The affects of globalization on American exceptionalism have had a paradoxical effect, whereby the globalization process has problematized what in fact American exceptionalism entails in an unprecedented historical manner. As Beinart (2016) notes, American exceptionalism has itself been a historically fluid concept, However, in so far as American exceptionalism has historically represented a type of providential mission for the United State (Bacevich, 2008), what globalization and the changing world order has established is that this providential dimension has reached an impasse on both domestic and foreign levels.
Much of the world sees the power of the United States decreasing on a global level, in harmony with an increasing conception of the United States an aggressive ultimately imperialistic power concerned only with its own civilizational and realist alliances (cf. Huntington, 1993), whereas on an internal level the popularity of candidates such as Trump and Sanders offer radically different visions of what the United States should look like. In this sense, the United States’ encounter with the world in the globalization process has finally ended the already mythical concept of American exceptionalism.
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"The Effects of Globalization on American Exceptionalism".
As Bacevich (2008) argues, the United States has had a self-image as a providential power from its historical origins, but this image has been a distortion, a “sanitization” of another history. The “neoconservative” (Bacevich, 2008) contemporary image of American exceptionalism is tied to the notions of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which manifests itself in foreign policy, in the words of former President Bush, as the objective of “ending tyranny in the world.” (Bacevich, 2008) But as Bacevich (2008) also notes, following an insight that had already been advanced in de Tocqueville’s early nineteenth century analysis of the United States, these ethically sound concepts are really masks for a more fundamental materialism, consumerism and self-gratification, that is tied to the capitalist ideology and many of the Protestant and even Puritan mores that were integral to the culture of the United States. (Bacevich, 2008) Following this line of thought, the concept of American exceptionalism is not, as the neoconservatives would have it, an anti-tyrannical spirit, but itself a nation that, fuelled by its own self-righteousness, engages the world with its own superiority, gratifying itself by considering itself above the rest of the world and pursuing policies that attempt to convince the world of this same self-righteousness.
However, as Samuel Huntington (1993) convincingly argues in his text “Clash of Civilizations” written after the end of the Cold War, civilizations in general tend to conceive themselves as possessing a fundamental value, which is why civilizational blocs historically emerge. .In other words, Huntington (1993) conceives the new world order in terms of civilizational blocs, but the deeper question is the following: why do such civilizational blocs exist? Clearly, they exist, they are defended, because, for whatever anthropological or sociological reason, the people who constitute these civilizations feel that these civilizations are worth defending, that links of kinship have an intrinsic value that should be defended against the outsider. From this perspective, the American exceptionalist idea is not all that exceptional: in one sense, every civilization considers itself to be exceptional, as bearing a worth that should be defended and perpetuated into the future. This is the underlying message of Huntington’s text: if civilizations will become the dominant world order, this means that they have a power to mobilize individuals, cultural, religious and ethnic ties which are much stronger than more abstract ideologies such as communism or capitalism or even democracy. Globalization demonstrates to the American consciousness of exceptionalism that other civilizations conceive of themselves of having a dignity, a value and something to offer to the world.
Arguably, it is precisely this notion that was reflected in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, with the success of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, and the near success of Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primaries (and it is arguable that Sanders could have won based on releases of Wikileaks if the process had been more fair). In Sanders’ vision of the United States, as Beinart (2016) observes, the aim is to make the United States more like Western European welfare states, offering various free social programmes to the population. What Sanders’ campaign and its success among young people demonstrates is that young people are now familiar with the world around them and are critical to the idea of American exceptionalism: they have friends from Europe, who, for example study in university for free, whereas they are saddled with enormous student loans. In this atmosphere, based on pure pragmatic experience, young Americans would have to be naive fools to believe that the U.S. is the best country in the world, a point that Beinart (2016) makes clear in statistical evidence. Even the opposite end of the spectrum, Trump, also challenges the Amerian exceptionalism narrative: Trump essentially endorses an isolationism, but such a radical isolationism differs from the providential message of American exceptionalism by definition: for Trump America must essentially re-build, it is a damaged and wounded country, and providential missions of exceptionalism are unthinkable in such a state. Both candidates thus represent a radical revision of the historical idea of American exceptionalism.
Whereas American exceptionalism is associated with a providentail mission closely related to liberty, Bacevich and de Tocqueville before him are careful to identify a more self-gratuitous instinct underneath this noble discourse. The globalization of the world demonstrates that America confronts other civilizations who also claim a worth and a value to their histories, a narrative which makes American exceptionalism less exceptional in a global context. American exceptionalism in both Trump and Sanders is an anti-exceptionalism based on a need to join the world and a need to isolate the U.S. and re-build a damaged country. Through all these historical cases, the affect of globalization on the American exceptionalist concept is to reveal it as a myth that always was a myth and which has finally been disclosed itself in the age of the global.
