Richard Gamble reviews John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, and finds Wilsey’s version of exceptionalism to be dangerous in its own way:
I have argued before in favor of a salvageable conception of American exceptionalism. For lack of a better adjective, I call it the “old exceptionalism” and have tried to anchor it in the United States’ distinct political, economic, and religious institutions. This seems to me to be the only “safe” way to contain an idea that otherwise justifies an expansive, moralistic domestic and foreign policies. Wilsey’s “open exceptionalism,” while in some ways more constrained than the standard nationalist and imperialist version, turns out to be something quite different from the old exceptionalism. And those differences ought to give pause to conservatives and to confessional Christians troubled by an evangelical transformationalism that never seems to disengage itself from the social gospel.
Gamble identifies a number of problems with this “open” exceptionalism. Wilsey’s version still clings to “a robust version of the national purpose” and doesn’t give up on a moralizing mission in the world, and because of that this “open” exceptionalism is still very nationalistic and committed to transforming the world. In the end, an “open” version of “American exceptionalism” relies on many of the same false assumptions as the more aggressive, “closed” kind that it is supposed to replace, and embracing it would condemn the U.S. to similarly misguided and unnecessary ideological projects around the globe. Wilsey may be more interested in a benevolent missionary America than a hegemonic one, but the conceit that the U.S. has both the right and obligation to carry out such a mission ends up in much the same place as the hegemonists’ version of “American exceptionalism” that we have heard so much about over the last seven years.
None of these missionary goals has anything to do with what makes America unique or distinctive, as I said a few years ago:
American exceptionalism is not enthusiasm for global hegemony or an enormous military, nor is it a belief that the U.S. has a right or responsibility “to mold the world in its image.” There are ways to describe those ideas, but it is wrong and misleading to call them American exceptionalism.
Unfortunately, this is what the phrase has come to mean through sheer repetition over the last few years. On one level, it makes sense that advocates for an ambitious national mission would claim the phrase for themselves, since it allows them to cast opponents of their view as anti-American or unpatriotic, but on closer inspection it makes no sense at all. Nothing could be less exceptional or specifically American than the conceit that we have a national mission to improve the world. This is a conceit that other great powers have indulged over the centuries, and it is normally equal parts self-congratulation and self-justification. In our case, it provides cover for incessant, destructive meddling in the affairs of other nations while claiming to have only the best of intentions.
The insistence that the U.S. needs to have some great national purpose is an invitation to the continued expansion of state power and the ongoing rationalization of abuses of that power in the name of whatever the mission happens to be at the time.