Whatever the result of the current governmental stalemate, one thing is certain: The ongoing crisis of workers in general and the African American working class and poor in particular will continue unabated.

This is understandable given that, when the U.S. and the capitalist world faced the unraveling of the global economic order in 2008, the health of banks and the financial sector proved the main concern of Congress and the President. In fact, the recession presented managers of the global order with an opportunity to impose much-needed “discipline” on workers in the U.S. and Europe through the imposition of austerity programs as well as regressive fiscal and monetary policies, which had the dual objectives of weakening the relative bargaining power of labor while enhancing the dominance of the financial sector globally.

The result has been that the contradictions of the global capitalist/colonialist order finally caught up with the labor aristocracy in the West. Nor were the Western working class or its organizations prepared for the systematic assault on their relative privilege.

From the Golden Dawn in Greece to the Tea Party “movement” in the U.S., the economic crisis has once again brought forth the ugly specter of race-based fascism, that seemingly cellular characteristic of the more extreme expressions of white supremacist ideology that has poisoned Euro-American consciousness and culture and undermined national and transnational working-class solidarity and anti-imperialist politics.

The Euro-American corporate and financial elites have always been able to take advantage of the material and ideological contradictions of workers in the West by manipulating those contradictions while simultaneously developing unified strategic positions and global institutions to protect and advance their interests.

In the current battle over the issues of governmental spending and the debt ceiling in the U.S., there is general bipartisan agreement on the fundamentals, which adhere closely to the elite agenda. The only element gumming up the process toward passing a budget and raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring the integrity of the U.S. monetary system, is the reactionary Tea Party faction of the Republican Party.

This obstruction to the smooth flow of capital is based on an almost pathological hatred for all things Obama, some of which is overt and some of which (the socially unacceptable components, including white supremacy) is largely subtextual. Yet the Tea Party was born in 2009 in part as a reaction to the excesses of Wall Street and governmental policy, specifically the bank bailout plan that appeared to reward [did reward] the very same financiers who precipitated the crisis. Tea Party sympathizers, however, allowed this focus to be lost in a sea of their own race-based vitriol of personal attacks and name-calling.

The undeniable influence of racial politics in the actions of the Tea Party and its Congressional proxies is more than ironic. Before he was elevated to the position of Presidential candidate, Obama was thoroughly vetted by powerful elements of the ruling elite. They concluded that he could indeed be trusted to carry out the traditional role as the mediator and chief executive officer for capital, required of any individual who holds the office of U.S. President. Had he not met that litmus test, the cash needed to mount a competitive campaign would never have materialized, and some other water-carrier would now occupy the White House.

In other words, Obama was cleared to uphold the interests of the white minority ruling class – interests that historically have been counter to those of the Tea Party base – and has been dutifully protecting those interests even as the Tea Party obsesses about his race. The fact that the only questions about spending priorities contained in the budget and demands that the debt ceiling be raised are coming from this dubious source is a bizarre indicator of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for normal in U.S. politics.

The failure to challenge the priorities of the Obama administration from a radical, left, human-rights position that addresses the needs of poor and working-class people reflects the utter collapse of reform liberalism, the ideological confusion and self-marginalization of U.S. radicalism along with its capitulation to white supremacist ideology, and the centralization of corporate news media with its narrow, mind-numbing propaganda.

As a result, the discussion on U.S. fiscal and monetary policy has been entirely controlled by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. During the last few years and in the weeks leading up to the current governmental impasse, Euro-American banking and corporate interests have accepted an orthodoxy that privileged the issue of debt reduction, primarily in order to avoid defaults and keep debt payments flowing. The resulting governmental policies, including the back-door austerity program known as sequestration, meant that the plight of the working class and poor was effectively “disappeared.”

