American Exceptionalism
Part One
Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts...a thousand special causes...have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. – Alexis De Tocqueville
More than any other people on Earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free. – John F. Kennedy
When a nation’s ways please the Lord, that nation is blessed with supernatural help. – Jerry Falwell
All modern people have internalized and taken for granted the 5,000-year-old heritage of patri-archy, as well as the 3,000-year-old literalized thinking of the Judeo-Christian tradition. We live in what Joseph Campbell called a “de-mythologized world.” It is not that we no longer have myths, but that we are unaware of them, they no longer serve us, and our ignorance of them makes us dangerous.
Within the wider concentric circles of those older myths, almost all white Americans incorporate the myth of innocence. Our educational, religious and political institutions share the task of teaching everyone the values of individualism, consumerism, optimism, mobility, competition, free enterprise – and underneath, the deeper legacy of Puritanism – that define us as Americans. Above all, the media have replaced priests and storytellers in the ancient function of telling us who we are: a nation of pure intent, existing to enlighten and redeem the world.
We are also taught, however, that as individuals, we enter the world as blank slates with neither baggage nor purpose, free to make our own destiny, on our own merits. We assume that everyone should – and does – have equal access to the resources needed to become anything they want to be, and that one’s responsibilities to the broader community are limited to its defense. But when sceptics confront us with statistics or stories that question these assumptions, it is our characteristic shock, followed quickly by denial and forgetting, that is the proof of the power of myth.
Myths speak of beginnings, how the world came into existence. We take for granted that the gods (or in our secular story – the Pilgrims and founding fathers) have left us the means to aid the process of freely competing with each other, including a free market of ideas, products and services. As a result, most of us still believe that we live in an affluent society – the best in the world – that has resolved old racial problems, indeed that we were meant to do this. Again: our shocked response to evidence to the contrary shows how strongly our mythic narratives hold us.
The idea of American exceptionalism arises out of this contradictory tangle of ideals and realities. Curiously, this collectivity of free and purposeless libertarians thinks of itself as a nation that is inherently different from other nations; that we are in fact superior to other nations; that we have a unique mission to transform the world, to spread opportunity and freedom everywhere. Here is the power of myth revealed: a nation composed of radical individualists sees itself as an individualist among nations.
However, anyone who has achieved some detachment from the myth can see that those rights and freedoms have rarely been available to most citizens. In fact, it took centuries for most residents of the nation to be accepted as citizens. Indeed, those Americans have won their rights only after decades of sacrifice; and many of those rights have been eroded in recent decades. But the fact remains that the myth of national purpose and innocence is so pervasive that even in those rare moments when the nation confronts bare reality, we quickly re-veil it. Recall the conservative refrain of the 1960’s: My country – right or wrong! Americans have developed a very old, unique and massive cognitive dissonance – if facts contradict the story, then it is the facts that must change, as President George H.W. Bush admitted in a rare moment of candor:
I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.
But we also live an eternal mystery: the world’s most materialistic culture, where consumerism and “lifestyles” were invented, where predatory capitalism has reached its apogee, where both major political parties consistently support the largest and most violent military empire in history – is also the most religious country in Christendom, exhibiting much greater acceptance of literal belief and higher levels of church attendance than in other industrialized countries. Only 2% of us are atheists, as opposed to 19% in France; 94% of us express “faith in God,” compared to 70% of Britons.
Our academic and media intellectuals continually reframe information. This is not at all to take a conservative (more accurately, reactionary) position on the mainstream media as “fake news,” only to acknowledge how they set the terms of debate, frame all reporting in subtle but consistent ways, and rarely convey news or commentary that might be perceived as inconsistent with the main story. In other words, the “liberal establishment” has an essentially religious function, like the Inquisition: preventing, or at least marginalizing heresy. For more on this theme, please see these other essays of mine:
Funny Guys, Fake News and Gatekeepers
Old White Men: Historians as the Gatekeepers of American Myth
Americans really are unique in many ways, concluded historian Richard Hofstadter. Whereas other nations’ identities come from common ancestry, “It has been our fate…not to have ideologies, but to be one.” One cannot become un-English or un-French. “Being an American…” wrote another mainstream historian, Seymour Lipset, is “an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are (considered to be) un-American.”
Part Two
I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way. In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. – Ronald Reagan
What I really found unspeakable about the man (Reagan) was his contempt, his brutal contempt, for the poor. – James Baldwin
Here is another curious contradiction. This is the nation that took radical individualism to extremes seen nowhere else. The U.S. is the only major nation with significant Libertarian ideologues (for more, see my article The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism), even if most of them prove to be confused if not hypocritical. And yet, studies show that Americans are more willing to fight than citizens of other nations if their country goes to war.
This stems not only from our violent heritage and historical isolation from war’s effects, but also from our Protestant moralism and the myth of the Frontier. A majority of us tell pollsters that God is the moral guiding force of American democracy. Therefore, when Americans go to war, they generally see themselves as being on God’s side against evil incarnate. Wars are not simple political conflicts; they are crusades, and evil must be annihilated. Lipset writes, “We have always fought the ‘evil empire.’”
Americans have a high sense of personal responsibility and independent initiative. Shared belief in the value of hard work, public education (at least until recently) and equality of opportunity continues to influence attitudes toward progress. In 1991, nearly three fourths of parents expected their offspring to do better than they, and (in 1996) a similar percentage expected to improve their standard of living, while only 40% of Europeans shared this optimism. Forty percent believed that there is a greater chance to move up from one social class to another than thirty years before. We still believe – deeply – in a nation of “self-made men” who succeed by “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps”.
