Occam's Banana
03-07-2014, 12:09 PM
h/t Christopher Manion @ LRC: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/maybe-we-arent-so-exceptional-after-all/
We're Just Not That Special
What the crisis with Russia reveals about the USA's age-old self-obsession.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/american-exceptionalism-russia-ukraine-104318.html
Andrew Bacevich (05 March 2014)
Unless Barack Obama is even a weaker president than he appears to be, the effusion of editorial emoting unleashed by the Ukraine crisis is unlikely to have any effect on U.S. policy. Pray, let that be the case.
Should Obama’s advisers look for guidance to the opinion pages of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, much less the Weekly Standard or Fox News, we’re in deep trouble. One might as well leaf through the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog for guidance on empowering women.
Still, the recent flurry of angst-filled opining provides a concise tutorial on what we might call the theology of American Exceptionalism, the irreligious religion that flourishes in certain quarters of the American elite and periodically finds favor with the larger body politic.
Central to that theology are several tenets, vividly displayed by overwrought commentators over the last several days.
***
Tenet Number One.History is what exponents of American Exceptionalist theology choose to remember. What they choose to forget does not exist. Or, at the very least, it lacks relevance. So selective amnesia is not only permitted—it’s essential.
Here, for example, is the postwar era as neatly rendered by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. In contrast with Obama’s fecklessness when facing naked Russian aggression, the Cold War, she writes, was the heroic period “when we checked Soviet expansion and stood up for free peoples.” Not for Rubin such complications as Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, cozying up to Marcos or Somoza or making nice with the mass murderer known as Chairman Mao.
Tenet Number Two. [...]
Tenet Number Three. [...]
Commentary’s Tobin knows exactly what’s coming next: A “retreat back to fortress America,” with the United States “reduced to a second-rate nation with no power to protect its interests or its friends.” The inevitable result: “a planet where tyrants feel free to act.” Well, that’s one perspective. Another might be that while the United States was squandering blood and treasure on a war in Iraq that Commentary and the Post editorial page enthusiastically promoted, the rest of the world moved on. Of course, that perspective rejects the American Exceptionalist assumption that Washington is the sun around which the remainder of the universe orbits.
Tenet Number Four. [...]
Here is the historian Victor Davis Hanson berating his countrymen in National Review. The problem with this country? Let VDH give it to you with the bark off: We live in “a newly isolationist and self-indulgent America, eager to talk, bluster, or threaten its way out of its traditional postwar leadership role.” In the American Exceptionalist catechism, isolationism comes in a close second to appeasement in the ranking of heinous sins. Still, one might think that Hanson would have the decency to wait until U.S. troops conclude their futile 13-year-long war in Afghanistan before charging his countrymen with isolationism.
Tenet Number Five. [...]
***
[...]
Let’s permit Times columnist David Brooks to have the final word. Taking stock of the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Brooks detects a country infected with a “touchy messianism,” its “passions aroused and philosophic zealotry at full boil.” Russia, he speculates, has the look of a nation “motivated by a deep, creedal ideology that has been wafting through the culture for centuries.” Maybe. Or perhaps Brooks is describing tendencies found much closer to home.
Read the full article: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/american-exceptionalism-russia-ukraine-104318.html
We're Just Not That Special
What the crisis with Russia reveals about the USA's age-old self-obsession.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/american-exceptionalism-russia-ukraine-104318.html
Andrew Bacevich (05 March 2014)
Unless Barack Obama is even a weaker president than he appears to be, the effusion of editorial emoting unleashed by the Ukraine crisis is unlikely to have any effect on U.S. policy. Pray, let that be the case.
Should Obama’s advisers look for guidance to the opinion pages of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, much less the Weekly Standard or Fox News, we’re in deep trouble. One might as well leaf through the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog for guidance on empowering women.
Still, the recent flurry of angst-filled opining provides a concise tutorial on what we might call the theology of American Exceptionalism, the irreligious religion that flourishes in certain quarters of the American elite and periodically finds favor with the larger body politic.
Central to that theology are several tenets, vividly displayed by overwrought commentators over the last several days.
***
Tenet Number One.History is what exponents of American Exceptionalist theology choose to remember. What they choose to forget does not exist. Or, at the very least, it lacks relevance. So selective amnesia is not only permitted—it’s essential.
Here, for example, is the postwar era as neatly rendered by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. In contrast with Obama’s fecklessness when facing naked Russian aggression, the Cold War, she writes, was the heroic period “when we checked Soviet expansion and stood up for free peoples.” Not for Rubin such complications as Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, cozying up to Marcos or Somoza or making nice with the mass murderer known as Chairman Mao.
Tenet Number Two. [...]
Tenet Number Three. [...]
Commentary’s Tobin knows exactly what’s coming next: A “retreat back to fortress America,” with the United States “reduced to a second-rate nation with no power to protect its interests or its friends.” The inevitable result: “a planet where tyrants feel free to act.” Well, that’s one perspective. Another might be that while the United States was squandering blood and treasure on a war in Iraq that Commentary and the Post editorial page enthusiastically promoted, the rest of the world moved on. Of course, that perspective rejects the American Exceptionalist assumption that Washington is the sun around which the remainder of the universe orbits.
Tenet Number Four. [...]
Here is the historian Victor Davis Hanson berating his countrymen in National Review. The problem with this country? Let VDH give it to you with the bark off: We live in “a newly isolationist and self-indulgent America, eager to talk, bluster, or threaten its way out of its traditional postwar leadership role.” In the American Exceptionalist catechism, isolationism comes in a close second to appeasement in the ranking of heinous sins. Still, one might think that Hanson would have the decency to wait until U.S. troops conclude their futile 13-year-long war in Afghanistan before charging his countrymen with isolationism.
Tenet Number Five. [...]
***
[...]
Let’s permit Times columnist David Brooks to have the final word. Taking stock of the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Brooks detects a country infected with a “touchy messianism,” its “passions aroused and philosophic zealotry at full boil.” Russia, he speculates, has the look of a nation “motivated by a deep, creedal ideology that has been wafting through the culture for centuries.” Maybe. Or perhaps Brooks is describing tendencies found much closer to home.
Read the full article: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/american-exceptionalism-russia-ukraine-104318.html