Nevertheless, massive unemployment, whole communities without access to affordable food, crumbling infrastructure, entire dying cities like Detroit, crime and violence as the oppressed turn on themselves, and a hopelessness born out of the realization that in this economy some human beings are disposable, are realities that just cannot be wished away. Millions of people in the U.S., rural and urban, wake up every day faced with the challenge of trying to fend for themselves in the dismal new reality of a U.S. economy that can no longer even pretend to offer the false promise of social mobility and material prosperity.

The economic and social contradictions exist for an effective challenge to the rule of capital in Europe, the U.S. and in many parts of the world. In the U.S. we are not going to be able to reverse the four-decade-long assault on the working class if we don’t confront and overcome the influences of white supremacist ideology. As the hard right continues to congeal with direct and indirect appeals to white racial solidarity, we can no longer afford to avoid this historic confrontation.

Because the interests of workers and the poor are not part of the conversation around spending and the debt, it is certain that the day after the U.S. government resolves this latest phony drama, the reality of systematic human rights abuses in the form of racial oppression, capitalist exploitation and colonial national repression will not have been altered in any form.

Ajamu Baraka is a long-time human rights activist, writer and veteran of the Black Liberation, anti-war, anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity Movements in the United States.  He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. He can be reached through his website.

Once upon a time there was a young female screenwriter (Writer) who got employed to adapt a book into a feature film. In order to snag the job, Writer wrote twenty pages of the script for free, and sent it to the Producer as a sample so that they would hire her. Producer liked what he saw and employed her on the spot for one draft, and one rewrite of the script.

As with every single job there had ever been, Writer did not just do one draft and one rewrite for Producer: Writer did about seven different versions of the script for this price. Writer didn’t mind: this is how you get work in Hollywood, and every writer knows that the first draft is never going to be enough. Even those writers who are A-list are rarely going to really hand in a ‘first’ draft.

Producer seemed happy with the script, until Director dropped out to work on a large budget movie. Producer brooded for a while, and six months later approached Writer with some ideas for significant, radical changes in direction. Writer expressed her concerns about these ideas, said she didn’t think she could do them, but offered a compromise of changes and edits she could do. Producer seemed happy to proceed, paid Writer some more money, and so Writer worked exclusively on the rewrite for a month, and sent the new version of the script in.

A week or so later, Producer emailed Writer one afternoon and asked her to come into the office the next morning for a meeting to talk about the script and make some changes. Writer was working on a TV show the next day, and was unable to come in. Later in the evening, Writer was going on vacation for a week to a faraway land with no phone or internet, and upon her return, would be flying to New York to research a script. Writer suggested that rather than wait for her return to Los Angeles which would be in 3-4 weeks time, Producer call her in a week, the day she return from her vacation in the faraway land. Writer was surprised to find that she received numerous missed calls from the Producer while she was in the all-day TV meeting, none of which left a voicemail. She alerted her agent to the fact Producer was trying to get in touch with her and she would be unavailable until XXX date, suggested perhaps her agent make sure Producer was OK as he seemed very intent on getting hold of her even when she said she wasn’t available, and then Writer left for her week’s vacation.

Upon her return, Agent said that Producer had been calling Agent’s office all week very urgently. Agent was also on vacation that week and had called Producer as soon as she got back in the office. Producer was, by this time, very irate and insisted that the script (draft 7) Writer had produced was unusable, and he would have to hire a new writer to start from scratch.

When Writer heard this news, she was not too surprised. She had felt that the numerous phone calls she had received from Producer when she had informed him she was unavailable had indicated a certain degree of impatience and displeasure over the news that she was indisposed. She had sought advice from a friendly
screenwriter friend with more experience than her, who had said, “If you’ve been paid for 1 draft and done 8, that’s insane. Is there some serious possibility hanging out there — Cate Blanchett has some notes — or is the producer just churning? At this point, the notes better be incredibly minor.  He’s had a lot of bites at the apple and if you’re not almost there, you’re probably not going anyplace. As for ignoring him, you’ve responded.  He just didn’t like what he heard. Sounds like a typical guy to me….”