And we also believe in the reverse of that cliché (or, in Jungian terms, its shadow) – that if we are unsuccessful, then poverty is our own fault, not that of the system. Televangelist Jerry Falwell articulated this belief quite clearly:
This is America. If you're not a winner, it's your own fault.
Despite consistent evidence to the contrary, we still believe (at least until quite recently) that if we apply ourselves, play by the rules and compete assertively, we will continue to grow and progress toward fulfillment of our dreams.
But what are those dreams? Aren’t they equal part nightmare? For all its enviably optimistic, pragmatic, “can-do” ways, from the beginning this nation has always carried a great load of fear and anxiety over its shoulder. At the beginning, it was theological anxiety: the constant worry of never definitely knowing if one was among the God’s elect, and it propelled the Puritan to work unceasingly.
Layered above that has been the unsettled dread and guilt of the colonist / settler: the knowledge that one will never belong to this land as one’s Old World ancestors did to their land. These anxieties, and the need to justify the theft of a continent and the enslavement of millions, led to the creation of the myth of American innocence. And this myth required a people who would live in perpetual fear of the unspeakably evil red man (what I have called the outer Other) who might sweep down out of the dark forest at any moment to attack the innocent community, and of the treacherous black man (the inner Other) who might rise up from within the community to mix his blood with the white man’s women and take the riches that he had helped create. Chapter Seven of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence goes into great detail on this theme.
Lipset, whom I quoted above, also reveals the characteristically liberal naiveté of our intellectual classes: “America has been a universalistic culture, slavery and the black situation apart” (my italics). Indeed.
Human bondage, institutionalized discrimination, mass murder of the natives and “free” land created the economic foundations for the very senses of optimism, moralism, affluence and idealism that, to Lipset, distinguish America from other countries. Howard Zinn provides some needed balance:
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.
Without the protracted, unresolved – and unmourned – crimes of genocide and slavery there would be no affluence, no optimism and no innocence in America. And no privilege.
Whoever uses statistics to argue about America is lost in a dream. Since most polls question likely voters, they ignore most poor people, most minorities and most young people. But this confusion provides us with a metaphor for one of the mythic factors in American exceptionalism: “white thinking.” The sense of privilege is so deeply engrained – so invisible – that few whites notice or question it; this is why it has mythic power. Politicians, entertainers and media pundits take the default perspective of the white male, speaking of “African Americans,” or “Asian Americans,” but never “European Americans.” Their language reveals exactly who is a member of the polis and who isn’t. This inconsequential example points, however, to more significant issues.
We begin with the most fundamental aspect of privilege: it is so ubiquitous that it is invisible to nearly all white people, yet consistently, perfectly obvious to every person of color, even the affluent. It is the psychological advantage of having views that define the norm for everyone else. It allows one to view oneself as an individual or to claim that they don’t think of themselves as any color at all. Tim Wise writes,
To even say that our group status is irrelevant…is to suggest that one has enjoyed the privilege of experiencing the world that way (or rather, believing that one has.)
Privilege allows working-class whites to deny that privilege itself exists. It allows them to vote against their economic interests in favor of other advantages. It allows them, even when dirt-poor, to cleave to an identity of white, male, Christian and heterosexual – as moral and clean – rather than as members of a socio-economic class or an alternative gender. It allows them membership in what the Greeks called the polis, even if they can’t afford to live within its gated walls.
White privilege allows one to not have to think about race every day. It is freedom to not be viewed as violent or hyper-sexual, not be racially profiled, not worry about being viewed with suspicion when buying a home, or not be denied a job interview. It is the freedom to avoid being stigmatized by the actions of others with the same skin color.
The invisible ocean of privilege lies at the core of both capitalism and innocence. Despite the grinding tensions and anxieties of modern life, it allows whites – including recent immigrants – to have a sense of place in the social hierarchy and to believe in upward mobility for their children. They can know who they are because, as un-hyphenated Americans, they are not the Other.
For much more, see these essays of mine:
Natives of Old World nations, for all their limited freedoms, have known who they are because they have inhabited their lands more or less forever. But white Americans, in the rush to define themselves in terms of the Other – who they are not – have periodically been overwhelmed by the need to cleanse the polis through the violent rejection of those defined as impure. Without our characteristically American Paranoid Imagination, we would not endure periodic inquisitions and tribunals running from the Salem witch craze through the Red Scare of 1919 through the Eugenics craze, the second Red Scare of McCarthyism, the post-9-11 anxieties that keep the “war on terror” going, the Tea Party and Trumpus (I use “Trumpus” deliberately, to remind the reader that Trump = us).
Here is another surprising contradiction. Because American identity is so fragile, we have always been driven, more than anything, by fear. In 2015, Glenn Greenwald offered some recent quotes by politicians who have made their careers manipulating what is in fact our exceptional willingness to be immobilized by phobias and nightmares:
Lindsey Graham: We have never seen more threats against our nation and its citizens than we do today.
Dianne Feinstein: I have never seen a time of greater potential danger than right now.
NSA chief Michael Rogers: The number of threats has never been greater.
CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell: The ‘lone wolf’ terrorist threat to the United States has never been greater.
Rep. Mike McCaul: Something will detonate...I’ve never seen a greater threat in my lifetime.
“Here we are,” continued Greenwald,
...14 years after 9/11, and it’s still always the worst threat ever in all of history, never been greater. If we always face the greatest threat ever, then one of two things is true: 1) fear-mongers serially exaggerate the threat for self-interested reasons, or 2) they’re telling the truth – the threat is always getting more severe, year after year – which might mean we should evaluate the wisdom of “terrorism” policies that constantly make the problem worse. Whatever else is true, the people who should have the least credibility on the planet are the Lindsey Grahams and Dianne Feinsteins who have spent the last 15 years exploiting the terror threat in order to terrorize the American population into doing what they want.
