In Dan's Saturday diary, "Confronting the failure of the New Deal" a comment by bystander "The coming age of 'ressentiment'" began:
Julian Sanchez hit that note here. Brad DeLong hits it again on page 24 of Battered but Not Beaten.
I'll have more to say about DeLong later, but first, I want to say something about Sanchez's piece, and particularly about a theme struck by a couple of commentators.
Sanchez started off by quoting Michael Kinsley (never a good sign) criticizing "American exceptionalism", then said:
It occurs to me that there's an obvious link here with the idea that the contemporary populist right is heavily driven by ressentiment-and that a lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties. You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism-a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don't have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don't have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of "American-ness" relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.
I thought he might be about to say something genuinely interesting--the earlier (late 2009) post he linked to did, to a certain extent, including the quip:
Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag.
In short, he specified that it was conservatives in particular (though not exclusively) who leaned heavily on American exceptionalism as a crutch. He went to explicate a bit, and wrote:
The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance-but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary. Check out the RNC's new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan "Listen to Me!" There's almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it's fundamentally about people's sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks.
Of course, not only were the policy problems "distinctly secondary," the most incendiary were purely hallucinatory, and most of the rest simply delusional, since Obama's policies were grounded in RomneyCare and its 1990s origins in the Heritage Foundation, so there really wasn't a whole lot for conservatives to legitimately oppose.
In short, Sanchez had a pretty strong case to make, which he distinctly undersold. (He is a libertarian, after all.) But his current post didn't really do much of anything to bring up the more subtle dynamics discussed in his earlier post.
What I found more interesting, actually, was the reaction of several commentators piling on to justify American exceptionalism, and to do so in distinctly tribalistic anti-leftist ways (all of which, I would argue, is at root driven by ressentiment, including the claim that conservatives are the real Americans by virtue of allegiance to founding values and principles that are either actually liberal in origin or else invented more recently by conservatives--such as remaking America as originally a "Christian nation") :
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DivisionByZero // Nov 5, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Well, one could construe "exceptionalism" to mean that America is exceptional in the sense that it is not socialist. In other words the American way of life is better than the socialist one. Whether it's true or not is certainly up for debate and I am sure that most socialists would disagree. It's more like capitalist machismo than nationalism.
Except, of course, we have roughly as much institutional socialism as other Anglophone liberal welfare states, with the notable exception of healthcare for those under 65. Our history lacks socialist party representation in the national legislature, but that's something else again. And considering how vehemently even Tea Partiers cling to their Medicare and their Social Security, I find it pretty darned implausible that folks are expressing "capitalist machismo [rather] than nationalism," except in a delusional sense. And, of course, the delusional is distinctively nationalistic in how it is commonly stirred up.
Left coast dave // Nov 6, 2010 at 11:43 am
American Exceptionalism is the concept that our founders created a government and gave it limits on its power. That gave individuals the freedom to prosper. The left hates this notion of limited government and thus perverts and attacks the notion of American Exceptionalism.
To which Sanchez himself replied:
"American Exceptionalism is the concept that our founders created a government and gave it limits on its power"
That is a true and important concept, but it is also not at all what "American exceptionalism" means.
It also should be added that the idea of limited government is a distinctively liberal one, directly opposed to the previously dominant conservative idea of absolute government. Although America certainly represented a "great leap forward" as it were, there was clear continuity with over six centuries of British history, from the Magna Charta onward, over which period of time conservatives associated with the crown routinely opposed restrictions on state power, while liberals pressed for the expansion of freedoms, claiming them as historical, God-given rights. Over time, this division became increasingly common in other European countries as well, particularly after the Reformation.
Among the limits on federal power the Founders imposed--out of perceived political necessity--was a limit on the power to end slavery in the states, which persisted longest and its cruelest forms amongst the most conservative state governments, those of the traitorous South. That limit on federal state power most definitely did not give individuals "the freedom to prosper."
In short, what we hear from " Left coast dave" is a demonstrably false tribal narrative of American conservatives. We hear a very similar version from another commentator:
sinz54 // Nov 10, 2010 at 10:29 am
America is exceptional in one very important respect: Except for the American Indians, none of us trace our history here back more than a few centuries. We all came here from elsewhere.
Unlike China or Europe, our patriotism doesn't come from race or blood or soil, but from the ideas that our Founding Fathers came up with.
One of those unique ideas is unalienable rights: That we're born with certain rights; governments can take away those rights by force (unfortunately), but government doesn't grant them as gifts.
That idea had originated in Europe by men like Rousseau, but no society there could put those ideas into effect because all those societies evolved from statist pasts. Whereas our Founding Fathers, on this continent, started from scratch. They could have invented any type of relationship of Man to government. They came up with the one we now inherit.
If there's one idea that the modern socialist Left will never accept, it's that of unalienable rights. To them, we all start from belonging to a collective, and any rights we have are granted as some gift-and can always be taken away again.
And that's why they are furious about this notion of "American exceptionalism." They admire Europe-despite its recent history of bloodlettings and ethnic cleansings (ask the Roma in France)-and wish to wipe out this notion that Americans will always have rights as a birthright. They don't believe in that.
This version of the narrative is equally false--and not just because it's conservatives who are now quite swept up in the idea of taking away birthright citizenship from people they don't like . In addition to the points already made above, I should point out that idea of inalienable rights came from Locke's theory of the social contract, which itself was a deliberate justification of the state on bottom-up secular grounds, in direct opposition to the top-down theocratic justification of the divine right of kings. It was, in short, the secular left alternative to the religious right establishment of Europe at the time.
What's more, it's entirely false that "That idea had originated in Europe by men like Rousseau, but no society there could put those ideas into effect because all those societies evolved from statist pasts." Indeed, As the Wikipedia entrey for the British Bill of Rights explains:
The Bill of Rights was passed by Parliament in December 1689. It was a re-statement in statutory form of the Declaration of Right presented by the Convention Parliament to William and Mary in March 1689, inviting them to become joint sovereigns of England. It enumerates certain rights to which subjects and permanent residents of a constitutional monarchy were thought to be entitled in the late 17th century, asserting subjects' right to petition the monarch, as well as to have arms in defence (these ideas about rights reflected those of the political thinker John Locke and they quickly became popular in England). It also sets out-or, in the view of its drafters, restates-certain constitutional requirements of the Crown to seek the consent of the people, as represented in parliament.
Thus, the relationship of individuals to the state not only had the exact same philosophical origins in England as in America, but they were put forth in legal form a full century earlier than in America, despite the fact that British society had indeed evolved from a statist past.
Naturally, our society evolved from a statist past as well. Our Founding Fathers did not start from scratch, they started with thirteen state governments already in place, along with a failing confederation of them all. Indeed, the statist institution of slavery in the southern states was one of the most profound constraints the founders labored under, and it most assuredly prevented them from declaring the very universal freedoms that conservatives deludedly claim were there, since universal freedoms would apply to blacks as well as whites. What's more, originally, the Bill of Rights was meant to restrict state power only for the federal government, as some state governments already restricted even white citizens' rights, particularly religious liberty. But getting the historical facts right would seriously get in the way of the American conservative tribal origin myths, which, of course, are entirely silent about the above-noted matter of slavery.
In short, what we see in these comments is precisely the sort of thing that Sanchez was somewhat cautiously getting at in his earlier post: This is a shared tribal claim to special status, that one doesn't have to do anything as an individual to claim, except to assert one's group membership. The only difference is that these particular individuals are making it explicit that it's not enough to be an American to make these claims, one must be an American conservative. |
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