Writer was sad to leave the script, and sadder still that her busy schedule had prompted Producer, who had seemed extremely happy with her work up until that point, to suddenly decide to fire her. One week he was calling her into the office, and the next he was firing her. It seemed more than a little petty. She tweeted about it, making sure not to name any names:

Producer called me into studio last week. I said I was busy until next week. This week he says he wants to fire me. Oh the politics.

… and then thought no more about it. Until a week or so later, Agent called sounding very confused. “Producer said you’ve been tweeting about him, and that you’ll never work again in Hollywood if that’s how you talk about people.”

Writer laughed, and immediately recalled the tweet she had fired off. “Is Producer stalking me on twitter?” she asked Agent, very confused. “Why is he googling me if he thinks the script is terrible and doesn’t want to work with me again?”

Agent sounded perplexed. “He told me someone in his office alerted him to the fact you were sounding off over twitter about him.”

“Well, that’s obviously bullshit. I didn’t use his name, I’ve never met anyone from his office, and someone would have to be really clued into the situation to know who I was talking about, given I’m working with about eight producers at the moment. It sounds like he fired me because he was annoyed I wasn’t available, and is winding himself up by checking my reaction, which he hoped would be contrite and penitent. I do find it ridiculous that one day he’s calling me into his office for notes, and the next he’s firing me through you. It’s like playground politics.”

The more Writer thought about it, the uneasier she felt. Her twitter feed had been predominantly about her pregnancy and impending motherhood – a fact she had been careful to conceal from Producer and those she had been working with because she felt it was unprofessional to share her personal life with them, and she knew many people had strange preconceptions about women, employment and pregnancy. He had obviously seen all these tweets, either before firing her or after, and yet still felt compelled to call Agent with a veiled threat that Writer would never work again. Writer felt that for politics sake, she should call and apologize to Producer, but she felt uncomfortable doing so when she knew she had done nothing wrong except be firm and polite when Producer had wanted to see her when she was working on the TV show. Apologize for tweeting? Hell, it was the 21st century. That would be like apologizing for farting in bed.

Agent told Writer to take care and be careful what she said. Writer had heard this warning before. Writer had strong views and did not like the dishonesty which often passes for courtesy in the entertainment industry. Once a Producer in London had told her to never write about —— ——- (Man) in negative terms, because his power and influence was so great, he could destroy your career. An actor had once been quoted in a newspaper saying something critical about Man, and he had never worked on anything Man had ever funded again. Which was quite a lot of cable and TV shows, because Man was very rich. Writer hadn’t ever felt the need to say anything critical about Man because other people did it very well without her, but she felt annoyed that in order to work, she had to censor herself and be aware that sometimes the people funding movies and TV shows were very big political figures who were often involved in controversial corporations and shady wheeler-dealing.

Writer knew that it wasn’t just because she was a writer, and therefore pretty low down on the Hollywood food chain, but also because she was female that she often butted heads with a ragingly misogynistic industry. She’d once worked for an Independent European Producer (EP) who had a habit of getting extremely drunk and calling her at random hours of the day to scream down the phone “YOUR AGENT IS A FUCKING CUNT” and to inform her that the Oscar winning female Producers he was working with were “Stupid fucking snotty bitches who think they’re better than anyone else”. After EP introduced her to the Director of the script she had written for them, and he decided to remove the very few female characters they had in the script and replace them with men, Writer told EP she was unable to make the changes Director had asked for and she thought it would be better if she left the project so they could move forward. EP screamed at her down the phone, and she never heard from them again.

Writer hoped to work with more women in the future, or at least men who didn’t seem to consider her little more than a secretary (no offense to secretaries), but Writer was pragmatic about the chances of this happening in the film and TV industry: it was very remote. The one Female Producer (FP) she had worked with, and whom had friended her on facebook, had taken huge offense to Writer’s anti-racist political views, writing belligerent comments on every article she posted, or taking issue with everything she expressed. Writer was uncomfortable arguing back because FP was, in normal life, a lovely lady, very successful, very influential, very clever and extremely important in the film industry. Writer felt that she was being backed into a corner where she could not defend herself without offending FP, and she could not just ignore FP’s comments without implicitly condoning the sometimes offensive views she expressed. She felt that if she blocked FP, then she would cause even more trouble. She wished FP would just leave her alone and quit taking offense at the concept of White Privilege.