Here are some other essays of mine on this subject:
Part Three
America remains the indispensable nation...there are times when America, and only America, can make a difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression. – Bill Clinton
I laughed to myself…"Here we go. I'm starting a war under false pretenses.” – Admiral James Stockdale, on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident
These innocent people are trapped in a history they do not understand, and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. – James Baldwin
It is another colossal mystery, if not an outright contradiction. For the American economic and bloated military empire (which spends exponentially more on military defense than the next seven competitors combined) to justify a constant state of war, with nearly a thousand military bases in 160 countries (Russia has 21 foreign bases and China has three), it has to do two things. It must rely on certain subsets of the exceptionalism myth. Michael Ignatieff calls them "exemptionalism" (supporting treaties as long as U.S. citizens are exempt from them); "double standards" (critici-zing "others for not heeding the findings of international human rights bodies but ignoring what these organizations say of the U.S."); and "legal isolationism" (the tendency of U.S. judges to ignore other jurisdictions). But such policies – consistently the same under Democratic or Republican Presidents – rely, in turn, on both the belligerence and the ignorance of the public.
And it must rely on keeping its citizens – us – in a perpetual state of anxiety. If we were honest, we’d have to admit that our neurotic susceptibility to fearmongering is a primary characteristic of American exceptionalism. Here are some others:
America is simultaneously the world’s most religious, patriotic – and materialistic – society. If we add that it is also the most racist, violent, punitive and aggressive of nations, we have the ingredients that require a myth of exceptional innocence. I offer the following statistics and comparisons not out of gratuitous America-bashing, but to put the yawning gap between myth and reality into a helpful perspective. These are a small sample of statistics I collected in 2010 for Chapter Nine of my book. Some point toward our profound, media-nourished ignorance; others reflect the fundamental themes that really do distinguish America from other societies.
Lipset’s innocent fascination with the bright side allows him to avoid the fact that America (with the sole exception, for a few years, of Nazi Germany) is the most violent society in history. Most of the realities that actually make America unique stem from the foundational facts of conquest and racism. Our frontier mythology, individualism and inflated fear of the Other have prevented the gun-control measures that citizens take for granted in almost all countries. Americans own 250 million legal and 25 million illegal firearms, approximately 1.7 guns per adult. Forty percent of us own guns. As a result, the U.S. has been the site of far more mass shootings than in any other nation. Our adult murder rate is seven times higher and our teen murder rate twelve times higher than in Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Canada and Germany. These nations together have 20 million teenagers; in 1990 a total of 300 were murdered. That same year, of America’s 17 million teens, 3,000 were murdered, while thirty of Japan’s ten million teens were murdered, a rate one-fiftieth of ours.
Annually, 15,000 Americans are murdered, 18,000 commit suicide and 1,500 die accidentally by guns. Twenty-four percent of us believe that it is acceptable to use violence to get what we want, while 42% strongly agree that “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice,” compared with 11% of Europeans. Police kill over 1,200 Americans yearly, with people of color grossly over-represented. In 2025, by August 31st, there have already been 308 mass shootings (each with at least four victims), the vast majority of them perpetrated by white men.
Our disdain for authority and love of guns contributes to the highest crime rate in the developed world. How we calculate the numbers, of course, reveals our prejudices toward blue-collar crime and the lack of political will to control white-collar crime, which, though non-violent, is far more influential. And there is a mythical component as well. Our fascination with TV and movie Mafioso indicates that many of us perceive organized crime to be an alternative mode of accessing the American Dream. Sociologist Daniel Bell writes that we see this kind of crime as a “natural by-product of American culture…one of the queer ladders of social mobility...”
But the fear of crime and the need for scapegoats results in over two million Americans in jail, more than in any other country except China, with five times our population. The U.S., with 5% of the world’s population, has 22% of it’s prisoners. And the fact that few of our prisoners and ex-prisoners are allowed to vote is a major factor in the legalized voter suppression that keeps reactionaries in power in over two dozen states. For more on this, see my essay on the election of 2016, Trump: Madness, Machines, Migrations and Mythology.
Traditionally, the fear of crime has also been bound up with the fear of miscegenation, or the mixing of the tainted blood of Black people and other undesirables with that of the pure, Anglo-Saxon blood of Whites, who first began calling themselves “native Americans” as early as the 1830s. Well before that point, the nation that was truly exceptional in the sense of being composed primarily of immigrants, slaves and their descendants had already been struggling with both legal and de facto definitions of just who would be accepted as full citizens. And this has never ended. The topic is too vast for this essay, but you can read much more here: The Myth of Immigration.
The U.S. has over a million lawyers, far more both in sheer numbers and per capita (twice as many as Britain, in second place) than the rest of the world. This in part reflects the fact that we have far higher rates of divorce and single parent families. But our teen pregnancy rate – twice that of any European nation – leads to questions of religion. American teenagers’ expressive individualism leads them to be sexually active at earlier ages than in other countries. But they also have both greater religiosity and restricted access to sex education, and this undermines attempts to rationally approach birth control. Despite the creed of separation of church and state, the Republican base continues to favor strict legislation of morality. While abortion and gay rights are non-issues in almost all European countries, puritan prejudices continue to infect our attitudes toward the body. Although we engage in more premarital sex than the British, we are far more likely to condemn promiscuity. One out of every four American men condemn premarital sex as “always wrong” – more than three times that of the British.
Between 45% and 60% tell pollsters that they believe in the literal, seven-day creation story, and 25% want it required teaching in public schools. Forty percent believe the world will end with the battle of Armageddon. Sixty-eight percent (including fifty-five percent of those with post-graduate degrees) believe in the literal existence of the Devil.
