The Delusion May Be Breaking

New York Times columnist David Brooks made the following statement on the PBS News Hour last week. 

For those of you who might not be familiar with David Brooks, he’s been a columnist, an opinion writer for the Times since 2003, and at some point not too long after, he came to be regarded as the favorite conservative columnist of what could be called Democratic Party America. This would refer to the party leadership, those elected as Democrats and those who see themselves as members of or loyalists to the Democratic Party. 

His position at The Times gives him a greater access to the public, and our political machinery, than most writers would ever even bother to hope for. He’s been regarded, throughout his tenure, as a “moderate Republican/moderate conservative.” This can mean many things to many people. Being familiar with his work, having read a good deal of it, my impression of Brooks is that his job, at least how he sees his job, is to launder conservative ideology to appear moderate to the casual political observer. As one might glean from his statement, Brooks has used his column to obscure the darker, destructive aspects of both US history and of the results/consequences of conservative political ideology being implemented. He is of the variety of person who has gone on, at length in a number of columns about things like “cancel culture” and “woke” being detrimental to national character and discourse. He has presented them not as part of the landscape created by and served by free speech, but as attacks on them, as if somehow the people he's accusing are not real stakeholders in the nation and culture they are part of or that they are some form of hysteria. Probably my favorite instance of this was the relation of supposed experience with a “working class friend,” that amounted to a column basically saying, “You lefties don’t understand that regular, working class people are afraid of sandwiches with fancy names.” 

I would be wrong to not admit, as a writer and someone who does my best to consider our history and our present, in all of it’s complexity, I have despised Brooks writing and his continued employment at “the paper of record.” I’ve felt this way, specifically because of the degree to which Brooks has dedicated an incredible amount of time, effort and space in a premium outlet, to obscuring, excusing or ignoring how the worst aspects of our history, our national character as he would put it, in order to undermine and belittle the efforts in our present to achieve a nation and culture which might recognize equity, human rights and inclusion as necessarily to every different piece of the well being of nation, in both practical existential terms, as well as the more vague, nebulous terms of national character. 

What Brooks described in his appearance on PBS News Hour, is the same delusion I was referring to in the piece I wrote last week, titled Terrible Opportunity. That piece is a description of what I believe is the opportunity afforded to those of us who believe in concepts like equity and inclusivity, basic human rights, those the inalienable rights The Declaration of Independence declares are the reason for the existence of The United States. In it, I describe Trump and his fellow fascists as having exploited this delusion in order to rise to power. 

What Brooks is expressing, isn’t one belief, it’s a constellation of beliefs, which add up to once basic delusion. We have come to refer to this delusion as American Exceptionalism. It is what it says. It’s a constellation of beliefs created to protect the delusion that as a nation, in both contemporary and world history, there is something exceptional about The United States. It has been transmitted to most of us as inextricably connected to patriotism. In the way we articulate patriotism, if you aren’t willing to express, in word and action, this idea that there is something exceptional in The United States, you are lacking in patriotism. It is malleable enough to encompass the beliefs that this is true because of the nature of the nation’s founding or because it has been ordained by God. 

All of it though, is wrapped up with the concept of empire. Mostly, it’s founded on the fact that The United States has, for a time, been the most powerful nation in the world, economically and militarily. I refer to American Exceptionalism as a delusion, for this reason. It doesn’t seem to me, in national or world history, we have acted very differently from most other imperial and colonial powers. Technology has certainly allowed us the opportunity to extend our influence across more of the globe than some of the imperial powers of the past, but our actions and the reasons we’ve taken them, are wholly in keeping with the patterns of imperial colonialist powers. 

Central to the defense of this delusion, is to ignore or to create a veneer of altruism or benevolence for policies, foreign and domestic, which have been most destructive, and have not by any coincidence been in service of the most wealthy and powerful. Among these is the hostility to democracy evidenced by the history of our foreign policy, as well as the fact that we haven’t been a democracy for more than fifty-six years, despite having declared ourselves a nation two hundred forty-eight years ago. 

