Against American exceptionalism

Tuesday, 2nd September 2008

You'd think Berkeley and the estimable Mary Beard would be a perfect fit, yet she's struggling with all the talk about the shining city on the hill:

I hadn’t ever realised before quite how pushy all the “top nation” , “God bless America” talk was. I know that it’s easy for the British – who are palpably not “top nation” -- to talk more modestly about their role on the world stage. But I’d been slow in seeing that even the most liberal Democrats here have to thunder on as if American values were clearly superior to anything else on the planet (is this how the British sounded a century ago, I found myself reflecting).

Hubris also happens to be the subject of Andrew Bacevich's new book on the imperial presidency. The Economist gives him a sympathetic hearing:

This might sound as though his was a shrill voice of the left. It is not. Mr Bacevich is a former colonel in the American army who is now a professor of international relations and history at Boston University. But he does share much of the left’s analysis of what has gone wrong. This includes both its dislike of what he calls (quoting the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr) the “most grievous temptations to self-adulation” brought about by American exceptionalism, and its perception that America has long been accumulating an empire. But he comes to these conclusions from the position of a genuine conservative.