Part Four
Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. This is the everlasting dream of America. – George W. Bush
I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. – Barack Obama
In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. – James Hillman
Despite such emotionally laden issues, civic participation, civic awareness and trust in democratic institutions continue to decline. Americans vote in lower percentages than in any other democracy. Eighty million eligible voters stayed home in November of 2020 and 2024. Of those ineligible to vote, 4.7 million – a third of them Black men – are disenfranchised by felony convictions.
America is 17th in the world in high school graduation rates and 49th in literacy. Surveys regularly indicate just how “dumbed-down” we are: 60%, for example, know that Superman came from the planet Krypton, while 37% know that Mercury is the planet closest to our sun. Similarly, 74% know all three Stooges, while only 42% can name the three branches of the U.S. government.
Millions of citizens completely misunderstand common political labels. Nearly 50% believe or are not sure that conservatives support gun control and affirmative action, and 19% think that conservatives oppose cutting taxes. Seventy percent cannot name their senators or their congressman. In 2000, twelve million Americans thought that George W. Bush was a liberal.
Studies indicate that social mobility – the opportunity to move up into a higher social class – has decreased significantly. But in a 2003 poll on Bush’s tax plan, 56% of the blue-collar men who correctly perceived it as favoring the rich still supported it. The myth of the self-made man is so deeply engrained that, until recently, our ignorance of the facts has been equaled only by our optimism: in 2000, 19% of respondents believed that they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another 19% thought that they already were. Half think that most families have to pay the estate tax (only two percent do), and two-thirds think that they will one day have to pay it. Twenty-five years later, those numbers have certainly come down. But in America, disillusionment can just as easily turn someone’s politics to the right as to the left.
Our ignorance is both the cause and the result of our unique voting system. The Founding Fathers devised both a two-tiered legislature and the Electoral College because they feared “mob rule”. The College was expressly designed to prevent thousands (now millions) from impacting national elections. Three times, a presidential candidate has won 500,000 more votes than his opponent, only to lose the election. Senators from the 26 smallest states (representing 18% of the population) hold a majority in the Senate. Still, though most citizens are ignorant of these statistics, they are not stupid: majorities regularly favor dismantling the Electoral College. The system, designed to limit democratic participation, has succeeded. As fewer people believe that their votes matter, they lose interest in keeping track of events, and ignorance becomes reality. But the contradiction becomes monumental when we periodically bond together to “bring democracy” elsewhere.
A vicious cycle has developed. Low turnout by the poor results in two political parties that are each far more conservative than the population, while politicians reaffirm their apathy by courting the middle class. Indeed, in countless subtle ways the process of voting in America is designed to restrict participation: voting on one workday instead of weekends; massive voter suppression; computer fraud; and hostile right-wing operatives who reduce the numbers of voting booths in Black-run cities such as Atlanta and Houston.
“Americanism” is a mix of contradictory images: competitive individualism balanced by paranoid conformism; an ideology of equality with a subtext of racial exclusion; and official church-state separation negated by the legislation of morality. These features come together in one truly exceptional symbol: the cult of the flag, which we literally worship. We have Flag Day, Flag etiquette and a unique national anthem dedicated to it that we sing, curiously, at sporting events. Twenty-seven states require school children to salute it daily. But worship? Consider the federal Flag Code: “The flag represents a living country and is considered a living thing.” Indeed, religious minorities have refused to salute it specifically because they consider such action to be blasphemous. But dread of the Other and re-invigorated, manipulated support for the military creates religious fervor – and fearful politicians. Long before Trumpus, all fifty state legislatures urged Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to make defacing the flag a crime.
The myths of freedom and opportunity – two-thirds of us believe that success is within our control – meet the myth of the Puritan to form another exceptional characteristic. Since Puritans still perceive both morality and worldly success as evidence of their elect status, we are a nation in which the poor have no one to blame (and often to turn to) but themselves. By more than six to one, we believe that people who fail in life do so because of their own shortcomings, not because of social conditions.
The New Deal safety net remains as popular as it was ninety years ago; but as low-income voting constituencies shrink, both Republicans and Democrats have felt free to erode them. (Let me say again, by the way, that I compiled most of these statistics prior to the economic meltdown of 2008 and long before the depression of 2020.)
The results: Nearly four million children live with parents who had no jobs in the previous year. The U.S. is 22nd in child poverty, 24th in life expectancy, 24th in income inequality, 26th in infant mortality, 37th in overall health performance and 54th in fairness of health care. We are almost alone in the Western world in not guaranteeing health care as a basic human right. America is alone among 41 Western nations in not guaranteeing paid family leave. Even so, its health care system is the costliest in the world. We spend over $5,200 per person on health care, more than double what 29 other industrialized nations spent. This equals 15% of our GDP, compared to Britain’s 7.7%. We were 28th in environmental performance, long before Trumpus trashed most of the nation’s regulatory agencies.
We account for 50% of the world’s (legal) drug budget, and our vast hunger for illegal drugs is a direct cause of the world-wide, hyper-violent drug-smuggling industry. That, in turn, has contributed to the immensely large numbers of American dead in the opioid epidemic of the past 25 years. Approximately 105,000 people died from drug overdose in 2023 and nearly 80,000 of those deaths involved opioids (about 76%).
Although we believe we are quite generous in helping the poor – in other nations – our Puritan judgment of the undeserving encompasses the whole world. We are 22nd in proportion of GDP devoted to foreign aid, and over half of it goes to a few client states in the Middle East, primarily Israel and Egypt. Indeed, nearly 80% of USAID contracts and grants (prior to Trumpus’ evisceration of it) went directly to American companies. Nearly 70% of Europeans, well aware of their colonial and imperial histories, want their governments to give more aid to poor nations, while nearly half of Americans claim that rich nations are already giving too much.
