The 1920’s were known as the roaring twenties while the current decade might best be described as the lying twenties. The era of the big lie was ushered in with the epithet Make America Great Again, a statement founded on false hood. The ideals America once represented which inspired the world and led so many to embrace American democracy, humanitarianism, and initiative are in stark contrast with America's domestic and foreign policies. America's willingness to put its wealth and will to work to support those ideals throughout the world are what earned our country its admiration but its past is also littered with acts of cruelty, oppression, and human indignity. The idea that our nation has fallen from greatness and in need of restoration is a knowing distortion of the truth. Those who embrace this mythology have no interest in restoring American ideals, they did not live and fight through two world wars, a depression, and a bitter civil rights era to preserve them. They are the embittered, entitled, and disaffected, dreaming of an America that is exceptional in all the wrong ways.
You may dismiss this post as an unpatriotic, hypocritical or politicized screed, but let me say that nothing could be further from the truth. There is much I admire about our country, much that it has contributed to the benefit of mankind and the ideals on which it was founded still represent the highest aim of those who seek to advance justice and freedom. But if our country wishes pre-eminence it must abandon the myth of American Exceptionalism.
Blessed with vast natural resources and wealth surpassing all other nations, America is riddled with contradiction. We have the costliest healthcare in the world and are among the least healthy, with rampant obesity and opioid addiction and an infant mortality rate among the highest in the world. America is home to many of the most admired centers of learning, awash in colleges and universities but is among the least educated of nations, with scandalously low levels of literacy and numeracy, far below almost every other developed nation. Most nations provide free post secondary education while the cost of even a community college degree is beyond the means of more than half the families in the US, yet our country spends ten times the budget for education on fossil fuel subsidies.
America claims to uphold the rule of law, yet among developed nations is the only one lacking gun control. The US continues to practice mass incarceration, as well as the death penalty, and tolerates state sanctioned torture in the name of defense. America's military budget is ten times that of Russia, three times that of China and twice that of all western nations combined. Where it spends its money speaks volumes about the focus of its concerns and policies.
America is a country comprised of immigrants that actively pursues anti-immigration policy and tolerates economic subjugation. America lays claim to religious tolerance and separation of church and state but enacts laws reflecting a theocratic rule. We claim a system of governance that is the most democratic in the world but are grid-locked by a two party system that dismisses the opinions of most Americans in favor of wealthy self interested donors.
America is not alone in laying claim to exceptionalism, in their day most colonial powers have done so. All believed themselves singular among the nations of the world. If America wishes to restore its legacy, to truly be a leader in deed as well as thought, it must first restore the ambitions it once held.
First and foremost we must cease rewarding politicians whose only achievement on behalf of the American public is to denigrate each other, sabotage constructive dialog and subvert the rule of law. Those who seek to govern must govern –their role is not to create political stalemate. We must prevent corporations and religious institutions from acting as America’s ruling class and restore the rights and privileges of its ordinary citizens. We must preserve our limited resources and use our wealth to benefit our citizens, providing support for affordable healthcare and education and return to the preservation of human rights that our Constitution envisioned. We must pursue peace at home and abroad acting in good faith, avoiding political or corporate adventurism. And, we must make American idealism a living, breathing thing once again, not a dust covered document or a subject of politicized judicial interpretation.
We can be exceptional, not in the cynical sense that some would assert, not as an authoritarian American theocracy, and not as a bulwark of corporate interests but in the manner America once inspired and led, with humility, with tolerance, and a just hand.
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