American exceptionalism, once embraced by conservatives in their worship of Ronald Reagan and debated by liberals as a premise unfulfilled, isn't expounded upon much anymore. An imprimatur encased in the ideology that America was special among other nations or as Wikipedia puts it, an exceptionality "based on liberty, equality before the law, individual responsibility, republicanism, representative democracy, and laissez-faire economics." Surveys indicating that fewer Americans think the United States is the greatest nation temper such a statement.
Yet recently so coveted and tendentious was the term that aspiring Republican presidential nominees in 2015 attacked President Obama. Bobby Jindal, Rudolph Giuliani, Marco Rubio and others questioned Obama's patriotism for saying that citizens of other countries too may think their nation is exceptional. That same year criticism came also from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, current chair of the Republican Conference, when they published Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. In it they cited Abraham Lincoln in calling America "the last, best hope of earth" concluding, "we are, in fact, exceptional."
To both elites and the hinterland masses, hewed by Covid lockdowns and representative isolation, the term lies hallow in meaning in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt. An event that glaringly demonstrates the phrase was always more propaganda than fact; a comparison in its madness and violent intent that bears little distinction from the storming of the Bastille in 1789, Emiliano Zapata occupying Mexico City in 1914 or the Bolsheviks overrunning the Winter Palace in 1917.
The near establishment of Trump as an autocratic ruler left any controversy surrounding the belief in American exceptionalism enervated. Yet this concept was the underpinnings of Trump's pursuit in undermining American democracy. The phrase "Make America Great Again" encapsulates nationalism, modified slightly by Trump from Ronald Reagan's "A shining city on the hill" 1989 presidential farewell speech or Bill Clinton's 1991 presidential announcement speech, "I believe that together we can make America great again. Yet Trump, even in his marketing thievery took exception to any belief in "exceptionalism," citing Vladimir Putin's dislike of the term, at least as to how it applied to the United States.
The words American exceptionalism now seemed buried in an avalanche of hubris, falsity and wickedness implanted by the digital plague of the Big Lie that the election was stolen. After the Capitol riot the Big Lie now couples with Denial in that Trump and his horde of supporters weren't really who they are but victims of antifa and BLM disciples. Trump fanatics ceaseless in their dissimulation (until recently) mightily aided by social media — Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. — in cauterizing the critical thinking of millions of Americans, creating what Tristan Harris calls a "cyborg democracy."
Harris, a former Google design ethicist, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology and part of the documentary The Social Dilemma, told MSNBC that cyborg democracy is where regulation is left not to the government but to private entities. Yet cyborg democracy is not free speech democracy no matter how much the social media platforms invoke constitutional protections as license not to be regulated.
Traditionally free speech was exercised within a broad controlling category of acceptable use by laws, by courts and by the simple adherence to public decorum, as quaint as that now may be. No one had the right to endanger another by what was untruthfully said. The reliable example of not yelling "fire" in a crowded theater when there was no fire was an easy understood precept as to why free speech needed restraint.
Social media blew all that up. As Harris notes, their business model required it. Growth accelerated through the users' ability to say what he or she want about whomever he or she wanted, and algorithms, the fecundity of an idea and the platform's digital tools spread it to others analyzed by their profiles and postings to be agreeable to it. But the world of such a user to a particular idea shrunk as social media contrivance kept elevating an idea to the forefront. Information and disinformation said Harris, "was funneled into a smaller and smaller space" and the exercise of free speech became a "Crazytown."
Fake news travels six times faster than the truth, and anger is the emotion that travels fastest and farther, says Harris. Bots overwhelm human users in spreading falsehoods and occupying social spaces. Social media giants don't know how to control it. The only thing they can do is by "turning it off," taking down posts or tweets or denying a user access to the platform. An approach one commentator called "emptying the ocean with a shovel."
Social media and its deviation from fact awoke survival notions of tribalism within the human mind. Thinking about information outside your group is stymied, judgement becomes the prevailing reaction fueled by racism and white superiority, a creed openly embraced with illiberal enthusiasm. Studies has shown that on-screen addiction reduces in gray matter in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions, particularly fear, memories and motivation. "This pruning away of brain matter is similar to the type of cell death seen in cocaine addicts," states the Center for Human Technology.
Weren't those who attacked the Capitol zombie-like in their robotic mayhem? As Tanya Lewis wrote in a January 11, 2021 Scientific American article, The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists: "After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth."
Within the narrow range of thinking misinformation takes seed. Propaganda flourishes within the deluded group and by forces seeking to control the group. Big lies, be it election fraud or QAnon, bond to individuals creating a social element previously lacking in their lives, communication among adherents becomes almost like playing an online game. "They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher, in the New York Times, Jan. 17, 2021.
Fabrications metastasize, engulfing groups that previously held to rational beliefs. As some former conservative loyalists have noted, the far-right, terrorists, racists and QAnon believers found a "safe harbor" in the Republican Party. With an emptiness of fact, with principles degraded and behavior norms eviscerated, order slowly collapses and broad consensus more difficult to achieve. Tribal warfare ensues. Any notion of exceptionalism drowns in a drumbeat of threatened violence.
"Tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics," said Peter Kreko, executive director of Political Capital, a research group in Budapest, Hungary. "Tribalism is a natural form of politics. Democracy is a deviation."
Reclaiming any badge of American exceptionalism means rejecting democracy as a deviation. It means more than relying upon the good intentions of a new president or corporations withholding political donations to hopefully return the Republican Party back to a symbol of loyal opposition. Depriving campaign money is unlikely to last as corporations want and need to influence policy. They are leery of broad and inclusive democracy for such pressure can devour the most well-funded candidate. And can a new president purge a segment of a diseased populace by performing good deeds and passing fruitful policy? Maybe.
Most of all keeping this republic going means white Americans must recognize their proclivities to holding racist notions and their fear of losing white privilege in how America is governed. Trumpism is not outside of America. It is symbol of America's denial, said Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
"And in the end," writes Kendi in The Atlantic, "what will make America true is the willingness of the American people to stare at their national face for the first time, to open the book of their history for the first time, and see themselves for themselves — all the political viciousness, all the political beauty — and finally right the wrongs, or spend the rest of the life of America trying.”