ANALYSIS/OPINION:
In that strange way that the history of ideas can swivel and turn, an old internal communist argument is back — but as so often happens, this time with the sides reversed. And few recognize its origins.
When Josef Stalin was wrapping up his enemies inside the Soviet Union and its appendage, the Comintern, the world communist headquarters, he ran into an ideological problem with the minuscule American Communist Party. Stalin wanted to reconstitute the U.S. party with his own hacks. But as happens among communists — as recently as today in Beijing — Stalin needed a “theoretical” issue to justify his actions. He seized on a heresy rampant inside the hugely unsuccessful 1930s American left: namely, the belief that, without Europes ancient class structures and conflicts, the breathtaking exuberance for life and opportunities on this side of the Atlantic would block Marxist apparatchiks from bringing on “the revolution.” That was the climactic event Kremlin leadership (even if Stalinists were themselves increasingly skeptical) preached would solve the worlds problems.
The then-American representative to “The Socialist Motherland,” Jay Lovestone, called it “American exceptionalism” in party councils, an unpardonable sin.
Lovestone, an old American revolutionary despite his ideological transgressions, escaped Stalins goons. But it was by a hairs breadth, with help from a fellow American Communist then in Moscow, Dr. Julius Hammer, New York City physician, abortionist, ex-convict and good friend of Lenin. Hammer would go on to found a dynasty of billionaires prospering from their Moscow connections through the long line of Soviet dictators.
Lovestone blossomed into an exceedingly effective anti-communist, first with the World War II Office of Strategic Services, later transformed into the CIA. Then working as international director for George Meany, the old plumber who headed the AFL-CIO, Lovestone helped bring much of the European left into the anti-Soviet fold.
American exceptionalism, as clever slogans are wont, metamorphosed over the decades. It has melded with the beliefs of religious reformers who originated some American Colonies, including the Pilgrims, Oona Anne Hathaway, William Penn and Lord George Baltimore. They saw themselves as precursors of a new social order. Their phraseology often borrowed from Judeo-Christian thought, specifically the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
Later, the founders of the American republic believed they were creating a new civilization on the western shores of the Atlantic, distinct from Europes old evils. When asked by a passer-by the result of the secret conclave of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, the grand old wizard of the American Revolution, told her, “We have created a republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”
The latest to use the concept, if not the slogan itself, was Ronald Reagan, who in his 1989 farewell speech explained:
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”
This theme divides the nations polity today as perhaps no other intellectual current. Much of the self-anointed, sophisticated “political class” denigrates the whole idea. President Obama, for example, recently said in France he believed in American exceptionalism only as a rationalization every nation-state has for the importance of its own credo. Many in his most loyal political base have long argued American exceptionalism camouflages rampant chauvinism, xenophobia, arbitrary use of power for self-interest — even opportunism and greed.
That line of attack was enhanced when, in the aftermath of World War II, American exceptionalism took on a new meaning. With a Europe in ruins and even in recovery dependent on the U.S. defense umbrella to prevent Soviet domination, Americas economic aid was overwhelming. Its support consisted not only of brute strength but of the ability to set enduring patterns for economic development and world order. Official U.S. aid and private investment outflows created the norm for industrial countries international relations. American-style multinationals quickly superseded old European trading companies, themselves the outgrowths of European colonialism. The dollar became the international currency in which most values were expressed.
Battered and tarnished as the current U.S. economy may be, when the European Union attempted to deal with this springs “Greek crisis” — which could lead to the destruction not only of the euro but of “the European project” itself — the EU begged for help from the International Monetary Fund. There, indirectly, the American taxpayer carries a disproportionate load — more evidence of Americas still special role in world affairs.
American exceptionalism lives!
• Sol Sanders, veteran foreign correspondent and analyst, writes weekly on the convergence of international politics, business and economics. He can be reached at solsanders@cox.net.
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