American Exceptionalism Proves to Be Political Fantasy
America's exceptionalism underwent one of its biggest boom-and-bust cycles during the past eight years under now former President George W. Bush. The election of its first black President, Barack Obama, is a testimony to America in reflection of this ideology having gone bust. Now renowned professor Donald E. Pease, who teaches English at Dartmouth College, comes out with a tome devoted to further analyses of that trend in his book, ``The New American Exceptionalism.'' During an interview with professor John Eperjesi, a professor at Kyung Hee University, Pease claims exceptionalism was a state-sponsored fantasy that policymakers relied on to justify the unjustifiable. The following are excerpts of that interview. ― ED.
John Eperjesi :
In the movie The Dark Knight (2008), the Joker triggers a state of emergency that forces Batman to go outside the law, to make an exception, in order to save the people of Gotham. This seems like a fitting allegory for George Bush's war on terror. In New American Exceptionalism, you provide a narrative of transition in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism from the Cold War through the Bush administration's global war on terror. How do you understand this transition?
Dr. Pease:
In my new book I describe American exceptionalism as the encompassing and trans-historical state fantasy that provided policymakers with the spectacular terrain in which they authorized their policies. In the absence of any guarantees other than its monopoly of violence, the state relied on this fantasy to solicit the citizenry's belief in the legitimacy of policies that it could not ultimately justify. The fantasy of American exceptionalism was undergirded by the citizenry's contradictory beliefs in the moral exemplarity of the nation's civic ideals as well as in the exceptional military force through which the state propagated them. These contradictory aspects composed the Janus-face of American exceptionalism.
Eperjesi:
You elaborate on a crucial difference between the National Security State and the Homeland Security State. What is the difference?
Pease:
The Homeland Security State President George W. Bush inaugurated at the inception of the ``Global War on Terror'' introduced a version of American exceptionalism that simply eliminated the facet of moral exemplarity through which the state had justified its use of exceptional military force throughout the Cold War. President Bush produced an exception to the rules that U.S. citizens had considered the norm in order to establish a new regime of governance. Bush's Homeland Security State differed from the National Security State in that it supplanted the nation's exemplary civic ideals with a permanent State of Exception.
With the passage of the USA Patriot Act, the erection of the detainee center at Guantanamo Bay, and the declaration of its pre-emptive strike policy, President Bush radically abridged the citizenry's rights and liberties in the name of protecting them from bio-terrorist attack rather than an alien ideology. Bush's Global War on Terror represented America as ``the Exception'' to the laws of nations that was alone endowed with the military dominance required to enforce the rule of law across the planet.
How has President Barack Obama dealt with the issue of American exceptionalism?
Obama's presidential campaign was based upon the reaffirmation of a version of American exceptionalism (``Where else but in America could a man with my story aspire to become President?'') that Bush's State of Exception had supplanted. In resuscitating the image of America as a morally exemplary nation, Barack Obama effectively replaced Bush's State of Exception with the ``good'' morally exemplary face of American exceptionalism. Obama's retrieval of the fantasy of America as a model of civic nationalism obliged him to criticize Bush's Global War on Terror, the detainment center at Guantanamo Bay and the pre-emptive strike policy as inter-related abrogations of American norms and ideals.
In the speech he delivered Sept. 23 at the United Nations, Obama invoked the ideals of civic nationalism comprising the good face of American exceptionalism to explain why America would no longer represent itself as the Exception of the laws of nations. But after promising that America would no longer assume the posture of planetary dominance, Obama invoked these ideals of civic responsibility to enjoin other nations to cooperate with the United States in promoting these ideals as the global norm.
Speaking of the Cold War, in your book you discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Before your talk at Ewha, you had an intense conversation with Chinese cultural studies scholar Kuan-hsing Chen over whether, considered from an Asia-Pacific perspective, the Cold War is over. This conversation encouraged you to take a trip to the DMZ. What did you think?
Well, in fact my doubts about the termination of the Cold War began during the question and answer session following my lecture at Korea University, which I delivered the day before I spoke at Ewha. During that discussion, a professor asked me whether or not my confident assertion that the Cold War was over betrayed a Euro-American perspective. The intensity of my conversation with Kuan-hsing Chen derived from my reflections on that question. How could I deliver a lecture in South Korea within walking distance of the Demilitarized Zone and within an affective terrain informed by the traumas of families forcibly separated by the Korean War that began with the assertion that the Cold War was over? My visit to the DMZ deepened my sense of shame at the arrogance of that remark.
Toward the end of your book, you discuss the social forces that led to the election of Barack Obama. How did he get elected? What kind of change did his election signify?
Obama's campaign was in part an anti-war movement that drew upon the public's disaffection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a constitutional movement directed against President Bush's abridgment of political and civil rights. In the course of his run for the presidency, Obama drew upon three of the grand themes of the fantasy of American exceptionalism ― the American dream, the perfectible Union, and the land of promise.
But the tidal shift in political loyalties that Obama's movement engendered drew upon a much more pervasive fantasy of dispossession ― of citizens stripped of their constitutional rights by the Patriot Act, of parents separated from their children by war, of families forced from their homes by the subprime mortgage crisis. The turning point in the campaign took place when the subprime crisis enabled the U.S. public to reinvest the credibility they had withdrawn from the economy onto the wish for a trans-generational dream to come true.
Overall his election marked a decisive change in the state's emotional compact with the American people ― from the aggressive revenge that undergirded Bush's State of exception to the ethos of communal care that accompanied Obama's retrieval of America's morally exemplary civic ideals.
Speaking of presidents, the new president of Dartmouth, Jim Yong Kim, was born in Korea. What kind of relationship does Dr. Kim hope to establish between Dartmouth and Korea?
Like Barack Obama, President Jim Yong Kim has brought a visionary imagination to his new office. His presidency promises to unsettle received understandings and to reanimate the belief that a liberal arts education can become a pathway to enlightened social change in both the United States and Korea.
So this was your first trip to Korea. What are some of your impressions after your visit?
I was deeply moved by the spirit of hospitality with which I was received and by the nuance and complexity informing the questions raised by the faculty and students. I feel a deep affinity with the passion and the vitality of Seoul. I also believe I have a lot to learn from the friends I've made in Korea, and I look forward to the continuation of our discussions ― in Seoul as well as Dartmouth.