In the end, Writer stopped posting political articles on facebook, and FP stopped writing on Writer’s wall, and Writer thought everything was OK again and she could see FP in person without it being too difficult and awkward. However, it turned out FP had just defriended her, and Writer had the sinking feeling that they would probably never work together again.

Writer considered penning a first person screed about her difficult and frustrating experiences in the Film and TV industry, but her husband pointed out that, as Producer had said, she would probably never work in Hollywood again, and that if she wanted to be successful as a writer, she should delete her twitter, delete her facebook, never, ever say what she thought, endeavor to eradicate her personality, stop writing the opinion pieces about politics she wrote in her spare time, quit doing political activism and community organizing, always agree with people who paid her wages, and be extremely gracious when someone fired her, sending them warm and understanding emails which were apologetic and humble. Frustration was a no no. No one likes to know that the person they just fired might harbor some negative feelings towards them. People like to think that firing people shows employees who’s boss and teaches them a lesson about respect.

Writer instead decided to put out a plea to find all the other people in the film and TV industry who wanted to make good movies and good TV and work with good, honest, outspoken, opinionated people. Husband vomited into his mouth a little, choked on it, and suggested she move to Portland, make pickles and write critically acclaimed obscure literary fiction that no one would ever read instead. Writer answered that she couldn’t do that as she wasn’t a white male and didn’t have an MFA. Husband agreed.

Ruth Fowler is a journalist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. She’s the author of Girl Undressed. She can be followed on Twitter at @fowlerruth.

The neoconservatives, whose ideas led to so much senseless slaughter and destruction when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran the American empire, and their functional equivalents, the humanitarian interventionists who have taken charge under Barack Obama, twaddle on, at opportune moments, about American exceptionalism.

It is one of those expressions, like “the American dream,” that have no fixed meaning, only vague connotations, but that are sometimes useful in political contexts.

Following the dubious lead of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, contemporary exponents of the idea moralize the concept.  For them, American exceptionalism means American moral superiority.

This understanding is ideologically pernicious, philosophically incoherent, and preposterous on its face.  But it does serve a purpose.

President Obama’s September 24 address to the United Nations General Assembly exemplified the idea’s flaws and its uses in a perspicuous way.

It is too bad that this speech, and the self-righteous saber rattling about Syria that preceded it, have already fallen into the great American memory hole.  Had their fifteen minutes of news cycle fame lasted longer, the ludicrousness of Obama’s contentions might have become too obvious for even our base and servile media to ignore or deny.

But Tea Party acting out put the kibosh on that prospect. In a display of mindless obstinacy extreme even for them, they decided to shut the government down unless Obama would give in on funding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The focus of the news cycle therefore shifted away from Obama’s feeble efforts to justify American bellicosity to divisions within the Republican Party, and to the mean-spiritedness and imbecility of the Tea Partiers who now run the show.

This development would not have been all bad, had the corporate media made plain how the reform Republicans now recklessly oppose is essentially a Republican plan – forged in the early 90s at the Heritage Foundation as an alternative to Hillarycare, and implemented, just a few years ago, in Massachusetts under then Governor Mitt Romney.

But that would be too much to expect from them; and indeed, it never came to pass.  Instead, Obama’s proclamation of America’s probity emerged unscathed.

And so, a moralized understanding of American exceptionalism is still very much in the public arena, and still doing harm.

It is therefore all but certain that the next time a new military adventure in the Middle East or elsewhere beckons, the neocon-humanitarian interventionist twaddle will resume.

