Access Provided by Bridgewater State University at 06/04/12 4:55PM GMT BOOK REVIEW ESSAY An Exceptional Debate: The Championing of and Challenge to American Exceptionalism Jason A. Edwards American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey. Edited by Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2011; pp. 240. $75.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. he Limits of Power: he End of American Exceptionalism. By Andrew Bacevich. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009; pp. 224. $24.00 cloth; $14.00 paper. he Myth of American Exceptionalism. By Geofrey Hodgson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009; pp. xviii+221. $18.00 paper. The New American Exceptionalism. By Donald E. Pease. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; pp. 246. $67.50 cloth; $22.95 paper. A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. By Newt Gingrich. New York: Regnery Publishing, 2011; pp. 264. $17.79 cloth. Jason A. Edwards is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 15, No. 2, 2012, pp. 351–368. ISSN 1094-8392. 351 352 I Rhetoric & Public Affairs n April 2009, President Obama travelled to Europe to meet with European leaders to coordinate a strategy to deal with the global inancial crisis while commemorating the 60th anniversary of NATO. At a news conference in Strasbourg, France, a reporter asked the president whether he subscribed to American exceptionalism. Obama began a long answer to that question with, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”1 Although Obama later stated that the United States was “exceptional” because of ideas enshrined in its Constitution and its body of law, his opening sentence regarding American exceptionalism caused a irestorm of controversy among conservative pundits and politicians. James Kirchick wrote, “[I]f all countries are ‘exceptional’ then none are, and to claim otherwise robs the word, and the idea of American exceptionalism, of any meaning.”2 Monica Crowley stated that Obama’s answer is “not exactly the way Mr. Reagan would have answered.” She further noted that “President Obama’s reference to British or Greek exceptionalism” is a “kaleidoscopic let-wing view, no nation is better than any other, no country can tell another country not to have nuclear weapons, and we’re all socialists now.”3 he Washington Times editorial page declared that Obama “doesn’t believe in U.S. exceptionalism.”4 Similarly, Mitt Romney accused Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism, and part of Romney’s presidential campaign was based on a promise to restore America’s greatness.5 Newt Gingrich predicted President Obama’s beliefs regarding American exceptionalism would be one of the two or three most important issues in the 2012 presidential campaign.6 he hullabaloo over Obama’s rhetoric is symptomatic of a larger debate in the United States concerning its exceptionalist ethos, which is fundamental to questions concerning who we are as Americans, where we are going, and how we relate to the world around us.7 American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is unique among, if not superior to, other nation-states. It is the fundamental agent that has underwritten arguments concerning America’s destiny.8 Currently, our exceptionalist ethos is in lux, partly because of the drumbeat of American decline that has become a constant refrain in American politics. Accordingly, the nature of American exceptionalism and how we enact that exceptionalism is under debate. A number of recent works have spoken to how American exceptionalism has manifested itself in U.S. history, how it can be restored, and how it endangers the United States. Read together, these works demonstrate the power and seduction that American exceptionalism still holds in U.S. politics and culture. My Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 353 aim in this review essay is to outline the contours of the debate concerning American exceptionalism, while providing insight into its speciic lashpoints, champions, and challengers. Ultimately, the books reviewed here point to present and future self-relection Americans must have about who they are and how they interact with the outside world. A Powerful Force in American Culture and History I begin this review essay with Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson’s edited collection American Exceptionalisms, which chronicles how exceptionalism has manifested itself throughout U.S. history. hese essays, according to the introduction, illustrate “both the history and the pervasiveness of the assumptions underlying the political debate about the role of the United States in the world. Our premise is that exceptionalism . . . inlects every discourse involving relations between the United States and its—internal as well as external—others and that even dissenting counterdiscourses rely on the commonality of assumptions underlying the national ethos” (9). hrough 11 chapters and an aterword, Söderlind and Carson have gathered together a group of scholars who have a common desire to “understand how and why the rhetoric of exceptionalism has shaped, and continues to shape, the writing of history and culture in the United States” (9). I highlight four representative chapters. In chapter 1, Deborah Madsen provides a trans-historical study analyzing the trope of witchcrat in recent political rhetoric, inding the roots of this trope in the preaching of Puritan Ministers like John Winthrop and Cotton Mather. Winthrop and Mather presented contradictory visions of how to extricate evil from colonial New England, but both agreed that if New Englanders were vigilant in ighting evil, then exceptional bliss would befall Puritan communities. For Madsen, this trope reappears in contemporary political rhetoric where politicians constantly assert that the United States must be vigilant in its “witch-hunts” to ight an enemy that might endanger the American polity and its allies. he ights America engages in reinforce its exceptionalist ethos, while also attempting to “transform everyone into ‘American’ subjects and everyone into ‘America’” (28). In chapter 4 Matthew Brophy uses the burlesque genre to critique the sanctiication of violence inherent within American exceptionalism. Brophy focuses on the exceptionalist violence aimed primarily against Native 354 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Americans, which served as a means to “civilize” various populations within the United States even as it justiied westward expansion. As Brophy notes, burlesque is a subgenre of satire “in which the grotesque and ridiculous are exposed without explicitly positing a moral norm” (72). Brophy’s subjects of evaluation are Washington Irving’s A History of New York and Herman Melville’s he Conidence Man. Both literary works, he argues, stealthily criticized an exceptionalism built upon the destruction of other groups of people. In chapter 7, Carl Bon Tempo does an outstanding job of analyzing contemporary debates over immigration. He demonstrates how both those who would restrict and those who would liberalize immigration drew upon similar exceptionalist ideals to make their arguments in the debates of 1965 and 2006. Bon Tempo argues that in 1965, immigration liberalizers used the ideals of the civil rights movement to advocate that immigration quotas, which had been in place since the 1920s, needed to be loosened. he loosening of immigration quotas would prove the United States was still an exemplar nation, in sharp contrast to the shadow cast by the Soviet Union. In the 2006 debate, immigration restrictionists and liberalizers used exceptionalism to make their cases. According to Bon Tempo, liberalizers used arguments similar to those that worked in 1965, whereas restrictionists maintained that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, undermined what made the United States exceptional because it drove down wages, impinged upon the self-image of the United States as a “nation of laws,” and imperiled American identity. hus, Bon Tempo asserts, restrictionists advocated tough new enforcement mechanisms to maintain exceptionalism. Finally, Sarah Humphreys, in chapter 10, focuses on Oprah Winfrey’s reinforcement of American exceptionalism by examining the “Oprah Winfrey’s Child Predator Watch List” website, launched in 2005. Humphreys presents Winfrey’s argument that her website would help eradicate the evil of child predators plaguing America. Humphreys calls Oprah’s rhetoric “vigilante sentimentalism” that functions to uphold American exceptionalism more than it alleviates child molestation. She notes that Oprah’s Watch List gives the impression that America is under attack from evil, facilitating the construction of an insidious form of exceptionalism that promotes the appearance of Americans as a divine and righteous people above all others. Although I have highlighted only four chapters of the eleven in this edited collection, scholars will proit from its entirety. he book covers a wide range of subjects, providing enlightening takes on how American exceptionalism has been created, strengthened, critiqued, and challenged. One missing Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 355 element of the text is a concluding chapter to summarize the voices included within the text, pointing to varying debates that rage in American culture over exceptionalism. hat said, readers will ind that this edited volume ofers a wide-ranging look at one of the most important forces in American culture and history. A Champion of American Exceptionalism Most Americans know Newt Gingrich either as President Clinton’s foil during the 1990s or as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. However, Gingrich is recognized as one of the most important thinkers in Republican circles. Gingrich’s latest book, A Nation Like No Other, is in some respects quite predictable. Gingrich is unabashedly enthusiastic about American exceptionalism. he United States, according to Gingrich, is the greatest country ever. However, “[O]ur unique habits of liberty that have made us such a successful society, are now being threatened by a combination of centralized bureaucracies, letwing ideologies, destructive litigation, and an elite view that American Exceptionalism is no longer accessible or even permissible” (13). Accordingly, the point of his book is to “share with you the most important ideas of American Exceptionalism, what policies arise from it, and what we can do to sustain and strengthen our role as the singular nation of the modern world” (13). Gingrich’s book consists of eleven chapters, divided into three parts. Part I, entitled “Remembering Who We Are,” outlines what Gingrich deems to be the roots of American exceptionalism. He maintains that America’s exceptionalist ethos lows from the Founding Fathers and founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If one understands the greatness of America’s founders and how the founding documents enshrined a government built upon rights guaranteed through limited government, then one understands how the United States became exceptional. In turn, this exceptionalism is sustained by America’s “habits of liberty,” which are faith and family, work, civil society, rule of law, and safety and peace. he Founding Fathers were exemplars of those habits of liberty, which have been “lived” by Americans ever since. In part II, “Deining American Exceptionalism,” Gingrich expands on these ive “habits of liberty.” Each one is given its own chapter. he former Speaker describes what he believes to constitute each habit, and then demonstrates 356 Rhetoric & Public Affairs how that habit of liberty is under attack by a cabal of letist and elitist interests. For example, in the chapter on “safety and peace,” Gingrich describes Ronald Reagan as the presidential exemplar of “safety and peace,” whose policy of peace through strength helped to restore American exceptionalism, win the Cold War, and make America great once again. he Obama administration, according to Gingrich, undermines America’s safety and peace by not directly supporting the Arab Spring, negotiating a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, and not confronting the threat of radical Islam. he Obama administration’s foreign policy has the United States “leading from behind,” which “not only violates American Exceptionalism, it is the precise antithesis of American Exceptionalism” (178). herefore, Gingrich believes that the American people must do something to overcome this leadership deicit. In part III, “America Rising,” Gingrich prescribes a plan to help the United States overcome this deicit. His solution is to take steps to restore America’s habits of liberty by learning about American history, exceptional Americans, and its founding principles; speaking out and questioning governmental authority; celebrating American holidays; defeating and replacing bad judges; and a whole host of other actions. Ultimately, American exceptionalism can only survive if Obama is ousted from ofice and if Americans elect politicians who will restore our habits of liberty to basic founding principles. Newt Gingrich’s A Nation Like No Other is not a scholarly analysis of American exceptionalism. Gingrich makes broad sweeping connections that are not necessarily supported by an in-depth look into the history of the subject. For example, to assert that the Founding Fathers might subscribe to our foreign policy with all of its “entangling alliances” is a misreading of the Founders’ counsel on how America should handle its foreign afairs. hat said, Gingrich is not trying to provide an in-depth scholarly analysis. Rather, he is a cheerleader for America’s exceptionalist ethos. His book is clearly dedicated to an audience that constructs U.S. exceptionalism in a very narrow way, believes it has been damaged by the Obama administration, and wants speciic steps to restore conservative visions of American exceptionalism. But to dismiss this book as merely a polemic against the Obama administration would be, in my estimation, a mistake. he former Speaker’s ideas must be taken seriously because they serve as an important part of the overall debate about American exceptionalism and where the United States should go in its domestic and international afairs. Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 357 The Trouble with American Exceptionalism Although Mr. Gingrich might be a champion of American exceptionalism, quite a few authors have challenged those ideas and how they are operationalized. Geofrey Hodgson is one such critic. Hodgson’s Myth of American Exceptionalism questions the very nature of exceptionalism. Mr. Hodgson is a British national who has been “thinking about the United States, reading about the United States, and experiencing American history all my life” (ix). He considers himself to be a friend of America and until the late 1990s, “remained an ‘American’ in my politics” (xii). However, Hodgson maintains that something has been fundamentally wrong with U.S. politics over the past thirty years. What troubles Hodgson most has been the propensity to “a new insistence that America be admired, almost worshipped” (xii). In the last thirty years, U.S. political culture seemed to develop a disdain for journalists and commentators who pointed out the shortcomings of American society and its leaders. As Hodgson relected on this change, he came to the conclusion that American history had been distorted. he uniqueness of the U.S. political tradition has been overstressed. America’s greatness is not truly her own, because she owes a good chunk of it to Europe, a point which oten is ignored. With that in mind, Hodgson spends the next six chapters discussing how the United States is not as exceptional as it believes itself to be. In chapter 1, Hodgson examines the historical development of American exceptionalism, while at the same time challenging the uniqueness of the