This delusion of American Exceptionalism isn’t held exclusively by conservatives either. The traditional American conservative and liberal are swaddled in it. It is the defining aspect of what is generally referred to as the centrist, middle or “mainstream” perspective on The United States, whether looking at its history or its present. At different times, we refer to specific issues as the “third rail,” the ones you don’t dare touch because they are so charged, you will become persona non grata in that mainstream, fried where you stand. To engage those ideas is to become a pariah, marginalized culturally and ideologically.  American Exceptionalism is the constant third rail. Above all others, it is the idea you cannot challenge should you want access to the mainstream of American politics and the media dedicated to it. It's the central point when anyone claims the "far right" and "far left" are the same. The single point of agreement is that The United States is not exceptional. To act as if the desire to create a white, Christian ethnostate and the desire to create a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, egalitarian focused culture are the same, is itself a delusion. It doesn't matter what the intent is, because the deviation from American Exceptionalism is sin enough. 

You can see this in this post by Barb McQuade, who is firmly among the contingent of “moderate” Democrats. 

If, like me, you are familiar with the many different movements in US history who have struggled and fought, either succeeded or didn’t, in attempting to force power to recognize those unalienable rights, you know protest has only ever been conditionally legal, depending on who is protesting, what for and how. The inclusion of “peaceful,” in this case (and in most cases) is a meaningless caveat. Protest, even when peaceful, is legal until it achieves the goal of protest as a concept, which is to inconvenience and/or disrupt the ability of authority, whether political or economic or both, to ignore this petition for the recognition of rights. Then, it becomes illegal by decree and consequence. The police are sent in to break up those protests, end the disruption or inconvenience (usually when they become too problematic for people in power), brutalize those protesting, and when those protesting respond to the further assault on their lives by defend themselves from this brutalization, blame is placed on those protesting. The news repeats the narrative shaped by police that it was a “clash” between police and protesters, and never really gets around to describing where the clash began. The invention of the camera, and its continued evolution to moving pictures, then cameras mobile enough to film at the site of the protest, and now to the ubiquitousness of cameras in mobile phones, has started to challenge this dynamic, create cracks in that narrative. Stubbornly though, the police and the majority of media who act as stenographers for power, continue to hold onto and propagate this false narrative, which then gives those who hold this delusion of American Exceptionalism cover to continue saying things like, “Peaceful protest is not illegal.” 

Friends, I assure you as someone not only familiar with the history of protest in the United States, but who has taken part in many protests, whether or not they are peaceful is wholly founded on how willing those protesting are conditioned to accept the violation of their rights or how far conditions have pushed them to the nadir of that acceptance. I’ve never attend a protest planned to result in violence, but I’ve been to a number that have devolved into violence, at the hands, batons and tear gas canisters of the police. The First Amendment makes no mention of whether protest is inconvenient or disruptive. It guarantees us the unalienable rights to free speech and freedom of assembly, in order to petition government for a redress of grievance, and protest is the marriage of these, by definition. We have though, created norms, through the decisions of the courts, through the web of municipal statues, the narratives we tell about history and commerce, which have placed limits on protest based on inconvenience and disruption. Those norms serve the powerful (and almost always the wealthy), and are supported and propagated by the variety of media that either refuses to recognize the dynamics of power or are wholly in service of power, a kind of offshoot or kin of American Exceptionalism. 

Brooks statement though, suggests the delusion is beginning to break. There may not be a better example of a defender than David Brooks. It is something his entire career is fundamentally based on. It has been a foundational, unspoken part of all of his writing as a public person. Other than Ronald Reagan, there has not in my lifetime been a more zealous believer and proselytizer for it. If it is starting to crack for Brooks, it’s starting to crack for others, and I believe those of us who either never believed it or have long recognized it as a delusion, are in the position to begin to create a new narrative, and inject into the public consciousness, which does not avoid the ugliness, the darkness, and yes, the evil of the part of our history so intertwined with the desires of the rich and powerful, and says there can be a nation which is exceptional in history. It becomes our responsibility to make clear that American Exceptionalism is central to how we got here, and to not be here again, any time soon, we must recognize the total of our history, estimable and horrifying. 

I believe that narrative, this new consciousness, can spring from that very question, “What would make The United States exceptional in history? What would make it the force of good we have only been able to imagine it to be, by refusing to fully acknowledge the horror and evil it has visited on its people and the people of other nations?” 

I don’t believe we will find the answer to these questions so long as we continue to give the prominence and power we have to men who hoard wealth, power and resources like dragons hoard gold, twisting them into people who can believe authoritarianism is an answer to anything other than their own small insecurities.