* High medical costs
* Highest maternal mortality among developed countries
* Highest income gaps
* High education cost & the vicious circle of college debt.
* Increasing trends of bankruptcy & paycheck-to-paycheck sustenance.
* Lack of public transportation issues in most places
* Very oil dependent economy.
* Gun violence. So many lives needlessly lost every year.
* Growing mental health & opiod crisis
* Lack of public awareness about current affairs (& to some extent apathy even)
* Waning trust in judiciary & in parallel the rise of the rich oligarchy
* Interference in politics of other countries
* Equality of diversity (in true sense) is still to be achieved given racial profiling persists
* The extent of personal freedom without state agencies keeping track of activities.
It definitely has successes but there is a long road to being a model nation. But US as a nation has demonstrated the capacity to overcome odds in fortitude. There is hope - but a sense of cautious hope
Ok, you've created the greatest military power, but your country can rarely go through a day without mass shooting of it's own citizens by it's own citizens. How does your military power help your country if the greatest threat to it's citizens comes from your other citizens?
You created an economic power, but you can't afford to provide medical services to a huge portion of your population. When you do provide medical services, the costs are significantly higher than any in any other country. So what has your economic power purchased you? Another television? More sugary and unhealthy foods?
* US is absolutely the leader in innovation. No doubts about it.
* Champion of democracy. The US political system & constitution has inspired a lot of other countries. Its a very immaculately drawn political system built on checks & balances
* High degree of choices to an individual to shape his life
* High degree of demographic diversity.
* Good quality secondary & college/university education.
* A general attitude to question the status quo - which is necessary to bring change.
* Secure nation militarily.
* Peaceful & cooperative neighbors, who engage symbiotically for the better of all stakeholders.
* High social mobility for a lot of people (not all but a big chunk).
* Good quality of life in general.
* Very high natural diversity & plentiful resources.
* Ability to shape the political climate to maintain world order.
Thinking US is the best country in the world and rejecting the issues is why it’s considered a shithole by a growing population of the world. As a French, the US seems like at third world country to me regarding social rights and benefits.
Note that I am not saying that these are the only causes of the problems you mentioned, but they are significant. And I agree that you can go to far with these and sometimes being more free / subject to less societal pressure to conform is worth sacrifices in health and safety. Just so long as we understand the tradeoffs and don't blindly look at perceived benefits of other countries without also looking at sacrifices made for these benefits.
It's one of the core American myths which is directly transmitted through American education, and the vast majority of Americans believe it. Even those that say they don't will recoil when you disprove or contest some key aspects, it's a very ingrained idea.
Everyone wants to be part of an exceptional nation because then there's a chance they're personally exceptional, too :-)
So I don't think it's as widespread as you say, though I can easily imagine that it's a popular idea in certain segments of the population.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the misunderstanding that you seem to be referring to is whether or not the nation actually is the thing that people misunderstood exceptionalism to mean, which is "great," "superior," etc. That's more of an opinion, so I wouldn't say "misunderstanding" is the right word for it.
Undoubtedly, the American Revolution was huge and created something novel, but it's not like it all happened in a vacuum.
However, the classical definition, that the U.S. has a historically unique operating agreement, is generally understood in politically conservative contexts.
If anything, what's exceptional about America is how its citizens are treating fossilized details of a 246-year-old system as critically important, conveniently ignoring that America's founding fathers couldn't foresee everything, and that dozens of other democratic countries function without these details just fine.
Interesting claim - how would you square that with, say, the fact that majorities of “the people” in the UK support the death penalty for child murderers, and yet both main political parties have conspired to ban the death penalty? Does “power deriving” from the people differ somehow from actually implementing policies that they want?
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/0...
The article entirely misses the problem non-US people have with the US faffing on about greatness or its exceptionality.
Which is that individuals from the US seem to see this as an indication of their own superiority and develop a parochial point of view regardless of their almost total insignificance to the accomplishments of the US.
Most US citizens have done precisely nothing to increase the 'greatness' of the US other than pay their taxes (which they oppose doing). Many non-US citizens have done much more, the success of the USA is the result of a combined effort from many countries but the parochialism of many Americans refuses to acknowledge this.
Even if your country is exceptional, which is immeasurable nonsense (I'm sure every country is exceptional in some ways), you should not take pride from this because you have done incredibly little to achieve it.
I expect precisely 0 Americans to agree with me, but my PoV is not uncommon in Australia at least.