American experience. hroughout this chapter, Hodgson demonstrates that the rise and expansion of the United States was not wholly of its own making, but relied upon the help and inluence from European states and peoples. For example, many trace the origins of American exceptionalism to Puritans who immigrated to the United States seeking religious and political freedom. Yet Puritans like John Winthrop and William Bradford were not Americans, but Europeans. And Hodgson notes they were not unique in their search for political and religious freedom. All over Europe, people struggled to extend the freedom of others. Accordingly, any exceptional ethos derived from the Puritans is at least partly European in nature, and not solely American. Ultimately, Hodgson insists that the “United States did not emerge like Athena from the brow of Zeus, or by a kind of geopolitical virgin birth” (20). Chapters 2–4 continue this motif of debunking the American exceptionalist mythology. In chapter 2, Hodgson examines American history until the 358 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Civil War. He demonstrates how many items that make the United States exceptional—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the wide availability of education, territorial expansions westward—were directly linked to experiences in Europe. Chapter 3 investigates the development of America’s exceptionalist ethos from the Civil War to the Cold War. As in chapter 2, Hodgson demystiies some of the myths about the American experience. For example, the reform movements of emancipation and labor and the expansion of rights such as woman sufrage that the United States celebrates as providing a beacon for the world to emulate, had already taken place or were taking place in Europe. Consequently, America’s political development is not as unique as some would believe. Chapter 4 explores the time period comprising the height of the liberal consensus of the 1960s to the ascendancy of conservatism in the 1990s and 2000s. Hodgson describes how items that made the United States exceptional before, such as a reliance on its own natural resources, have led it to undercut its own claims to exceptionalism. he expanding militarism of the United States has repudiated a tradition of being suspicious of standing armies and has led the United States to intervene in the afairs of other nations. his militarism caused its for American politicians, policymakers, and pundits. America, which once declared its opposition to colonialism, is now a modern empire. In chapter 5, Hodgson presents how the United States is truly exceptional in ways that are profoundly negative. his negative exceptionalism includes the rise of social inequality between classes, the highest murder rate in the world, the continual use of capital punishment, the continued problems with access to health care, and the increasing inluence of money in politics. Hodgson traces the acceleration of this negative exceptionalism to the 1970s, when U.S. political culture began to swing to the conservative and the United States began to consume more than it produced. In the inal chapter, Hodgson answers a series of rhetorical questions about American exceptionalism not answered throughout the preceding pages. For example, he poses the question, “[I]s there, then, any truth at all, or has there been no merit in exceptionalism?” (172). Hodgson answers that American exceptionalism inspires the lives of countless Americans and people across the world. Nevertheless, he asserts that “what has been essentially a liberating set of beliefs has been corrupted over the past thirty years or so by hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system” (175). Andrew Bacevich’s he Limits of Power, like Hodgson’s work, challenges Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 359 America’s exceptionalist ethos. A primary diference between the two books is that Bacevich does not deny that the United States is exceptional; rather, he maintains that exceptionalism as it is currently construed has been one of the leading culprits in America’s current crisis. Since the beginning of the War on Terror, Bacevich has advocated, in two previous books, that the United States needs to revise its foreign policy, and he has argued that the United States has begun a slow march to empire.9 hose two books laid the groundwork for many of the ideas presented in he Limits of Power. However, this book is his manifesto. Over an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion, Bacevich argues that the malevolent actions of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden cannot explain why the United States seems to be perpetually involved in conlict. Instead of looking abroad for an explanation, Bacevich perceives the crisis is “of our own making” (6). It stems from America’s supposed providential duty to spread freedom. “Freedom is the altar at which Americans worship, whatever their nominal religious persuasion,” Bacevich asserts (6). Conversely, that freedom comes at great cost. As Americans pursued freedom, they generated a penchant for empire. Consequently, they racked up obligations and debts that make it increasingly dificult for the United States to operate within the world. While the country increased its commitments abroad, it has not sacriiced at