Taking exception to it is therefore still timely and, the media’s attention notwithstanding, as urgent now as it was just a few days ago.

[pullquote]It is too bad that [Obama’s UN] speech, and the self-righteous saber rattling about Syria that preceded it, have already fallen into the great American memory hole.  Had their fifteen minutes of news cycle fame lasted longer, the ludicrousness of Obama’s contentions might have become too obvious for even our base and servile media to ignore or deny.[/pullquote]

 *     *   *

What Obama said in defense of the idea was more than usually slippery – in part because he implicitly conflated America’s exceptionalism with his own.

This rhetorical slight of hand has become familiar in the Age of Obama.

Obama uses it, for example, to counter growing popular discontent with the surveillance state he actively superintends.

Edward Snowden’s revelations have brought the Bush-Obama war on centuries old protections against state interferences with individuals’ lives and behaviors into public awareness.  But not to worry!  Obama will see to it that only good will come from what the NSA and the others do.  How could it be otherwise?  His moral superiority is beyond reproach; it is exceptional.

Therefore even as his administration trashes privacy rights and Constitutional guarantees of due process, this President, Constitutional scholar extraordinaire, along with Attorney General Eric Holder and the surveillance state’s lesser minions, can be trusted implicitly.

They will do the right thing not just because they are good, but because they are so good that they needn’t abide by rules that constrain others; they are too exceptional for that.

Similarly, in foreign affairs, President Drone wants to be free to kill and maim as he pleases.  And so he asks for unstinting trust – on the grounds that America is and always has been the world’s best and most consistent guarantor of freedom and justice.

At the UN, he said, in effect, that America is not just one state among many; its essential goodness puts it in acategory by itself.

No matter that in the real world the United States, especially (but not only) after World War II, has been, by far, the main perpetrator of violence and reaction throughout the world, and the main prop for some of the most vicious dictatorships known to humankind.

What matters is that, even when we make mistakes, we are essentially good.  This is why the world should acknowledge that a pax Americana is our planet’s best hope.

Obama told the world leaders attending his speech that the peoples of the world already know this in their hearts.  The problem is just that some of them are in the thrall of ideologies that preach otherwise — and therefore don’t know that they know.

“Anti-American” ideologies are always at the ready.  Communism is gone and secular nationalism is on the wane.  But Islamism has arisen to fill the void.  The Leader of the Free World knows this well.  Since the late 1970s, American governments have been doing their best to stoke the flames.

An so it is that, just as, in the memorable words of the late (and unlamented) Leona Helmsley, taxes are only for the “little people,” international law is for lesser – unexceptional – states only.

Being exceptional, America can make whatever exceptions to international law it pleases – not because it can, but because it is good.  This is true now more than ever because now America is led by someone obviously trustworthy and wise — a Nobel laureate, no less.

The same holds, in diminished degree, for countries that participate in America’s essential goodness – Israel, of course, and the UK and sometimes Germany and France along with other obedient, EU countries.

On the other hand, lesser states and peoples, the unexceptional ones, must follow the rules – without exception. When they don’t, or when Obama thinks they don’t, they can rightfully be beaten into submission by any means necessary and suitable to the exigencies of electoral politics in the United States.

In other words, at the UN, Obama did more than merely flaunt the “get out of jail free” card that American presidents have always wielded.   He tried to justify deploying it at his pleasure.

Needless to say, few in attendance that day were impressed by the cogency of the case Obama made.  They are not fools.  They know that, in the arena of world politics, naked power, whenever it feels compelled to justify itself, does so by appealing to high and noble purposes; it always has.  In this respect, America is no exception.

But it is different from most because the humanitarian interveners now calling the shots probably are sincere or, what comes to the same thing, exceptionally (unusually) uncynical in their attempts at self-justification.

Do Susan Rice and Samantha Power –or, for that matter, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – believe the nonsense they spout?  Terrifying as the prospect may be, this seems to be the case.

Perhaps their sincerity makes them less odious ethically than some of their counterparts in other times and places.  But, for reasons that Niccolò Machiavelli long ago made clear, in the realm of Realpolitik,cynicism can be and often is a virtue, and sincerity a vice.  If Obama understands this, there is no sign of it.

Perhaps the Obama of old, the one who had yet to enter into national politics, understood; we know that he was at least exposed to the arguments.  Evidently, years spent stewarding world capitalism are not just morally degrading; they are intellectually debilitating as well.

The problem with a moralized understanding of American exceptionalism is not only that its factual basis is glaringly – preposterously – wrong.  The idea is philosophically incoherent.

The reason why, in short, is that morality admits of no exceptions.

Let us say that an ethic provides an account of how a person ought to act; and that morality designates a kind of ethic – one that holds that, in pertinent circumstances, one should act (and deliberate) from an impartial or agent-neutral point of view.

That idea is basic to modern understandings of justice and right; but even at the dawn of the modern era, it was not a new idea.  It is anticipated in the ethical theories of many of the world’s religious traditions.

The Golden Rule is an example.  To do unto others as you would have others do unto you implies that, from the point of view in question, the moral point of view, what distinguishes oneself from others is of no account; that, for purposes of determining what one ought to do, only what one has in common with other persons matters.

The moral point of view is assumed in most strains of ethical theory.  However it has also been subjected to trenchant criticism.

Karl Marx was a critic, though his concerns had to do with real world applications of the moral point of view in class divided societies, not with the soundness of the idea itself.

Marx thought that an ideal society – the (small-c) communism towards which history was moving — would genuinely institutionalize the moral equality of persons.  But this side of communism, where class struggle is the rule, institutionalized morality sometimes functions as a snare and illusion that reinforces existing systems of class domination.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a more radical critic; he took issue with the very notion of equality that the moral point of view supposes and therefore with the idea of morality itself.

In pressing his case, he made use of notions of virtue and of inherent differences among human beings that have roots in the ethical traditions of Greek and Roman antiquity and in the thinking of other “heroic” civilizations.

Proponents of American exceptionalism, like Barack Obama, are, to a man and woman, defenders of the class divisions Marx abhorred; and they can hardly be accused of harboring sympathies for the kind of ethical thinking Nietzsche advanced.

If called to explain their stance, they would surely reject notions of inherent gradations of goodness in persons – or nations.

This is why, at the UN, Obama took care to base his assertion of American moral superiority on America’s good deeds on the world stage and on its many sacrifices of blood and treasure.

No matter, again, that the purported goodness of those deeds is a plain confabulation.  No matter either that the U.S. came out rather well from World War II in contrast to other belligerents, or that the burdens most Americans have born in the cause of American world domination are trivial in comparison to those America has unleashed on the nations and peoples it dominates.

To be sure, the (mainly) economic conscripts our chicken hawk leaders persist in putting in harm’s way have suffered mightily.  Many of them have been driven to despair or even suicide – not to defend their nation, but to implement neoconservative and humanitarian interventionist folly.  But their travails pass unnoticed to the vast majority of Americans who bear no sacrifices at all.

In short, the facts are overwhelmingly not on Obama’s side.  But even if they were, it would hardly matter because there is no such thing as moral capital — except in the propaganda mills of states intent on justifying their oppression of others by appealing to historical events of the near or distant past.

Thus by declaring itself “the state of the Jewish people,” Israel claims a right to do as it pleases to Palestinians or anyone else in its way – because of what the Nazis did to European Jews more than a half-century ago.  Sometimes it is even suggested that victimhood is essentially part of the Jewish condition, and that this somehow frees Israel from the usual norms of international conduct.

At least the Israelis can mount a spurious case in defense of that contention; that Obama would even suggest anything similar for the United States defies credulity.

But even if there were a case to be made, it would be irrelevant.

There is no way to argue for exceptions to the requirements of morality by appealing to the exceptional morality of those for whom the exceptions are claimed.  The very idea is self-contradictory.

