leadership is an exceptionally malignant force in the world because of this 'hyper-power' and has been for a while.

Neither imperialism nor its dialectic of “leading from behind” is a source of American exceptionalism.  Each represents a reaction to the rise of American commercial power and military capacity. While American imperialism began to appear from the early nineteenth century onward, it has only been the last fifty years during which the illusion of coercion has intoxicated too many leaders into an amoral realpolitik or, worse, into a tendency to project military force too quickly at the expense of the weak.

One view produces bloodless calculation, as seen in the stark indifference to the unceasing slaughterin Syria. The other view has produced the string of phony wars in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Serbia and Libya as well as pushed for invasions of bloody consequence in Viêt Nam and, perhaps, in Iraq. While coincident with the apotheosis of American commercial power, that economic leadership preceded this hubris of power by almost a century. Things started changing when the British, exhausted and insolvent after two world wars, handed their empire and policing role to their ‘American cousins’.

Unfortunately, the counterpoint to this inflation of power – the notion of leading from behind – is an over-reaction to this hubris and often degenerates  into an excuse for indifferent diffidence that compromises what American exceptionalism ought properly to be.  In a sense, this new paradigm of leading from behind parallels the British shift away from empire seventy years ago.  In the case of the United States and her accession to empire, the world saw two large empires squaring off for almost five decades in another world war of ideas. 

Both the United States and Soviet Union divvied up the policing powers according to immediate interests at play.  Imperialism and policing is not a sustainable foreign policy; war broke down (at least) direct British influence in the Second World War.  The Cold War was another world conflict that bankrupted the U.S.S.R. As the lone ‘hyper-power’ for the last quarter century, America’s policing role and aggressive pursuit of policy has basically made the U.S. insolvent with wartime debt levels in peacetime and a monetary policy that has the world sloshing through deep pools of inert currency. 

(Once that currency moves or others trade in their stored dollars for other newly recognized store-value currencies and / or selling off Treasury notes and bonds, inflation will spike and accelerate a long-deferred deflation of artificially high asset values generated by near-zero percent rates suppressing the discount rates applied to asset valuations. The American people are weary of war-making far from home with dubious assertions of national security where inconvenient challenges tend to be exaggerated into existential threats.)

Thus, this doctrine of leading from behind is the American version of handing off the hegemon function, with its attendant costs, to others.  In the case of Syria and Ukraine, the unhappy beneficiary of this bequeathing of power appears to be the European Union, particularly Germany.  The problem is that the Germany-led E.U. is as unprepared today to assume that mantle as were the United States when Great Britain made this shift in the 1940s. 

The unwillingness of the current Administration to initiate the process of a significant push-back in the face of evil or illegal aggression – that is, take the lead through a concerted first step so new partnering powers can feel empowered to stand with the democracies – has vitiated leading from behind to a public compromise of what our Republic stands for.   The United States is managing to alienate allies, to embolden terrorists and to encourage illegal expansionism.  

In short, the stars and stripes are coming to mean weapons or self-enriching development aid for many of the world’s poor while, at the same time, the disenfranchised of the earth see America backing away from confrontations with countries strong enough to impose significant casualties.  This behavior of a school-yard bully – by bombing defenseless countries while recoiling from more powerful adversaries – surely cannot be the stuff of American exceptionalism.

If it is, then those friends of mine who argue that American exceptionalism is a myth used to justify armed adventurism to safeguard short-term, primarily economic, interests are sadly correct in their heated assertions. Nevertheless, there has been an American exceptionalism forged in the past and applied judiciously across two centuries, until the 1960s, as the United States evolved from a struggling post-colonial state in 1784, an emerging economy in 1820 and a great power in 1860.  More about that soon.

Letters to friends and family #94: Ukraine, the butt of history

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it [...no matter how much they rant on mass or social media]."

-- George Santayana.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines [...and bloggers]."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By now, in the unfolding developments in Ukraine, it is almost certain that President George W. Bush would have deployed 10,000 troops from Germany, with or without N.A.T.O., into the Crimea and the Eastern half of Ukraine to create an immediate trip-wire, pending replacement by U.N. troops. Since the military does planning scenarios out the kazoo, such a deployment could roll out post-haste.

The difference between Ukraine and the Russian land grab of Georgian territories in 2008 is that the borders in Georgia had been disputed for many years; not so in Ukraine. Second, Ukraine is a larger nation firmly embedded in Europe. Finally, U.S. forces were unavailable due to engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. Nevertheless, President Bush cut in front of P.M. Putin in the V.I.P. seats at the China Olympics of 2008 and ripped an armpit so savagely into Putin that other leaders scooched away on the bleachers. Putin stopped the invasion immediately, though he had gained control of the two disputed territories.

