In the coming election year, we are going to hear more than enough from Republican candidates about “American exceptionalism;” and even Obama has been known more than once to dip into this reliquary when his rhetoric needs just the right patriotic burnish.
I thought I’d get ahead of the rush and have my say about what American EXCEPTionalism means to me.
“Americans get the best healthcare in the world!”
How many times has that one been trotted out in opposition to healthcare reform? We don’t need any changes to the current system because “it’s the best healthcare in the world.”
EXCEPT when you can’t afford the astronomical cost.
EXCEPTional it is, indeed, if judged soley on the amount of money we annually invest in it. When outcomes are considered? Not so much.
It’s true that we have some EXCEPTional physicians and facilities.
EXCEPT that they are not available to anyone who can’t afford the skyrocketing cost of maintaining private health insurance.
The upshot of our EXCEPTional healthcare is that we have one of the highest infant mortality rates and shortest life-expectancies in the Western industrialized world.
And let’s not forget that great American educational system!
Once again, our math and literacy skills now fall well below those of much of the educated world. In fact, we are EXCEPTionally mediocre on that score; and with Tea Party hostility to federal spending and an organized effort by players like the Koch Bros. and the Waltons (of Walmart fame) to end public education, we are likely to fall further down that well.
How about our EXCEPTional American-style democracy?
We have vigorously sought to export it for decades now. Former president and humanitarian Jimmy Carter has made something of a latter-day career of invigilating democratic elections in other countries.
So, we must still be an EXCEPTional example of democracy in action.
EXCEPT when gerrymandering takes place, as it most famously did recently in Texas. But nowhere EXCEPT in Texas, right? Nope. The gerrymandering model is playing out in re-districting dramas all over the map.
But our democracy is still EXCEPTional.
EXCEPT when voter suppression takes place, as is currently being attempted in the state of Florida
EXCEPT when the media declare a winner before the polling places are even closed; and that false winner is carried to victory soley by the expectations created through the premature announcement, and even though the final balloting invalidates it. (Bush v. Gore, 2000.)
EXCEPT when you belong to the poorer classes in America.
Democracy doesn’t work out so well for poor people. Since Citizens United equated money to free speech, what many had long suspected was the operational reality of American democracy became officially so.
In closing, I’d like to take EXCEPTion to the whole tone of superiority.
Those EXCEPTional claims are just a bunch of old wheezes that now raise the merest flutter from our blushing national banner…and that flag is probably made in China from Saudi oil products.
We would do well to learn a little history of bravado.
Claims of British EXCEPTIONalism in the nineteenth century didn’t save her empire from slow decline and dissolution.
Nazi Germany was so convicted of its EXCEPTionalism that it extinguished itself with the sheer fury of insistence.
For better or worse, global fortunes rise and fall more or less in tandem now.
Believing without question that the “market” will somehow miraculously do the right thing, we’ve privatized everything but the kitchen sink in America; then watched placidly as the profits went overseas and our jobs were out-sourced.
American EXCEPTionalism? It’s time to get over ourselves.