Note that I never say a single thing about Australia being perfect or model citizens, that is your fabrication which you interpreted as 'US Bad and Parochial, Australia Good". Very zero sum of you, which fits exactly into the type of personality I am talking about. Find as many flaws in Australia as you can, it wont offend me because unlike you I dont see my country as beyond reproach.
I did not invent American Exceptionalism, I did not write the article we are discussing, Americans are the ones who refer to their country as the best or greatest.
Nah, I disagree. First, individuals who were educated across the globe, money from across the globe, and access to global resources are all necessary (and a fundamental part of the history) of Silicon Valley's success.
There really is no argument that Silicon Valley-like innovation do occur in distinctly non-free environments. For example; The Soviet Union's part in the Space Race, the current entrepreneurial and technological development in China, the British component of the Industrial Revolution.
Each of these demonstrate scientific innovation in otherwise less-free societies than California. I'm sure there are many more examples if you wanted to extend the historic timeline further.
Not an endorsement of the CCP.
I think the conclusion is interesting, so I'm going to paste it here in case you don't want to read the whole article.
> To put it simply then, the United States might be typified by an emphasis on achieving greatness (as traditionally defined) above almost everything else.18 The very bigness is the goal, driving forward towards larger profits, newer technology, more clicks and views, greater military power, more allies19, damn the consequences. That’s not the only thing at the heart of America, but it is one of the things.
> And on those terms it is hard not to conclude that the United States is a success, indeed, it is a country that has succeeded on those terms like no other country has ever succeeded. It has resulted in a country which is not merely exceptional, but exceptionally exceptional – that is, the United States is highly unusual in an unusually high number of ways. And, as I noted at the beginning, it is unusual in fairly obvious ways, evident enough that one has to accomplish some serious mental contortions not to notice what a strange, expansive and powerful country the United States is.
> The interesting question then is not if the United States is a great country but if it will be a good country, if all of that vastness in wealth, technology, influence and power will be put towards some worthy aim, both judged against our ideals20 and against the historical behavior of other great powers.21 It’s a question that only Americans can really answer, in our doing. I strive and hope that we answer well.
Like self governance?
The results have been exceptional, too.
The US does indeed have plenty of problems, but those problems are usually traceable to neglecting those founding principles.
Of course, Jefferson's words established no basis in American law. It was signed before America existed. The Treaty of Paris ending the war established America only as a sovereign country, not a free one. (We were free of monarchy only). In fact, the intended audience for both documents was international, not national.
Never a legal document, the Declaration was mostly two things: advertising -- in the hope that enemies of England might give us money in order to annoy King George, and cheerleading -- in the hope America's troops wouldn't lose heart at the slow pace of the war and its woeful prospects, and desert, as many did.
We continue to harken to the Declaration only because the pretty words make it easier to dismiss proofs of contradiction like slavery and wars of adventure.
BTW, the Constitution was amended to outlaw slavery. That counts.
Unless you're black. Or female. Or Asian. etc.
Why does this founding myth persist?
Being Asian in Asia?
Do they have the same freedoms? Face the same discrimination?
If your measure is perfection than no country meets your standards.
Isn't the legacy of these 'founding principles' tarnished from the fact that many of the founding fathers owned hundreds of slaves? We are still within a living generation of segregation in southern states, an injustice that owes directly to how the founding fathers applied those principles.
[1] this did not use to be the case, the Athenian democracy had no qualms about slavery
Also, pretty absurd to blame founding fathers for segregation laws centuries later. People who made these laws were responsible for those laws.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...
Is the US an imperfect implementation of those principles? Yes.
Does that invalidate those principles? No.
Has the US done a pretty good job of implementing those principles? Yes.
They’re so vague that we find some people trying to decipher what someone living in in the 1700s would think about society today instead of updating our laws and principles to suit modern times.
Convoluted example: “Well smartphones didn’t exist in 1776, so you don’t have a right to pursue happiness on that medium”.
It’s so frustrating to see such partisan gridlock where the voice of the actual citizens are not heard and translated into laws and regulations.
I don’t know what my point really is, but I guess I’m saying it’s not so simple. We can’t boil it all down to a sentence or two.
The first is that, being a rich country and democratically elected, our standards for fair and ethical behavior are higher than others'. We can afford to be generous and to be kind. Our declaration of universal human rights means we stick up for rights not just in our own territory, but for all our human sisters and brothers, extending due process to all, even those under the boot of foreign enemy governments, and aiding movements toward democracy, freedom, and recognition of inherent human rights and dignity.
The other is that, being so fucking rich and powerful, the rules don't apply to us, and we are justified in doing anything, no matter how harmful, anywhere it gets something for companies based here or people holding power here at the moment.
You can guess which way administrations who have promoted "American exceptionalism" jumped. I don't think I need to trot out examples, but it seems notable that Russia copied the verbiage that US published in support of its unsupportable invasion of Iraq when they invaded Ukraine. The US demanding International Criminal Court attention to Russian war crimes, while warning that any attempt at prosecuting well-known American war criminals would evoke military action, is particularly rich.
Arranging for Nobel Peace Prizes to be issued to war criminals is a neat touch.
I don't think it is notable that Russia copied the verbiage of the US, this seems like a logical fallacy. Bad people will always quote the most powerful people to try and make a point, or try and weaken them. It doesn't mean it's good, it is just an irrelevant part of the argument.
Russians cribbing from that was obviously meant ironically. Missing that point is telling.
> The diatribe that statement is treated by the visual language of the scene like a truth bomb, which is why it is so odd because Jeff Daniels’ character is not merely wrong, but (as I intend to show) laughably so
The scene in question is literally the first scene in the first episode of the show. Jeff Daniels' character is disillusioned, sold out to advertisers, lacking integrity, and alone. His character arc, over the entire season, is about him getting over the attitude shown in the clip.
> There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
Fun fact, it is a formal heresy to believe (a historical form of) this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanism_(heresy)
Which is to say, it's a little bit of a definitional problem around what the word "country" actually means. The US, being a federalist collection of semi-autonomous states is sort of a hybrid country. There are some clear aspects (a single military, federal laws, a common currency, a commonly elected president). But then there are other aspects such as that the autonomy given to states is such that they invent local laws to the extent that for a huge range of areas you effectively have to deal with the US on a state-by-state basis.
It doesn't mean that it is more exceptional than earlier superpowers, like Rome, or Spain or Great Britain, if we account for the increased interconnectedness of the world. It also doesn't imply that all of these statistics may not one day apply (even more so) to a completely different country, such as maybe China.
But most of all, I don't think any of it implies that this is fully due to any intrinsic qualities of the US per se. While those certainly played a role, so did accidents of history. Had Europe not been so dumb to go to war twice in the 20th century, maybe we would think of Great Britain as "exceptional".
I also don't like how the author continues to use the adjective "great", despite acknowledging that it might be confused with "good". It's probably problematic that we speak of "Alexander the Great" too, but we do so due to historiographic tradition. There's IMHO no need to carry over this baggage to contemporary history. We can just call the US "important" or "a superpower", which is what it is, without using adjectives which so clearly imply moral judgement that the author immediately has to distance themselves from it (and IMHO in a rather half-hearted manner).
I mean you can, but the author seems to go back and forth in how he places value on bigness. The sentiment that we have the most research institutions does not seem to be presented as valueless, and yet we also talk about the replicability crisis in science.
McDonald’s is the largest restaurant chain in the world, does that mean American cuisine is the greatest?
I think I agree with the overarching sentiment of the piece: that America is unquestionably exceptional given a neutral definition of the word exceptional, but may conclude we are less driven by greatness and more driven by dominance at all cost.
And this is overly critical, America is obviously not do bad things 100% of the time, in fact I would probably say America is equal parts "Do great things" "Do, even if there's no evidence it's good" and "Gosh, no one has ever been inhumane enough to charge money for THAT before"
These are humans who have had an outsized impact on the course of humanity.
Perhaps similar historical events would have come about with a different person, but they were the human that made massively impactful decisions. Their personal whims and experience decided the fate of large portions of the world.
They had a great impact. If that is not the same as greatness, perhaps we need an alternative term to describe great impact without moral connotation.
Victoria Nuland giving cookies at the Maidan square and appointing the post Yanukovich government? US can.
Paying italian Mafia to kill socialist workers in Italy? US can.
Having US drunk air force peoppe kill 30 civillians in Italy because they wanted to see how low they coukd fly and sending them back home without charges? US can.
Toppling governments, supporting and funding coups in half the world? US can.
Military actions around the world against UN, which include bs wars like Iraq? US can.
Spying on all the world,including the german chancellor, inserting back doors in routers, processors and civilian infrastructure? US can.
US exceptionalism is a dangerous thinking, and what is more worrying is how openly US leaders talk about it. I vividly remember a 4th july speech by Obama with a 10 minutes rant on how US is exceptional and can do things other can't.
