The Less Told Story of 'American Exceptionalism': Race, Nationalism, and Sectarianism

This paper, rooted in social and political theory and comparative historical analysis, “The Less Told Story of American Exceptionalism’: Race, Nationalism, and Sectarianism” argues that past analyses of the phenomenon of “American exceptionalism” underemphasize three causal factors that must be intellectually highlighted and also taken into account in left political practice: 1. the role of racism and white Southern political dominance within the Democratic Party from 1935 into the early 1970s (and since then within the Republican Party); 2. the reality that only in the United States is the left ideologically conceived to be “foreign” to national political culture; and 3. the uniquely transcendental, sometimes sectarian, and “witness” nature of American protest culture (which, in part, derives from the role of dissenting Protestant individualism within American moral discourse).” A considerable body of scholarly work on “American exceptionalism” examines why the United States is the one democratic capitalist society without a significant socialist presence within mainstream politics and why our welfare state is weaker and less universal that those of Northern Europe. While a considerable body of work highlights how racial politics served as a barrier to the development of a more universal welfare state and a more pro-labor collective bargaining environment from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. But the politics of racial backlash of the mid-1960s onwards has not been fully grasped as a continuing barrier - to this day - to a majoritarian democratic left. From the late 1960s onwards a white working class confronting de-industrization feared competition from workers of color (who first entered the civil service, industrial work force and construction trades in large numbers in the 1960s). The Republican political strategy fed on these fears, starting with Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority” to Reagan’s support of the “rebirth” of states’ rights. Democratic party neo-liberalism, as most skillfully practiced by President Bill Clinton, tried to “neutralize” conservative racial politics by moving the Democratic Party to the right on such racialized issues as crime and welfare reform. Ironically, the first African-American president is particularly constrained in regards to taking on “racially charged issues.” President Obama has strategically avoided (both in his campaign and while governing) talking about poverty and the mass incarceration of youth of color. While racial politics may still be the soft underbelly of a potential democratic left majority coalition, the American left (and scholarly observers) have radically underestimated the role that nationalism has played in marginalizing the American ideological left. In almost every other nation, the left is identified with the “national” project of overthrowing despotic aristocracies, defeating fascism, or achieving national liberation from colonialism. Only in the United States is the left popularly conceived to be anti-nationalist or “anti-American.” This derives in part from the United States Socialist Party being only one of three socialist parties in the world steadfastly to oppose World War I. But, most importantly, as the Communist Party and its front groups dominated the US left from 1935 until the rise of the New Left, the ideological left (in its predominant form) took the side of the Soviet Union against the United States in the Cold War. The charge that the left is “anti-American” took hold in the popular political imagination long before the New Left’s opposition to the American intervention in Vietnam. The paper will explore how radicals in the United States can become more “American” without succumbing to narrow nationalism and while continuing to fight for a democratic and less interventionist foreign policy.Finally, the American left has historically been riven by bitter, sectarian disputes. This is in part because a weak left that does not have to deal with the pragmatic realities (and compromises) of holding state power can remain wedded to purism. But these sectarian proclivities may be an accentuated version of the American protest (and protestant) tradition of transcendental “witness” politics. The moral purity and radical individualism of ideological left culture remains a major barrier to an American left that has, as G. William Domhoff points out, difficulty in dealing with the structural biases, in both our constitutional and electoral laws, in favor of a two-party system. Obviously, any 21st century left will have to be more multi-cultural and internationalist than the American left of the 1930s and 1960s; but both these periods saw millions of ordinary Americans question whether the promise of political democracy can be fulfilled amidst rampant social and economic inequality. Can there be a progressive response to today’s global hard times? Absent the rebirth of social movement protest against unemployment, foreclosures, and federal and state budget cuts it is hard to envision a progressive “governing coalition.” But absent such a coalition we are unlikely to witness public policies which affirm that the logic of the market must be regulated and constrained by a democratic polity.