By choice (the Puritan’s addiction of workaholism) or by necessity (the “McJobbing” of the economy), we work unceasingly. In 2003, Americans worked 200 to 350 hours (five to nine weeks) longer per year than Europeans. Indeed, this was four weeks longer than Americans themselves had in 1969. Vacations average two weeks; in Europe they average five to six weeks. We spend 40% less time with our children than we did in 1965. Europeans, who consistently choose more leisure over bigger paychecks, claim that they work to live, while Americans are known for living to work. Even if we factor out economic issues, the Puritan residue remains. Just below the skin of consumer culture we judge ourselves by how hard we work, and we claim to relax only when we have acquired the symbols of redemption. Even then, we keep working.
One reason we work so hard is to afford the national status symbol, the car. We own far more than other countries, both in total and per capita. The average household now has more cars than drivers. Consequently, America leads the world in greenhouse emissions, both absolutely – a quarter of the world’s total – and per capita. We spend ten hours per week driving. We park those cars next to houses that average more than twice the size of European homes.
But the shadow of radical individualism reveals itself in epidemics of loneliness and alienation. According to Jill Lepore, neuroscientists identify loneliness as “a state of hypervigilance” embedded in our nervous system, inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. In the past seventy years the percentage of American households consisting of only one person has risen from 9% to 25%. She concludes:
Living alone works best in nations with strong social supports. It works worst in places like the United States. It is best to have not only an Internet but a social safety net.
Loneliness makes us sick, and alienation – combined with unrealistic expectations of success –makes us exceptionally willing to shoot up a schoolyard or workspace. For an excellent depth psychological perspective on the mass shootings of the past 25 years, read Glen Slater’s article A Mythology of Bullets.
Despite right-wing podcaster bloviation, Americans have generally been taxed at far lower rates than the rest of the developed world. Even before the Reagan years, taxes amounted to 31% of GDP, while most European countries were well over 40%. There are at least two primary results of these disparities. We provide far fewer social services, and economic inequality is far higher than in any other developed nation. By 2000, one percent of us owned forty percent of the wealth. By 2020, the top one percent owned nearly as much as the entire middle class. We have entered a “new Gilded Age” of unregulated capitalism and conspicuous consumption, as I write in We Like to Watch: Being There With Trump. In the first three months of the Coronavirus pandemic, American billionaires saw their wealth increase by half a trillion dollars, and the trend continued in 2025.
And that wealth is age-based. Excluding tiny enclaves like Switzerland, white American adults over age forty are the richest in the world. Even so, America has the highest rate of children living in families with incomes below poverty guidelines; this is the result of fewer public resources spent on children than in any industrialized nation. Youths are by far our poorest age group. Mortality rates among children are also the highest, approaching Third World conditions. Yet even the wealth figures for the elderly reveal surprises. Most are very well off. But twelve percent of them – again, the highest in the industrialized world – remain in poverty even after Social Security and Medicare.
However, we note yet another wild paradox that invites us back into the world of myth, the killing of the children, which I address here. Elderly Americans consistently support policies and politicians that would both limit their own participation in the welfare state and exclude their own grandchildren from it.
America is home to some of the starkest income inequality on the globe. With a shrinking economy, miniscule taxes on corporations or the rich, Puritan condemnation of poverty and the costly maintenance of a bloated military empire, it is little wonder that so few resources remain for the poor, except for policing and mass incarceration. The U.S. locks up its own people at the highest rate in the world and is nearly alone among developed nations in maintaining the death penalty. In June of 2020, we could legitimately ask, Do Black Lives Really Matter?
Confidence in American institutions – government, religion, media and education – had been dropping every year since the early 1970’s – at least until 9/11/01, and then only temporarily. So we return to mythic issues. A large and occasionally threatening population of Others is needed to periodically revive the myth of American innocence. So long as politicians continue to demonize Russia, China and a host of Third World nations, so long as the internal Black Other threatens to take one’s job (or one’s daughter), so long as gay and trans people force white men to question their identity, so long as they believe in the necessity of constantly striving in unsatisfying work to attain the symbols that substitute for a genuinely erotic life, they will work unceasingly.
Part Five
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. – James Baldwin
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. – John Steinbeck
Our compliant workforce is another aspect of American exceptionalism. Why does the U.S. have no established political party that represents working and poor people? Why have so many unionized, blue-collar, white men supported such obvious criminals, con-men, racists and warmongers as Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes and Trumpus? Three and a half centuries after Bacon’s Rebellion, when blacks and whites united and nearly toppled the government of colonial Virginia, scholars still wonder why a strong socialist movement never developed in America, as it did almost everywhere else.
Karl Marx believed that every society would eventually evolve out of old-world hierarchy into capitalism, and inevitably capitalism would yield to socialism. The more advanced a nation becomes in capitalism, the closer it must be to embracing socialism. But socialists were baffled by how the U.S. defied this rule. No nation was more capitalist, yet no nation showed less interest in becoming socialist, or more repression if it did.
Werner Sombart emphasized material abundance: socialism, he complained, had foundered in America “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” Leon Samson argued that the real enemy of socialism was exceptionalism itself, because Americans give “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions – democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism.” In other words, radical individualism had become an ideology that overwhelmed our natural inclination to cooperate with each other.