>"One may of course argue that this situation is changing, albeit slowly, but at the moment the contrast is startling: the sphere of Russian influence does quite reach Kyiv (about 150 miles from the Russian border) and the sphere of Chinese influence does not quite reach Taipei (about the same distance, but over water), but American influence evidently reaches both despite the former being 4,300 miles and the latter 6,500 miles away from American shores."
While that is true one can't talk about influence without talking about depth and quality. Russia and China have more limited reach, but the countries where in particular Russia has had an influence, Russian culture deeply permeates. One only needs to visit Kazakhstan to see the influence from its very system of politics at the top and well into the private homes. US influence around the world is wide but often times quite shallow. It's mirrored in military disappointments despite overwhelming power. Vietnam, Afghanistan recently, and so on. Same in the sphere of culture. Despite the overwhelming dominance of the US and the UK as well and, the Chinese haven't all become American, as people are noticing now, despite what they thought in the 90s. Even South America diverges pretty widely from the US compared to say, Russia and its direct periphery.
And I think this is to an extent true within the US as well. The author rightfully points out the dominance of US education in sheer numbers, but the US also seems to have unique troubles to translate this into social tools. For all the high quality of top tier American education and money, it hasn't necessarily created exceptional outcomes broadly, even compared to much poorer nations.
There's a thinness to American exceptionalism that is often masked by the focus on numbers and size. While the country is exceptionally rich, the life expectancy is not exceptionally high, but lower than in Cuba. And I think articles like this which pretend to be objective do intentionally wave that aside.
All this time I've been stumbling around thinking it was our ability to run twin deficits (trade and budget) for like 40 years, without any appreciable increase in Treasury yields.
At the end of WWII, America was the last rich country standing and proceeded to go round the world kicking out left-wing governments (unfriendly or not) and installing right-wing ones. The result was unprecedented profits and security for American corporations, and some of that wealth undoubtedly trickled down. But I'm left thinking about the cost. Is it any wonder Russia, Iran, South America, etc. would distrust us and want us out of their business?
The comparison at the end to the Mongols feels apt, since while their empire was undeniably great, it is very difficult to argue that they were a force for good in the lives of the people on whose backs that greatness was won.
Stop beating yourselves up. The US has been an incredible force of good in the world for the most part - though not perfect of course. Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan governments on the other hand have been objectively horrible. I don't believe the "American way of life" is keeping anyone down other than those that wish to oppress others.
If they had a choice to not allow them develop lethal weapons, they would by all means. McCarthyism executed a few, incarcerated several & targeted scores on charges of defense espionage, over a decade, including Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Not a great example. If the world has misunderstood this grandiosity, US should be willing to let Iranians & Koreans build their nuclear weapons, no?
> The US has been an incredible force of good in the world for the most part.
Reference needed to make such "exceptional" statement. The natural status quo would have inadvertently kept some power balance with or without US. International policing has just made the waters murkier. AFAIK US has meddled with politics of dozens of countries for political & economic gains. Count almost the whole of Latin America in it. Confessions of an economic hitman is a good read (it exaggerated several claims but the theme is consistent & accepted to be major US policies) Middle East is a quagmire, and hard to comment in this post - but what was the rationale of pitting Pakistan against India militarily for decades & now India against China. This is setting up a war of attrition on someone else's expense. As an Indian by birth, I know the numbers run into thousands of soldiers & civilians killed in conflict, mostly funded by arms & assistance to Pakistan over 80s & 90s. Could you forget Nixon sent 7th Fleet to Arabian sea with an intention to nuke India if IndoPak war persisted to favor a dictator in Pakistan [1,1a, 1b]? Not to forget Taliban was propped up by US [2] & ISIS was created in the vacuum of lawlessness left behind after Opn. Iraqi Freedom [3].
> I don't believe the "American way of life" is keeping anyone down other than those that wish to oppress others.
Space is a constraint for a full scale diatribe, but the Hispanic part of the world would like to have a word about it at least. Trade protectionism & political bullying has affected Latin American countries for several decades. Hispanic workers suffer lower wages in general than Americans, although working harder on most menial jobs [4]
1. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-indian...
1a. https://www.firstpost.com/world/the-1971-war-when-richard-ni...
1b. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/22/us/nixon-says-he-consider...
2. https://www.agoristnexus.com/taliban/
3. https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/iraqs-power-vacuum-cou...
4. https://universitybusiness.com/press-release/study-hispanic-...
Does that make the EU exceptional too?