lyndon johnson

Several months removed, it now seems clear that the Democratic debate on October 13 contained an illuminating moment that has come to embody the 2016 Democratic Primary and the key differences between its two candidates. Confronting Bernie Sanders's insistence that the United States has much to learn from more socialized nations, particularly the Nordic Model, Hillary Clinton was direct: "I love Denmark. But we are not Denmark. We are the United States of America."

"America's twenty-first-century 'exceptions' appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending." The implication behind this statement--the reasoning that ideas and institutions (in this case, social and economic programs) that are successful in other nations are somehow practically or ideologically inconsistent with Americans and American principles--speaks to a longstanding sociopolitical framework that has justified everything from continental expansion to the Iraq War: American exceptionalism. Rooted in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and the mythology of John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill," the notion that the history and mission of the United States and the superiority of its political and economic traditions makes it impervious to the same forces that influence other peoples has coursed through Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," the Cold War rhetoric of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and the foreign policy declarations of Barack Obama.

Despite particular historical trends--early and relatively stable political democracy, birthright citizenship, the absence of a feudal tradition, the relative weakness of class consciousness--historians have critiqued this "American exceptionalism" as far more fictive than physical, frequently citing the concept as a form of state mythology. Although different histories lead naturally to historical and perhaps even structural dissimilarities, America's twenty-first-century "exceptions" appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending.