Here’s the “Party of 1″ joke of the day: If you count yourself as a diehard American conservative and defender of “American exceptionalism,” try climbing to the top of an American skyscraper and jumping out the window — and see if you can make yourself an exception to the law of gravity.
That might seem harsh, but I offer it up with reference to the lead article in the March 8 issue of National Review, which came over the electronic transom a few days ago. The piece by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru is entitled “An Exceptional Debate” — and those familiar with the concept of “American exceptionalism” can anticipate the argument. The two worthies are concerned to demonstrate that Barack Obama is a threat to this vaunted “exceptionalism.” More broadly, the polemical pressure is in the direction of the view that fealty to “American exceptionalism” absolutely prohibits any social-democratic measures. “Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments,” concedes Damon Linker of the University of Pennsylvania in a reply on the New Republic website (I note that Linker formerly was associated with Richard John Neuhaus’s publication, First Things). Readers can try the above links and peruse both articles for themselves. For the moment, I am going to concern myself in the main with Linker’s reply.
Despite his generous concessions, Linker finds the Lowry/Ponnuru essay to be “either a string of American banalities and clichés—or an abstract of the Republican Party platform.” That’s the point, of course — to equate “Americanism” with one party’s line — and, under current conditions, I suppose you have to hew to the line or else individuals of conservative inclination will come after you with torches and pitchforks, as it were. I wonder what the future holds for political competitiveness in such a country, where the very essence of the country is equated with one side of the partisan divide. You might as well declare a dictatorship for the sake of enforcing unlimited corporate prerogative — not so different from what they have now in Singapore or even in China.
As Linker notes, the invocation of “American exceptionalism” is supposed to serve as an inoculation against any “foreign” or — for heaven’s sake — European infection. With that in mind, it’s most interesting to peruse a “Review & Outlook” feature from last week, from National Review’s fellow travelers, the Wall Street Journal editorial board. It seems that Russian politicians Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin were disappointed in their country’s performance at the recent Winter Olympics. I understand that, in the meantime, several Russian sports bureaucrats have stepped down. The editorial board notes: “This thought runs against centuries of Russian tradition, but why not try to measure Russia’s greatness by its ability to build a free and prosperous country, a good global citizen at peace with its neighbors?” Well, no one should take exception to that, as far as it goes. The board further notes: “The four leading medals winners in Vancouver are free-market democracies.”
Actually, it was five leading medals winners by the time the Games were over: Germany, Canada, Norway and Austria in addition to the United States. I would simply note that for the purposes of this commentary, it suited the editorial board to christen the three European winter-sports powers, not to mention Canada, as “free-market democracies.” But if you pointed out that the other four have more extensive social-democratic measures than the United States, it would suit the purposes of polemicists of this ilk to portray them as quasi-totalitarian. Linder: “Jane Addams, Herbert Croly, New Deal economist Stuart Chase—all of them, and many more, failed to understand and appreciate America’s exceptional character and sought to replace it with ‘the best innovations of the modern dictatorial movements taking over in Europe’ during the 1920s and ‘30s. That’s America for you: Members of the modern conservative movement squared off against the European-inspired liberal fascists, forever searching in desperation for ‘a foreign template to graft onto America.’ If only the latter could be convinced not to hate—let alone to like or love—their country. But alas….”
All those countries are, of course, “free-market democracies.” They are marked far more by their commonalities with this country than by their differences. All are part of a larger North Atlantic civilization which had its beginnings in Britain and Europe — of which this country basically is an offshoot, and from which all the components of “American exceptionalism” come. As Linker notes, such countries are described as “sclerotic welfare states” in contemporary polemic — but all of them exhibited plenty of innovation and dynamism. That, of course, can be inhibited by social-democratic programs — but these polities arrived at the conclusion that it is indeed possible to have too much of a good thing. Just ask the residents of Flint, Youngstown, or Buffalo.
Linker: Lowry and Ponnuru seek “to relegate contrary voices in our national narrative to the periphery of our history, and perhaps even to read them out of our history altogether.” Indeed, polemic of this genre often comes down to innuendo. In that connection, the March 8 National Review makes interesting reading indeed. It includes a book review by Matthew Scully, former speechwriter for the likes of Bush, Palin, and McCain. It may be regarded as something of a quirk, given his politics, but Scully has become an outspoken opponent of animal cruelty, and his book on the matter, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, attracted critical acclaim. Scully nevertheless found himself under attack from one Wesley J. Smith, author of the book under review, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. Scully apparently has been lumped in with those who “had ‘fallen for the deception’ of animal-welfare advocacy and ‘its true animal rights ideological agenda” — along with Rush Limbaugh, who, playing against type, offered some kind remarks on the radio about the activities of the Humane Society. In this polemical genre, offenses against the essential verities of Western civilization are never hard to find, and I suppose it could be a sort of just desserts for Scully, who may be experiencing blowback from the innuendo he might have crafted on the half of the aforementioned Republican politicians. I see that the letters section of the same magazine (difficult if not impossible to find online, apparently) contains an exchange of letters from the authors of dueling books about John Dewey, whose thinking supposedly “rests upon a denial of the first principle of the American founding.” Not that I have any beef to make on behalf of John Dewey, at least not for present purposes. From my perusal of newspaper editorial pages decades ago, I recall that Russell Kirk didn’t think much of Dewey.
Lowry and Ponnuru want to portray Barack Obama as a threat to “American exceptionalism.” As I have noted elsewhere on this site, such people hold it against the President that he was at one time a community organizer. Somebody who would work to remove asbestos from a housing project full of poor people, they deem a troublemaker. They hold it against him, as Lindner notes, that his allegiance is “to a hypothetical, pure country that is coming into being.” As an Aristotelian, I would say that the Stagirite would have held that all living things are “coming into being,” and that to forestall such a process would be tantamount to killing them.
Indeed, dogged pursuit of the party-line version of “American exceptionalism” may have a deadly effect, not least in the area of health-care reform, which probably occasioned the polemical exchange under consideration herein. Such a dogged pursuit is indeed something like jumping out of the top floor of a skyscraper — although contemporary affluent Americans do not see it that way, because the victims are out of sight and out of mind, in the ghetto, the barrio and the trailer park.
Limbaugh, for his part, declared that poor people do not deserve health care. By so doing, he thought he was upholding the verities of “American exceptionalism,” I suppose. The country will always be exceptional, even if it adopts more social-democratic measures — and, if it does not, we may find that its creed will come to be associated with kicking people while they are down, or rubbing their noses in the dirt. I recall that, at one of the vaunted “town hall meetings,” a senator was confronted by the sort of woman who is sometimes described as “poor white trash,” who was being ruined by her medical expenses. Essentially, his advice to her was to go around to her neighbors with a tin cup in hand. It’s the gorgon’s face of “American exceptionalism….”
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