*  *  *

The neoconservative-humanitarian interventionist purchase on American exceptionalism also comes with a lineage that conflicts with the drift of the political line its proponents nowadays advance.

For them, American exceptionalism is a tool in global capitalism’s arsenal.  It was not always so.

As remarked, the turning point came during the Reagan presidency.  It was a by-product of an ideological blitz that drew substantially on Anglo-Protestant, especially Puritan, theology, and on related political currents that had lain dormant for two centuries or more.

Reagan’s reference to “the shining city on the hill,” at the 1984 Republican Convention, is a well-known example.

The more or less intended effect of this way of presenting America’s role in the world is to move the discussion onto a quasi-theological plane — depicting America’s essential goodness as a transcendent property of the state.

Needless to say, this is not the way the effort is usually described.  If it were, its ludicrousness would be too apparent to bear even casual scrutiny.

The effect is similar to what has been achieved by calling the Nazi led effort to exterminate European Jewry a “Holocaust.”  The biblical reference suggests that ordinary causal explanations cannot explain what happened; that the evil lies outside the scope of ordinary human understanding.

This is nonsense, of course, but at least, in that case, there was a genuine and profound evil to explain.  In declarations of America’s essential goodness in world affairs, there is nothing to account for – naturalistically, theologically or in any other way.  There is no there there.

This is not to say that talk of American exceptionalism is necessarily pernicious.  Before the Reaganite turn, before the expression and the concept it articulates were construed in a moralized way, “American exceptionalism” was a benign and sometimes useful notion.

The idea goes back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of American democracy in the late 1830s.  Tocqueville deemed America qualitatively different from the countries of the Old World; in this way, it was “exceptional.”

The differences, he thought, were striking enough to call for a fresh understanding of historical trajectories and democratic forms.  The absence of a feudal past figured importantly in Tocqueville’s discussion, as did other ostensibly unique features of the American situation.

Decades later, a number of historians — Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, among others – were struck by the feebleness of the socialist movement in the United States.  In this respect, the United States seemed qualitatively different from  contemporaneous industrialized societies.  This exception to the rule likewise called for an explanation.

To account for this American exceptionalism, they made much of the fact that, up to their time, there had always been a frontier ready to absorb people whose discontents might otherwise have taken a less exceptional turn.  Other pertinent factors included levels of immigration that gave rise to animosities that blocked the formation of social solidarities; and, of course, there was the race question, as there always is.

On the whole, these pre-Reagan invocations of the term, and more often of the concept associated with it, came from the Left.  In the late 1920s, there was even a Communist version of American exceptionalism, associated with Jay Lovestone, a leader of the American Communist Party.

Lovestone thought that America’s industrial power and seemingly unlimited resources exempted it from the usual “laws of development” of capitalist societies.  Stalin promptly quashed that heresy; and, by the 1930s, the idea was heard no more in Communist circles.

Thus it has only been in the past several decades that “American exceptionalism” has changed sides; that the idea has been invoked to justify according carte blanche to American governments to do as they please.

The appropriation of the idea within liberal-imperialist ranks is newer still.  Its roots go back barely two decades – to ill-informed reactions to events in Bosnia and Rwanda.   The prominence this way of thinking now enjoys is, for the most part, a creature of Obama’s presidency.

* * *

The questions that first raised the idea of American exceptionalism remain pertinent and, to some extent, unresolved.  But in view of what has happened to the term in the current period, it is perhaps best that it be retired.

In its moralized sense, American exceptionalism is a noxious doctrine.  Reduced to its core, it amounts to nothing more than an expression of raw power – one that puts the United States beyond legal or customary constraints, that gives it license to do what it wants because it can.

This was probably not what Obama had in mind by the slogan “yes, we can.”  It is certainly not what his supporters thought he meant.  But it is what his foreign and military policies amount to.  Notwithstanding all the blather “American exceptionalism” has elicited of late, there is nothing more to it than that.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).