The Curious Case of American Exceptionalism

When did humility stop being cool?

I was nine years old when the September 11 attacks happened, but it’s one of my earliest recollections of being aware of the United States of America. The significance of the event escaped me at the time, but I remember coming home from school and thinking it was strange that all the TV channels were looping the same news footage (except BBC 2 which was playing the Tweenies). As a British kid, I grew up with a vision of the US as the ‘leaders of the free world’. That ‘city upon a hill’, a phrase taken from the Sermon on the Mount, has come to symbolise a nation in which good Christian values can be demonstrated for all the world to see - and be exposed if they should fail. The expectation that this New World nation, free from the shackles of Old World feudalism, might pioneer a social foundation from which the future of civilisation could grow, fertilised with hard work, ambition and decency.

Throughout history, global proponents of American exceptionalism have believed that the US has a unique mission to transform the world, based on some or all of the core principles of the American Revolution: Liberty, individualism, republicanism, democracy, meritocracy and laissez-faire economics. Above all, it was the idea of the ‘Great American Experiment’ that shaped the exceptionalism idea; the United States’ venture into self-government and democracy, breaking away from powerful British rule in the 18th century and creating their own constitution to guarantee the rights of all its citizens. In the words of the Declaration of Independence:

‘All men are created equal… with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’

A blank slate, forward vision, good values and hard work add up to a great experiment indeed, and one definitely worth pursuing. But the question is, at what point do you conclude that the experiment has failed?