On the other hand, writes Allen Guelzo:
There had been an American socialism; they were reluctant to recognize it as such because it came not in the form of a workers’ rebellion against capital but in the emergence of a plantation oligarchy in the slaveholding South. This “feudal socialism,” based on race, called into question all the premises of American exceptionalism, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Nor were slavery’s apologists shy about linking this oligarchy to European socialism, since, as George Fitzhugh asserted in 1854, “Slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire.”
The institution of slavery became the model for a broader economic / financial system in which corporate welfare, or “socialism for the wealthy” would exist only because of taxes on the middle class and massive budget deficits.
Academics, however, rarely consider the overwhelming presence of the Black Other, the elephant in the living room of their theories about exceptionalism. It is really quite simple: no other nation combined irresistible myths of opportunity with rigid legal systems deliberately intended to divide natural allies.
Whiteness implies both purity (which demands removal of impurities) and privilege. In America, no matter how impoverished a white, male is, he hears subtle messages every day of his life that invite him to separate himself from the impure. Without racial privilege the concept of whiteness is meaningless. From the Civil War, when tens of thousands of dirt-poor whites died for a system that offered them nothing economically, to the MAGA Republicans supporting politicians who promise to destroy their social benefits, white Americans have often had nothing to call their own except their relative position in the American caste hierarchy. We can only conclude that for them, and only in exceptional America, does racial privilege almost always trump class solidarity.
Throughout the developed world and their colonial outposts, the elite classes and their servants correctly perceived leftist organizing as rational, even logical antagonism to their rule, and they responded accordingly. Only Americans, however, saw communists as so polluting of their essential innocence, so un-American, so absolutely, irrevocably evil that they would create a Committee on “Un-American Activities”. Only in America has such fear, born in the Indian wars, the Salem Witch trials and the slave patrols, produced a surprisingly widespread consensus that any violations of human rights whatsoever are justified in suppressing the Others, or anyone who might align themselves with them. Only in America have people made the absurd but apparently serious assertion that they would be “better dead than red.” Only in America could media pundits accuse mild, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of being communists.
Thirty years ago, the memory of our eighty-year crusade against Communism was fading quickly from memory – except among those who recognized its mythic and political benefits. But that residue of fear and hatred never disappeared, and it soon reappeared as a series of narratives that blame every national problem on “the Russians.”
How ironic: 19th-century intellectuals occasionally referred to American exceptionalism; but the first national leader to use it (in 1929) was Joseph Stalin, as a critique of American communists who argued that their political climate was unique, making it an “exception” to Marxist theory.
The systematic manufacture of consent – based on terror of pollution by outsiders – is the ultimate meaning of American exceptionalism. The U.S. is unique among empires in convincing its own poor and working-class victims that they share in its bounty – and to pay for its expenses. “How skillful,” wrote Howard Zinn, “to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation!” Noam Chomsky writes, “The empire is like every other part of social policy: it’s a way for the poor to pay off the rich in their own society.” He adds, less we think of him as some sort of authoritarian communist: “Any state has a primary enemy: its own population.”
In the U.S., an efficient system of control, a “brainwashing under freedom,” has flourished like nowhere else. It combines free speech and free press (except for those regular periods when it represses them) with patriotic indoctrination and marginalization of alternative voices, leaving the impression that society is open. The system distributes just enough wealth to limit dissent, while it isolates people from each other, turning them away from collective action and toward the consumer symbols that reinforce loyalty to the state and its myths.
The real function of the media, say Chomsky, is “to keep people from understanding the world.” By limiting debate to those who never challenge the assumptions of innocence and benevolence, it maintains the illusion that all share a common interest. When the boundaries of acceptable thought are clear, debate is not suppressed but permitted. But in this context, the loyal opposition legitimizes these unspoken limits by their very presence. The system exists precisely because of our traditional freedom of expression. Chomsky quotes a public relations manual from the 1920’s, (aptly titled Propaganda): “The conscious…manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system.”
We can criticize the national state from this anarchist perspective not necessarily out of a particular ideology – Caroline Casey suggests that we “believe nothing, but entertain possibilities” – but because it is closest to a tribal perspective. Mass society as we know it is barely four centuries old. For most of human history we have lived in small communities in which individuals knew almost everyone else and experienced fulfilling relationships within a mythic and ritual framework. Human nature has never had time to adjust to the strife and alienation of modern and post-modern society. And it is precisely this disconnect that advertising and political propaganda take advantage of.
Compared to Americans, many Third World peasants are free in one respect: they have no myths of innocence or exceptionalism. Their consent may be coerced, but it cannot be manufactured. They, far more than our educated classes, can see. Where their own history has not been completely erased, they can see that there has been essentially no difference in American foreign policy for over 150 years. It is perfectly obvious to them that the U.S. controls their resources and manipulates their leaders, while protecting its corporations with its military. They know, more than we could ever know, that talk of “free markets” is just talk.
They know that the only significant changes in First and Third World relationships have been in the resources themselves (first agricultural, then mineral, then human), and in the nature of the overseers (first European, then American, then local tyrants). To them, “globalization” is merely the latest top-down phrase that rationalizes such practices.
Ultimately, what makes us exceptional is this mix of overt propaganda, subtle repression of free thought and a deep strain of willful ignorance. We want to believe the story. Only in America has a historical collusion existed between national mythology and the facts of domination, between the greed of the elite and the naivety of the people, between fathers who send their children to war instead of initiating them and youth who give themselves up to the factories and the killing fields.
Our exceptionalism lies in the denial of our racist and imperial foundations and our continuing white privilege. Cornel West writes, “No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history.” And because our media priests regularly remind us of how generous, idealistic, moral, divinely inspired and innocent of all sin we are, we can deny the realities of race, environment, empire – and death.
