Exceptionalism Cont.
Damon Linker of the New Republic has an interesting, intelligent response to the National Review article I linked to recently in defense of American exceptionalism. I particularly liked this remark about President Bush:
Lots of conservatives turned on George W. Bush by the end of his presidency. But here we see that if Bush didn't exist, the right would have had to invent him. His proud parochialism, his simple-minded and insecure suspicion of intelligence, his swaggering self-righteousness€”all of it is the natural expression of contemporary conservatism's outlook on the world.
Couldn't agree more.
National Review has responded to Linker's criticism, as well as other reactions, in this piece. I take exception- pun intended- to this comment about left-wing support of mass transit:
Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit's association with Europe.
Emphasis mine. This statement has it exactly wrong. Speaking as a liberal, my enthusiasm for subsidized mass transit comes from the fact that mass transit programs are environmentally sound, reduce dependency on foreign sources of energy, and are typically more efficient in and between urban areas than automobiles. These reasons derive from having empirically observed mass transit systems in action while living in foreign countries, and thus wishing subsidized programs to be implemented in the US.
The NR piece appears to accuse liberals of believing in European exceptionalism, when in fact the opposite is true. The conservative opposition to mass transit exists largely because it is less prevalent in the US than in Europe, and therefore in their twisted ideology must be better.
NR concludes with an absolute whopper of a statement. To wit:
Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.
The shocking part of this sentence? Hanson is actually a professor of history. This remark would embarrass a fifth-grader. But in their effort to keep any contrary evidence from interrupting their precious pet theory of American exceptionalism, NR somehow tries to argue that slavery 'never became part of the national psyche'.
The mind boggles. I realize contemporary conservatives disdain intellectualism, but in publishing this piece shouldn't an even cursory understanding of basic American history be required?
I realize I could probably devote hours of my time to reading mind-numbing right-wing screeds and rebutting them, but I think this question of exceptionalism cuts to the very core of how right-wing and left-wing Americans view our country. And as I've argued earlier, exceptionalism has a central position in contemporary Chinese politics as well.
March 14th, 2010 - 22:11
Speaking of American exceptionalism, have you been following what has been going on here in Texas to the school curriculum? The Christian coalition has a majority, and are rewriting the textbooks to promote American exceptionalism and Christian values. Thomas Jefferson almost completely disappears, and the separation of church and state was recently made up. This goes along with fun things like justifying McCarthysism due to communist infiltration of the government, justifying Japanese internment during WWII because some Germans and Italians were also interred, and almost completely leaving out anything to do with Latino-American history… in a state that is getting close to half Latino! Man, if I were to have kids, I would stop whatever I was doing and get the hell out of here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?pagewanted=all
April 9th, 2010 - 12:57
I agree that we need more mass transit in America, but unfortunately because our infrastructure was based upon the idea that everyone has a car, it will be much harder now for the United States to implement more mass transit. Much of the rail systems in Europe and elsewhere were built before the invention, or rather the proliferation, of the automobile, which means that populations tended to be highly concentrated around the train tracks. After World War II, the period of America’s largest growth, city planners and developers needn’t concentrate their populations around the train tracks because it was assumed that all Americans had cars, thus giving birth to the suburbs. Even if a massive overhaul of American mass transit took place, Americans will still have to walk farther to the nearest train station than any European would. Of course you could take a bus to the nearest train station, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve grown accustomed to driving our own cars where ever we want to go, and the layout of our cities and towns encourages us to do so.