Is "American Exceptionalism" a joke? (using Donnie's favorite phrase)

[Ohiogal]

This article is kind of a downer, but it’s very well written.

From Salon.....

*******

Since the day after Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016, I've been fretting about the effect of his obvious unfitness and incompetence for the "world order" as we have known it. I've made clear that I don't believe there's any reason why the U.S. should be the perpetual guarantor of security for half the world, nor is it forever obligated to provide some kind of Pax Americana. That was a consequence of America's unique position after World War II, having had the good fortune to escape the destruction of our homeland, which left us in the position of the last country standing. To our credit (and for our own profit) we did handle the aftermath of that war more competently than the world handled the aftermath of World War I.

But it has been clear to me from the moment Donald Trump came down that elevator that if he won, the world order as we knew it, which was already unstable, was going to be turned upside down with no coherent plan to replace it. His one simple understanding of the world was that he, and the United States, have been treated unfairly. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. America and Donald Trump had it all.

Throughout the Cold War and the red-baiting and the military adventurism and the overweening self-regard that we assumed was our right as the Leader of the Free World, we managed to do a lot of things wrong and the price for that has been high. This is true even though, as Salon's Andrew O'Hehir wrote in this searing account of America's precipitous decline as revealed by the coronavirus, the American people hardly noticed:

We have an ingrained national tendency to behave as if the rest of the world simply doesn't exist — or, on a slightly more sophisticated level, as if it were just a colorful backdrop for our vastly more important national dramas.

Read whole article at

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/27/american-vandal-trump-reveals-our-staggering-incompetence-before-the-whole-world/

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Always has been.

[Bucky]

2. From world history perspective, no, it's a valid perspective

It is, however, an anachronism. For the first 150 years of it's history, the United States was genuinely unique from the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure, geographic resources, relative isolation, and most importantly in its form of government.

It really wasn't until the 1920s that you saw a real upswing in the number of countries that had genuinely Democratic forms of government, most of them inspired by the thinking and a propagated myths of American democracy.

With globalization, and a continued upswing and normalization of inclusive democratic government around the world, the United States has thankfully lost the uniqueness of those features. Geographic isolation is about the only thing we still retain that's really outlying in the global situation. And, sadly, we do seem to be backsliding in terms of being a flawed democracy rather than the real McCoy.

I will now sing my rendition of "Memories All Alone in the Moonlight."

As a government and history teacher I highly recommend perusing this website's (Our World In Data) interactive graphics to explore how unique the United States was, starting up its flawed but pioneering democracy at the end of the 18th century

https://ourworldindata.org/democracy

[misanthrope]

6. Great post!

Spoken like someone with a good grasp of the big picture.

[Alliepoo]

3. Good read!

[Ferrets are Cool]

4. We are exceptional at building a military-industrial complex

which dwarfs any other on earth.

[abqtommy]

5. In 1958 the book The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick was published.

(I was 9 years old) In 1963 a movie based on the book and starring Marlon Brando was released. It's
interesting how tRUMP fulfills so many originally imaginative scenarios.

more at link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American