home. Our appetites for consumption continue to grow. Demand for cheap products and our sense of entitlement because of American power have led the United States to a set of interlocking crises—economic, political, and military—that put America’s domestic health at risk. he Iraq and Afghanistan conlicts exacerbate a problem that has been building since the end of World War II. Yet it is those conlicts that may serve as a wake-up call for the United States to get its political house in order. In the next three chapters, Bacevich chronicles these interlocking crises. he irst crisis is proligacy. Bacevich asserts that if there is one word that currently characterizes American identity, it is the word “more” (16). Similar to Hodgson, Bacevich traces this proligacy crisis to the 1970s. Over the past forty years, the average American’s pursuit of happiness has been found in what she or he consumes, while shedding any civic constraint that might interfere with this consumption. he foreign policy implication for this consumption has “given birth to a condition of profound dependency” (16). Americans have not lost the ethic of hard work, but our current way of life outstrips our domestic capacity to satisfy our consumption. Accordingly, Republican and Democratic presidents expand our international 360 Rhetoric & Public Affairs commitments, engagements, and skirmishes to assure our way of life. All the while, Americans have never been called upon to sacriice. Correspondingly, Bacevich opines that “Americans have yet to realize that they have forfeited command of their own destiny. he relationship between expansionism, abundance, and freedom—each reinforcing the other—no longer exists. If anything, the reverse is true: Expansionism squanders American wealth and power, while putting freedom at risk” (65–66). In chapter 2, Bacevich identiies the political crisis the United States faces. his crisis stems primarily from three areas. First, over the past sixty years the United States has created an ideology of national security. his ideology asserts that America, as the embodiment and herald of freedom, must pursue an international agenda where freedom must prevail everywhere, thus ensuring America’s way of life. he ideology does not prescribe any speciic action, but it has become hard-wired into America’s psyche, compelling the United States to act because it believes it has a providential duty to do so. hat duty led to America’s involvement in places it never should have gone. A second area that created this crisis has been the expansion of a national security apparatus. he United States spends billions of dollars and has millions of personnel working in some way, shape, or form to maintain a huge presence around the world. he apparatus has grown so large and entrenched that the United States appears compelled to maintain a constant military presence so the apparatus does not shrink, lest it cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their jobs. Finally, presidents have increasingly relied on a series of “wise men” to help them make foreign policy, ofering advice that supports an expansion of America’s presence abroad and that oten has led the United States to pursue foreign policy adventures that become too costly, in blood and treasure, to bear. Chapter 3 identiies America’s military crisis. Bacevich maintains that Americans have over-appraised the utility of American military power. his over-appraisal comes from three illusions. First, Americans became convinced that our use of force in the 1980s was more precise, discriminating, and potentially humane than ever before. Second, America’s civilian and military leaders subscribed to a set of principles that promised to prevent any recurrence of Vietnam. Finally, the military and American society patched up the diferences that became apparent during the Vietnam years. hese illusions led the United States to pursue a series of small wars that perpetuated a sense of invincibility about America’s military might. he failure to achieve quick or decisive victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, suggests that Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 361 we have not fully learned the lessons of the past and thus have continued to pursue the same policies over the past thirty years. Despite these crises, Bacevich argues that the failure in Iraq might inally wake up America’s politicians and people. He asserts that to cure these crises the United States must accept limits upon its power. It must give up its penchant for unilateralism and negotiate with its partners. It must abandon the idea that it can tutor anyone, including the Muslim world, on the matters of freedom. As he puts it, “[T]he principle informing policy should be this: Let Islam be Islam. In the end, Muslims will have to discover for themselves the shortcomings of political Islam, much as the Russians discovered the defects in Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese came to appreciate the laws in Maoism” (177). For Bacevich, the current notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States must spread freedom around the world and pursue any policy it wants—is doomed to fail. Instead, the United States must approach the world for how it is and not how it wants it to be. It must obey the rules that apply to other