Part Six
America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it tries to be a force for good because it is exceptional. – Peggy Noonan
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. – Vladimir Putin
…one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. – James Baldwin
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart…bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence…and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.
The indigenous world imagined the Great Mother as both sustainer and destroyer. But modern people can only respond to Becker’s questions in monotheistic, dualistic terms. Either we feel the terror and are immobilized, or we construct myths of religion, romance and domination to transcend our mortality. He argued that all human behavior is motivated by the unconscious need to deny this most fundamental anxiety.
Becker regretted that “we must shrink from being fully alive,” because seeing the world “as it really is, is devastating and terrifying,” and results in madness. Throughout history, however, mystics have described this insight as devastating only to the individual ego, and a necessary, initiatory prelude to the unitive vision that transcends duality. Ancient devotees of Dionysus, as well as modern practitioners of Eastern and African-based religions, strive to attain this state. But for those who lack the containers of community and ritual, the unconscious fear of death is a primary motivator.
To the uninitiated modern person, the death of the ego and the death of the physical body are one and the same. And in America, the loss of identity (white, patriarchal, masculine, Christian, productive, growing, gainfully employed, segregated into racially conformist neighborhoods, or simply privileged) seems to be equivalent to death of the ego. The anxiety just below these thin modes of identity hints that if any one of them were to be questioned, the whole pack of cards might collapse.
Even though the prospect of ecstatic escape from the confines of that ego continually beckons to us, and we respond in all manner of unconscious ways, we must consider yet another essential (and exceptional) American perspective, the denial of death.
Despite seeing great progress since the writings of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Jessica Mitford, American culture continues to deny and avoid the reality of death more than any other society. This is particularly curious, given our unusually high degree of religiosity. The myth of innocence represents the attitude of the adolescent who expects to live forever. It provides no space for acknowledging that death is a part of life, rather than its opposite. Some writers called death the most repressed theme of the twentieth century, comparable to the sex taboo of the 19th century. We still view it as morbid and commonly refuse to discuss it with children. Most adults have never seen a corpse other than in the stage-managed context of the funeral parlor.
Kubler-Ross argued that since few of us really believe that suffering will be rewarded in Heaven, “then suffering becomes purposeless in itself,” and doctors typically sedate the dying to lessen their pain. They are rushed to hospitals, frequently unconscious and against their will, and most die there or in nursing homes. Then the corpse disappears, not to be seen again until it has been “primped up to appear…asleep.” Euphemisms complete the ritual of denial. The “deceased” has “passed on”, “gone to his maker” or “joined her loved ones”.
It is an unconscious ritual and its purpose is to repress the anxieties that arise when tending to the terminally ill. Relatives collude with doctors in an elaborate series of lies, maintaining the fiction of probable recovery right up until the dying person reaches the point of death. Typically, doctors, rather than ministers, preside over the scene, keeping displays of emotion to a minimum. Adults deprive both children and the dying persons themselves of the opportunity to confront death. Ironically, write Anthropologists Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, “In America, the archetypal land of enterprise, self-made men are reduced to puppets.” Then the body is embalmed, restored and transformed from a rotting cadaver into “a beautiful memory picture.” Neither law nor religion nor sanitation requires this, and nowhere else but in North America is it common. In the last view, the deceased seems asleep in a casket (often made of metal). We say, “How peaceful he looks.”
The ritual achieves two results. First, it insulates mourners from the process of decomposition, the finality of death and their own fears. Second, it minimizes cathartic expressions of grief. The funeral director, wrote Mitford, “has put on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death has played no part…” Wakes are generally pleasant social events, and mourners quickly return to work. The mystery of death has invited them to enter an initiatory space, but it closes too abruptly and too soon for any authentic transition or resolution. A veil that had been briefly lifted drops again.
We claim to believe that Christianity represents a victory over death, yet estrangement from nature is one of its central themes. Thus, to Americans, death must be either part of God’s plan or a punishment. Arnold Toynbee joked that death was “un-American,” an infringement on the right to the pursuit of happiness. By contrast, wrote Vine Deloria, Native American religions produced people unafraid of death: “…the integrity of communal life did not create an artificial sense of personal identity that had to be protected and preserved at all costs.”
West African shaman Malidoma Somé observed our American refusal to give in to grief:
A non-Westerner arriving in this country for the first time is struck by how…(Americans) pride themselves for not showing how they feel about anything.
To him, all modern people carry great loads of unexpressed grief. And this leads to a corresponding inability to experience joy: “People who do not know how to weep together are people who cannot laugh together.” This is a succinct, tribal definition of alienation – exile from nature, community and spirit – and of the roots of mental illness.
If we cannot grieve or tolerate the vision of the dark goddess and her bloody, dismembered son, then we cannot experience ecstasy either. We learn to accept pale substitutes: romance novels, horror movies (in which characters often refuse to die), the spectacles of popular music and sports, New Age spirituality, Sunday church and happy endings. We learn early to emphasize the light (including “lite”) to the eventual exclusion of the dark.
So our characteristic and quite exceptional American expectation of positivity and emotional growth makes feelings of sadness and despair more pathological in this culture than elsewhere. Christina Kotchemidova writes, “Since ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘depression’ are bound by opposition, the more one is normalized, the more negative the other will appear.”
Ronald Laing argued that the modern family functions “... to repress Eros, to induce a false consciousness of security...to promote a respect for ‘respectability.’” To be respectable is to produce, and to look cheerful. American obsession with feeling good (“pursuing happiness”) is a fundamental principle of the consumer society. As Kotchemidova explains,
Our personal feelings are constantly encouraged or discouraged by the culture of emotions we have internalized, and any significant deviance from the societal emotional norms is perceived as emotional disorder that necessitates treatment.