This nation, Ukraine, clearly responded to Senator McCain's call in the streets of Kiev to stand firm for liberty. The people drove the wannabe dictator out. The courage of Senators McCain (R-AZ; raz the taz) and Murphy (D-CT) in December brings out in stark relief what increasingly looks like a nightmare of appeasement.  Don't believe me? (Wish I did not, either.):

First, inaction to the slaughter in Syria and watching on as radical elements hijack the opposition. U.S.-led reaction? Nothing. Could the U.S. do something?

http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2013/08/letter-83-thoughts-on-syria-case-for.html 

(from six months ago).

Second, emerging civil conflict brought on by a power grab at the expense of Iraq's fragile democracy by President al-Maliki in 2010 in Iraq. U.S. reaction? President George W. Bush started this war of choice; otherwise nothing. President Obama could have travelled to Iraq, as President Bush almost certainly would have, to demand the peaceful transition of government to the rightful winner of the election (Iyad Allawi) but did not. Result? Sunni jihadists coming in from Syria, where President Obama has already displayed a passivity perceived as an appeasement of terrorists free-lancing throughout the Arab Spring. The illegal President al-Maliki is now running for cover to Iran, at the expense of moderate shi'ites.

Third, the internal collapse of Venezuela. Admittedly, this crisis is not a result of a widespread perception of an impotent leadership in the U.S. The non-response thus far by Washington is neither constructive nor surprising. Decisive action to advocate the creation of an interim structure toward a national reconciliation could win a great amount of goodwill in Latin America for the United States right now. But we will see nothing as this President focusses on the longer-term implications of his legacy; sadly, President Obama has checked out.

The one instance of action, Libya, proved incredibly stupid. We bombed into régime-change and to death a dictator that had suspended W.M.D. and tried to establish links with the West. Preventing COL Khadafi's tanks from blowing Benghazi away was one thing. But hunting him down and killing him sent a clear signal to Presidents Assad and Kim Il-Jung and their brutal buds that there is no way out once the trouble starts; ergo, fight to the death. Why Libya? Because we were appeasing the residual colonialism of Italy. Thus, by killing Khadafi, we made sure that the option we are using in Syria, appeasement, is the exact wrong one. Please! Less people-pleasing and more principled people!

Letting the Russian forces capture significant parts of Ukraine -- a country with well-defined borders beyond dispute and clearly desirous of her sovereignty -- over excuses of protecting Russian nationals sounds quite similar to Nazi rationalizations for the Sudetenland and the eventual dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Lastly, let us remember the suffering historically endured by the Ukraine:

• the six million people starved to death by the brutal collectivized farming of the U.S.S.R. during the 1920s and early 1930s, a figure on the level of the Nazi partial genocide of the Jews; and,
• the four million (25% Jewish) more murdered by the Nazis for blood-sport.

These sobering numbers involved a population of 25-30 million at the time (i.e., 25-40% of the population during that era).  So, we have managed in recent weeks to embolden jihadists in Syria and the Russians in the Ukraine. No wonder Israel is skeptical of Iran's intentions. With the current leadership in Washington, Iran may well decide not to take the blandishments seriously.

So, to those who defend President Obama by vilifying President Bush: whom would you trust right now in confronting clear cut aggression in the Ukraine, ¿President Obama or President Bush? The hardest part in writing this essay is knowing that deploying troops to the Ukraine would not mean war; it would mean that Russia -- and other would-be aggressors enticed by Western dithering -- could not count on getting away with land-grabs. Though we are cautioned on the destructive power historical analogies through the misuse of the domino theory in Viêt Nam, at a great and terrible cost to 58,000 American families and millions in Viêt Nam, the lesson does fit in this particular context.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that President Bush would deploy those temporary peace-keepers, with or without N.A.T.O. Once the integrity of Ukrainian sovereignty were clarified, then he could pursue a peace-offensive with Russia by saying, "Hey, President Putin, Ukraine wants to join the European community. That is great. But why don't you think about joining the European community as well? We in the United States would welcome Russia back to Europe since she was the only great power that sided with our struggle to banish slavery one hundred fifty years ago and she proved herself a steadfast ally in defeating fascism and genocide seventy years ago. We have done some great things together. Come, let us do some more."