countries. If not, any exceptional nature that America has let will surely see its end. In Hodgson’s and Bacevich’s books, rhetoricians will not ind much in the way of textual analysis, although Bacevich does a nice bit of rhetorical analysis when discussing Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. heir contributions lie in how they hold up a mirror to conventional thinking in American foreign policy and American exceptionalism. Although the characteristics of American exceptionalism have long underwritten past debates over the role of the United States in the world, there is no real debate over current U.S. foreign policy. Republicans and Democrats, with some isolated exceptions such as Ron Paul, parrot the same commitment to maintaining American empire abroad. Hodgson’s and Bacevich’s books ofer important counterpoints to those championing American exceptionalism, such as Gingrich, and to the interventionist foreign policy of the United States. Both books provide important context to the anxiety concerning American political identity and its role in the world. Both books should inspire debate about the pursuance, maintenance, and/or expansion of U.S. exceptionalism. A New American Exceptionalism Donald Pease’s book, he New American Exceptionalism, is another critique and challenge to American exceptionalism. he diference between this 362 Rhetoric & Public Affairs monograph and those by Hodgson and Bacevich is that this one situates itself within a theoretical framework to explain how a “new” American exceptionalism developed since the Cold War’s end. Pease blends cultural history, political theory, and psychoanalysis to dissect how this new American exceptionalism was created. He maintains American exceptionalism is a “state fantasy,” which he deines as “the dominant structure out of which U.S. citizens have imagined their national identity” (1). Ater World War II a fundamental shit occurred in American exceptionalism. he United States went from identifying itself as an exemplar nation for the world to emulate, to creating an interventionist mission of exceptionalism. his mission was built on a fear of the Soviet Union, which allowed the rise of a national security apparatus that curtailed some rights of Americans at home, but provided Americans with psychosocial structures that gave the illusion of safety from Soviet aggression. he end of the Cold War threw this state fantasy into lux, requiring a redeinition of what made the United States exceptional. Pease spends the next six chapters discussing how America’s exceptionalism has evolved since the end of the Cold War. In chapter 1, Pease examines President George H. W. Bush’s introduction of the New World Order as a substitute for the state fantasy of the Cold War. Pease maintains that Bush attempted to introduce this new state fantasy in connection with the irst Persian Gulf War, but that it could not gain lasting traction because disruptions—the Vietnam Syndrome—occurred that made the fantasy untenable. Chapter 2 is framed by the events of the Waco tragedy in April 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Against this backdrop, Pease maintains that two dueling state fantasies were introduced during the early years of the Clinton administration. Speciically, Clinton’s “New Covenant” and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” battled it out in constructing a diferent kind of American exceptionalism. Clinton’s platform represented a multicultural vision of America, replacing the monocultural fantasy that operated predominantly during the Cold War. Gingrich’s platform sought to maintain and extend this monocultural fantasy. As Pease points out, “the culture war that emerged out of the implosion of the cold war divided the nation into people of Two Covenants within red and blue states organized out of a fundamental conlict over the terms of inclusion within these contradictory fantasies” (96). hese dueling constructs exposed a rit in American politics that had opened by the end of the Cold War. And because of the antagonistic Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 363 constituencies of Clinton and Gingrich, a new state fantasy to replace the Cold War could not be generated. Chapter 3 interrogates how Alexis de Tocqueville returned in the battle over American exceptionalism. De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a revered look at the development of American political culture and is still understood as a quintessential treatise in discerning the anatomy of that culture. he book provides fodder for those who want to ind the roots of American exceptionalism. In the late 1990s, Pease argues, de Tocqueville was reintroduced into American life as “symbolic engineers,” including Clinton and Gingrich, co-opted his vision of the United States in their constructions of true Americanness. Chapter 4 explores Roland Emmerich’s 2000 movie he Patriot. American ilm oten has contained embodiments of exceptionalism. According to Pease, he Patriot replaced foundational metaphors found in classic Hollywood cinema with a series of substitutions: “the Revolutionary South for the cowboy West, the Lost Cause for the frontier, and paramilitary terrorism for British (or Soviet) tyranny—that symptomized a major reconiguration of the political order as well as the cinematic