The 250-year Decline Of American Exceptionalism

It is impossible to revisit the American Revolution without raising the question: Did that late eighteenth-century conflict create a truly new kind of society, an “exceptional” nation that has ameliorated class conflict and sustained capitalist hegemony for more than 250 years? With Donald Trump in the White House and MAGA in power on so many fronts, has the idea of an “American exceptionalism,” which originated even before the colonials stacked their muskets, been finally reduced and debased to little more than a belief that Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a robust, unfettered capitalism have become definitional identities after 250 years of American history?

In his six-part documentary on the largely military history of the revolution, filmmaker Ken Burns sought to subvert such self-congratulatory chauvinism. A variegated set of scholars representing an expansive, twenty-first-century sense of what has constituted political and social history, offered a defiantly anti-Trumpian way of thinking about that 250-year-old upheaval. Multiple voices, among them those of indigenous people, enslaved African Americans, British loyalists, and “patriots” of various classes, genders, and regions gave to the Burns documentary a multisided complexity far removed from the textbook and TV tales of several decades ago or the one-dimensional revisionism coming out of the contemporary White House.

Like so many anti-colonial movements of more recent years, the American Revolution was a civil war within a global context, where each fraction and party sought advantage either by resisting or allying with more dominant forces that may or may not have served as faithful compatriots. Indigenous Americans, well organized into a set of politically sophisticated and militarily engaged tribes, were clearly the greatest losers during and after the conflict, betrayed in almost equal measure by both the patriots and their British adversaries. Likewise, the British sought to entice enslaved Americans to their side with promises of eventual freedom.

The maintenance of slavery may not have been a prime cause of the revolution, a hypothesis put forward by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, but the question of American slavery became of increasing salience as the war dragged on. As historian Bernard Bailyn observed in one of the talking-head comments, the fate of American slavery was rarely a subject of public debate before the revolution, but afterward, there was never a year in which it was not a contentious topic.

One virtue of the Burns documentary was to make George Washington something other than a marble icon. The fact that he was a slave owner, a land speculator, and a product of and advocate for the colonial elite has been explored by historians for generations. But as leader of the Continental Army, Washington’s military strategy was not all that different from that of the set of far more radical insurgents championing twentieth-century anti-colonial movements.

Like Ho Chi Mihn, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Fidel Castro, Washington’s prime task was not to defeat the army of the oppressor in open combat but instead to keep his own forces intact and in the field, ready for a military engagement when and if opportunity arose. Given the fiscal weakness of the new Congress and the fragmented character of the militias from which Washington had to assemble his regiments, this was a most difficult task, but also the most vital. I think this explains why, in our conventional patriotic memory, the winter his army spent at Valley Forge, where disintegration was a real possibility, has long remained the iconic military engagement of the Revolutionary War, celebrated even more than the defeat and capture of a British army at Saratoga in 1777 or even the penultimate victory by the forces of France and the Americans at Yorktown in 1781.

And yet, despite all the new voices and perspectives Burns assembled, his documentary leaves the viewer with an exceptionalist perspective very much intact. While the American Revolution was certainly but one upheaval among many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it remains the first, and from an economic and geographical standpoint, by far the most successful. Both the French Revolution and that of the Bolsheviks were far more radical, and at various times and places, fervently emulated by those seeking an overthrow of the old order. But whatever the luminary and universalist language embodied in the Declaration of Independence, I don’t think its reach would have been so great without the development of an exceptionalist ideology, in varying degrees myth and reality, that has persisted, sometimes on the Right and sometimes on the Left, for 250 years.

There were two aspects of this development. First was the idea that white male heads of household, chiefly farmers during the nation’s first century, were far better off than their European cousins. And that observation was tightly linked to the argument that the new nation was born as a bourgeois republic, with feudal structures and ideas largely absent. The American Revolution, as historian Louis Hartz would argue in his once influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), was from this perspective no revolution at all. What happened in the War for Independence merely codified what had previously been taken for granted in English North America.

The French immigrant J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur made both these points as early as 1782 in his Letters From an American Farmer, when he wrote that the new nation

is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. We are a people of cultivators . . . animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself.

This species of American exceptionalism had a century-long life. President Thomas Jefferson saw the Louisiana Purchase as an enormous body of land suitable for yeoman cultivation, an “Empire for Liberty.” That idea was ratified and refined by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, who marveled at relatively high levels of social egalitarianism, economic productivity, and social mobility, alongside the strength of popular religion, the weakness of a central state, and the propensity of Americans to form voluntary associations.

In the “frontier thesis” that Frederick Jackson Turner codified in 1893, the historian claimed that the continuous westward expansion of Americans into a body of virtually free land was the single most vital factor in shaping the exceptional character of American democratic life and culture. That the social worlds so lauded by De Crèvecoeur, De Tocqueville, and Turner were in fact settler colonialisms based on the violent expropriation of native American land and resources is an indictment that would have to await a new century and new historians to begin a reckoning.