The average American feels real pressure to present themself as cheerful during job applications. Once they are hired, however, putting on a ready-made smile is simply not enough. “Corporations expect their staff to actually feel good about the work they do in order to appear convincing to clients.”
She argues that 20th century America took on cheerfulness as an identifying characteristic. The new consumer economy of the 1920s called for cheerful salespeople and an American etiquette that obliged “niceness” and excluded strong emotionality. Among the dozens of self-help cheerfulness manuals, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) sold over fifteen million copies. In the 1950s, the entertainment industry invented numerous ways, such as the TV “laugh track,” to induce cheerfulness. In the 1980s, politicians discovered cheerfulness; all Presidents since Reagan smile in their official photos (none had done so before him). The “smiley face” button sold over 50 million units at its peak in 1971 and remains one of our most recognizable icons.
It follows that depression has reached epidemic proportions in America – and that violence is so fundamental to our experience. Kubler-Ross wrote that our denial of death “has only increased our anxiety and contributed to our…aggressiveness – to kill in order to avoid the reality and facing of our own death.” We recall that Phillip Slater wrote of “our technologically strangled environment” in which impersonal forces impact us from remote, Apollonic distances and provoke us to “find a remote vic-tim on which to wreck our vengeance.” This is one reason why Americans rarely protest the military’s mass killing of distant Third World people. Another reason, of course, is their ignorance of the news.
But America was characterized from the start by extreme violence. It was present in the “idea” of America – not the abstract ideals of the founding fathers, but the projection of darkness, instinct and lust onto the Other in the already demythologized world of the seventeenth century. By the Industrial Revolution of the 1840’s, Americans had been slaughtering Indians and enslaving Africans for over two centuries. Noting this, Herman Melville wrote that Indian hating had become a “metaphysic.” Technology and the factories certainly contributed to alienation, loneliness and the breakdown of extended families and father-son relationships. But as a seed of depression and long-distance violence, it fell on fertile soil that had been well prepared.
And history conspired. No one alive can recall the carnage of the Civil War; since then, we have fought our major wars across great oceanic expanses, while also slaughtering each other in small-scale violence like no other people in history. Except for urban race riots, the genocide of the Native Americans and the terrorist acts of 2001, however, there has been no warfare on American territory for a century and a half.
These factors all help to perpetuate the myths of innocence and exceptionalism. The final ingredient is the state of the media, in which news reporting, political spin and entertainment are now almost indistinguishable, when half of us get our news from social media or TV comedy “news” shows, while the other half still think that the New York Times is in the news business.
On the one hand, media colludes with our need to remain sheltered from the world and our impact upon it. “We are so desperate for this,” writes Michael Ventura, that we are willing to accept ignorance as a substitute for innocence.” On the other hand, even as violent programming perpetuates fear of crime and terrorism – the movies, television, followed by social media, have desensitized four generations of Americans to the actual effects of violence. We’ve all heard the statistics. We can theoretically take two populations of children and predict that, as young adults fifteen years later, those who watch more TV will be more violent than the group that watched less. Thus, there is a direct connection between the national denial of death in the abstract and America’s ferocious expression of literal violence. James Hillman concluded that death is “the ultimate repressed,” who returns “through the body’s shattered disarray,” an incursion “into awareness as ultimate truth.”
We innocently observe, we are shocked, and we quickly forget. In book talks I’ve often posed a trick question – When did you lose your innocence? – followed by another one – When did you lose it again? When an exceptional sense of personal and national innocence is so ingrained as ours is, every time it is punctured by circumstances it feels like the first time. In Chapter Eight, I wrote of this experience after the attacks on the World Trade Towers:
The next day, a second wave of commentators offered more nuanced interpretations. Rabbi Marc Gelman, asked if America would be changed by this event, responded, “Yes, we have lost our innocence. We now know there is radical evil in the world.”...Americans, mysteriously, had never heard about it. Psychologist Robert Butterworth’s son had asked him, “Daddy, why do they hate us so?” Staring mutely and miserably at the camera, he really didn't know...Such laments could have followed the Oklahoma City bombing, 1993’s WTC bombing, the TWA airliner bombing, the bombings of the destroyer Cole and Lebanon barracks, or any of the dozens of recent school shootings. America, we were told, had lost her innocence.
From the perspective of outsiders, or of older cultures, or of the Other, losing our innocence is an absolutely necessary step for white Americans to step out of our adolescent belligerence and join the human community. But from within the myth of exceptionalism, losing our innocence is merely a temporary stage that precedes falling back asleep.
Rarely having confronted death directly, we must find a way to see it, by condoning violence or by personally inflicting it upon others. Preferring vengeance to mourning, we are still the only nation to have used atomic weapons. Americans invented napalm, cluster bombs and “anti-personnel” mines. We are unmoved by news of torture at Guantanamo, rape of prisoners in Iraq, police murders of unarmed African Americans or two years of internet-streamed genocide in Gaza because, without ritual attention, innocence always trumps awareness. The nation that watches and exports thousands of hours of electronic mayhem and has more handguns than citizens is shocked – shocked! – every time a teenager massacres his schoolmates or a white nationalist drives his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors.
Octavio Paz contrasted his own Mexican culture, which has an intimate relationship to the dark side of existence, with ours: “A culture that begins by denying death will end by denying life.” Such a nation desperately needs someone to save it – to distract it – from the black hole of death, and to vanquish, rather than to accommodate those forces of darkness. Such a nation needs heroes. And it will get the heroes that it deserves. On the other hand, wrote Rumi:
When school or mosque, tower or minaret gets torn down,
then dervishes can begin their community.
Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust
can any human being become part of the truth.