I try to only rarely indulge myself with a rant in this venue any longer, but today I cannot deny myself from posting this one. Yet what I do hope to achieve is to draw some comments that will provide more focus. So here it is on “American exceptionalism”:
American exceptionalism is a very dangerous worldview.
The reason is that the rank-and-file American feels we have nothing to learn from the rest of the world. We are beyond compare. But people across the globe believe that their nation is the greatest country in the world, yet they do not possess the arrogance which prevents them from learning from other societies. So from the exceptionalism stance, we do not learn anything from the rest of the world in terms of, say, how to run a healthcare system or how to reform our government assistance programs. (Did you know that Cuba, yes, Communist Cuba, has a lower infant-mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than we do? [My favority CIA World Factbook talking-point, again]).
We also cannot learn things from other countries, according to the exceptionalism worldview, like the importance of high-culture. With America never possessing an aristocracy in its short history, nothing has trickled down to “the people” from the learned classes and no one has ever wished to move up in terms education and the exploration of thought and art like they have in other cultures. So how are we supposed to function as a democratic society with an uneducated citizenry?
For Americans themselves, though, the false idea of American exceptionalism makes them feel good and that is what gives it traction. It’s my theory that downtrodden white people are so “proud” to be Americans for this reason. They hang-on to that ideal because they feel they are a part of something “exceptional” even when they play no part in the grand mechanics of it. That is left to the higher-educated and the 1%.
Thank You!
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