Turner’s thesis also had a downside as he first deployed it. At the end of the nineteenth century, the frontier was no more, and Turner, along with figures ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Karl Marx, thought that American social and economic conditions would soon resemble those of Europe’s class-bound societies. Marxists welcomed all that. Indeed, they thought that with the astounding growth of American industry and the proletariat necessary for its continuous reproduction, the United States was overripe for socialism. The nation was still exceptional, but now because it stood in the vein of economic transformation as Marx and Friedrich Engels had postulated.

In the preface to Capital, Marx wrote that “the country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their future.” In agreement, H. M. Hyndman, a British Marxist, noted in 1904 that “just as North America is today the most advanced country economically and socially, so it will be the first in which Socialism will find open and legal expression.” Likewise, wrote August Bebel in 1907, the political leader of the German Social Democrats, “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic.”

By the early twentieth century, industrial conflict in the United States was as intense as anything in Europe, and yet neither class consciousness nor socialism won much purchase. Unions were often militant but hardly leftist in any programmatic sense, and even at the height of its popularity, Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party was neither revolutionary nor capable of winning the allegiance of a working-class majority. Although Werner Sombart, a German academic of Social Democratic views, had once argued that the working class in the US would inevitably turn socialist, he famously answered the query put forward in the title of his 1906 book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, by declaring that in the United States “all socialist utopias come to grief on roast beef and apple pie.” That was an exceedingly crude formulation, and Sombart undoubtedly knew that in both Germany and the United States, many of the most class-conscious workers were among the highly skilled and well-paid strata of the proletariat.

The more sophisticated and resonant answer returned to the idea that America was born bourgeois in which an extensive franchise, an ethnically fragmented populace, and a thoroughgoing capitalist hegemony proved an obstacle to the growth of class consciousness, whatever the standard of living of workers themselves. In 1892, Engels noted that it was “quite natural, that in such a young country, which has never known feudalism and has grown up on a bourgeois basis from the first, bourgeois prejudices should also be so strongly rooted in the working class.”

That was an idea that some communists themselves came to accept. We’ve seen that the idea that America was in some sense exceptional had been around since the founding, but the concept of “American exceptionalism” as applied to the consciousness and organization of the working class only came into widespread radical usage and debate in 1929 — first in Moscow, during a celebrated conflict between Joseph Stalin and Jay Lovestone, the American Communist leader of that time.

Years later, Lovestone would become a violent anti-communist in league with the CIA and the most conservative of American trade unionists. But in 1929, he was a battle-tested Communist seeking to make his small party relevant to a union movement well battered in the years after World War I. Thus when Stalin proclaimed a “third period” of revolutionary militancy for the worldwide Communist movement, Lovestone objected, arguing that social and ideological conditions in the United States made for an “American exceptionalism.” Lovestone’s opponents, led by William Z. Foster, a leader of the Great Steel Strike of 1919, argued to the contrary. That dispute soon animated a Moscow meeting of the Comintern where Stalin condemned the “heresy of American exceptionalism.” By the time Lovestone and his faction returned to the US later in the year, Stalinists in Moscow and New York had expelled them from the Communist Party.

As a left-wing group, the influence of the Lovestoneites soon faded, but the phrase “American exceptionalism” garnered strength when a cohort of intellectuals, all former radicals conversant with the ideological battles of the 1930s, redeployed the phrase to explain and defend American politics and culture in the early Cold War era. How had the United States avoided the conflicts that generated mass fascist or communist movements in Europe, making for what Arthur Schlesinger called a “vital center” politics in America? The key seemed to come down to the relative absence of class consciousness and the resultant conflict that sensibility might generate.

By the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Henry Nash Smith, and so many others, founders of the academic school labeled “American studies,” were de facto Lovestoneites. As Daniel Bell wrote in his essay collection The End of Ideology, while ideas of social transformation might still animate anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the Third World, in the United States and other industrial countries that followed in her footsteps, such radical ideologies could achieve no purpose. The whole world was becoming “exceptionalist.”

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the New Left, and the war in Vietnam put a big dent in such liberal complacency. A consensual interpretation of American history, such as that advanced by Hartz and Hofstadter, could not withstand an historical profession increasingly focused on the divisions engendered by slavery and Jim Crow, gender inequality, and the raw power and brutality of capitalist enterprise unfettered by either working-class organization or governmental regulation. In her book Belated Feudalism, the sociologist Karen Orren postulated that when it came to law and culture governing employment relations in the United States, bourgeois norms were entirely absent for most of American history, replaced by late medieval “master and servant” conceptualizations imported from Europe.

The idea of American exceptionalism did not die but migrated firmly toward the Right, where Ronald Reagan, his successors, and a neoconservative set of ideologues sought to use an exceptionalist ideology to project American power abroad. Less than fifteen years ago, Peggy Noonan, Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, declared, presumably with a straight face, that “America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world. It attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional.”

But as social myth, even that self-serving formulation has collapsed in the face of Donald Trump’s crude transactionalism and oligarchic corruption. Today the idea of an American exceptionalism unfurls its colors not so much as a useful fiction but as a reigning nightmare. To awake from its embrace, we’ll need to abandon the conceits that have sustained that mythos for 250 years and in its place put forth a radical universalism linking our fate to that of entire world.