AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, THEN AND NOW
Marco Rubio is a first generation son of Cuban immigrants running for the US Senate in Florida. He is mounting a conservative primary challenge to Republican Charlie Crist, the current Governor also now running for the Senate, and spoke earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention in Washington, D.C. According to reports, he brought the (conservative) house down with an impassioned defense of "American exceptionalism" and a stiletto like assault on the Obama Administration's ostensible refusal to honor it.
Too bad.
Because "exceptionalism" is pretty dangerous when rendered, as it often is, in a maelstrom of historical inaccuracy.
And also because, if there is such an animal and it is valid, Barack Obama -- not Marco Rubio, the latest poster child for CPAC -- is its best current manifestation.
There is a school of history that travels under the name of American exceptionalism. One of its biggest proponents was John Patrick Diggins, now deceased but formerly a History Professor at the CUNY Graduate school here in New York City. Years ago, Diggins wrote a book entitled On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundation of American History. In it, Diggins carefully laid out the foundational claims of the school of exceptionalism. It is, put simply, a laudatory version of the well settled notion that the United States was a set of ideas before it became a nation or a culture, and that the founding ideas of equality, representative democracy and individual rights were unique as a matter of government in the annals of history.
So far, so good.
There is nothing wrong with the notion that we created something fundamentally different from what hitherto existed or that our experiment in self-governance was and remains a noble undertaking. There is a problem, however, or at least the beginnings of one, when you turn that fundamental difference into one of kind as opposed to degree. It takes a lot of ignorance, or hubris (which is often the same thing), to forget Magna Carta, or the steady development of English common law in the centuries prior to 1776, or for that matter the Enlightenment, as one marches to the tune of American exceptionalism. Yet, as an indisputable matter of historical fact, it is impossible to envision the American experiment without those necessary precursors.
Monarchy only became unfashionable after knowledge was deemed a product of human experiment and investigation rather than divine right or inspiration, and you can't get there without Newton, Bacon, Descartes, Berkeley and Hume -- pre-1776 Europeans all. When Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence that certain truths were "self-evident," he was reflecting the fundamental sea change in philosophy that had occurred earlier, a change from the notion that we had to look beyond ourselves and our world to discover what we were about. The "Creator" may have "endowed" us with certain inalienable rights, but it was in the final analysis an endowment that was deemed inherent, not a gift that was reclaimable by the Almighty on a moment's notice.
In short, the world became about us, not Him.
The same was true with Lincoln. He changed our understanding of the American Constitution by reading it through the prism of the Declaration of Independence and that self evident truth of equality. He did not get that truth from a church or a theology. He got it from the same Enlightenment Jefferson himself had fashioned it out of. And then, as the experiment moved forward, millions flocked to our shores to share in that truth.
Marco Rubio is a child of today's flockers. His parents escaped Cuba, a nation built on a system that embraces the precise opposite of what the Enlightenment discovered. Marxism always was as ignorant of human nature and as absolutist in its teleological world view as the medievalists who insisted that man was bound to follow the dictates of divinely created monarchies.
Unfortunately, however, the right wing today often touts its own claims to divine right. Just listen to them talk about gays or abortion or immigrants who do not speak English. They treat the first two as divinely forbidden and the last with a contempt that ignores the fact that the vast majority of immigrants in the 19th century were not any more fluent in our supposed native tongue than those who show up today.
Language may not appear to be the vehicle through which divine right keeps the quotidian masses at bay, but it often is. For centuries prior to Vatican II, the Catholic Church spoke only in Latin in part to insure that its "truths" could only be transmitted through the insights of a special class and were not generally available to the people as a whole, there to be discussed, debated and perhaps refuted. America rejected that notion in principle. Jefferson's endowed man had inalienable rights. To be heard was one of them. To be heard only in English was not.
Rubio is one of the screamers now claiming that Obama denies American exceptionalism. That is flatly false. Obama does not deny exceptionalism, he properly understands it. And Rubio does not. Exceptionalism never denied the notion that policy should be based on empirical evidence rather than divinely asserted faith. In fact, it was founded on that notion. We cannot truly know what God intends about health care or taxes or national defense. So we might want to either leave God out of those debates, or at the very least admit that there is no Moses coming down from the mountain with ten point plans on these issues.
Exceptionalism also was never at odds with government regulation or social largesse. In fact, the economic opportunity Americans have steadily sought and often found in their aggressive "pursuit" of Jeffersonian "happiness" -- another founding idea that is part of American exceptionalism -- was regularly facilitated by government, whether via the land grants of the Homestead Act in the 1860s, the management of the railroads by the ICC at the turn of the last century, the regulation of securities markets in the 1930s, or the high tech product spin offs made possible by research done by NASA and the Defense Department in the last half century.
Obama's current effort to refashion the regulatory architecture in order to save finance capital from its worst self is in that tradition. So was his successful effort at reforming the health care system, which had become as irrational circa 2010 as America's railroads (with their different grades of track depending on who owned what and who built them) were in the 1890s.
The Rubios and right wingers appear not to accept that tradition.
Maybe some day they will.
If so . . .
That will be exceptional.
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