formulae through which it was naturalized” (131). In the movie, Southerners come to embody true American patriotism. he movie obliterates a history of Southerners as secessionist, antipatriotic individuals, and represents them as true representatives of American exceptionalism. Because of the cultural rit within the United States, this embodiment cannot be sustained. Chapter 5 examines how President George W. Bush succeeded in establishing a new state fantasy ater declaring a War on Terror. Pease explains that Bush accomplished this through co-opting a foundational myth of American identity, the myth of the “Virgin Land,” using signiiers like “homeland” and “ground zero” to argue that America’s “Virgin Land” had been wounded by the attacks of 9/11. Chapter 6 introduces challenges to this new state fantasy: speciically, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo Bay prison, Cindy Sheehan’s war protests, and the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Pease ends by arguing that the election of Barack Obama might provide a place to overturn and reconstruct American exceptionalism as he deals with many of the challenges let by President Bush. Pease’s book is a fascinating examination of how political leaders attempted to reinvent American exceptionalism in the post–Cold War world. He weaves and connects what appear to be disparate events into cogent 364 Rhetoric & Public Affairs arguments about why a new state fantasy of American exceptionalism has had dificulty emerging. hose interested in using psychoanalysis to analyze American political culture would proit from reading this book. hat said, although I ind much of his analysis compelling, I am not sure America’s current state of exception is that much diferent than it was during the Cold War. It seems to me that a cogent set of characteristics concerning American exceptionalism has continued since the end of the Cold War, particularly in the rhetoric of America’s national politicians. Certainly there have been policy disagreements between individuals like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but in American foreign policy, political igures emphasize similar precepts that are underwritten by the traditions of American exceptionalism. Where politicians difer is in the subtle nuances they introduce to exceptionalism and the means they promote to spread these precepts at home and abroad. Despite this criticism, Pease ofers fascinating insights into the constant reinvention of American exceptionalism, while providing an important appraisal of America’s current state of exception. Future Inquiries into American Exceptionalism In their own ways each of the ive books reviewed here speaks to the power of American exceptionalism. Where they differ, of course, is how they conceptualize this power. Söderlind and Carson ofer an overview of how exceptionalism pervades all aspects of U.S. cultural discourse. Gingrich is clearly a champion of American exceptionalism, believing that it has been denigrated by the Obama administration, but that it can restored and that America can return to being a “shining city upon a hill.” Bacevich, Hodgson, and Pease, in their diferent ways, speak to the dangers of American exceptionalism. For these authors, the belief that the United States is exceptional led this nation to become hubristic, lazy, obsessed with consumption, and militaristic, doing more harm than good in international afairs. he question is, Where do we go from here? Although these books highlight various avenues for further discussion, there are two lines of debate I want to highlight. he irst line concerns the nature and efects of exceptionalism. Most Americans believe the United States is exceptional in some capacity.10 Yet what makes America exceptional and the efects of that exceptionalism is up for debate. Gingrich argues that a belief in U.S. exceptionalism is fundamental to our destiny. For Gingrich, Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 365 America is a benign power that other countries look to emulate, and the United States fulills its leadership duties by spreading freedom, democracy, and capitalism for the beneit of humankind, not for itself. On the other side of this debate, critics of exceptionalism, such as Andrew Bacevich, acknowledge that American exceptionalism is a powerful force that contributed positively to American politics at one time, but that its enactment, through intervening into many foreign conlicts over the past forty years, has led to the crises the United States faces in domestic and foreign afairs. Geofrey Hodgson and Donald Pease similarly assert the belief that American exceptionalism has led to a crisis in U.S. culture, but unlike Bacevich they assert it should be abandoned as a concept altogether. Believing the United States is a superior nation only invites animosity, criticism, and mockery from other nations, particularly in light of the myriad problems—a large amount of debt, a stagnant economy, growing economic inequality, fragmented and partisan politics, and a lack of leadership and candor with the American people—existing in contemporary American society. How then, as scholars of public discourse, do we handle this question of American exceptionalism? How can we facilitate greater self-relection? Do we denigrate or promote U.S. exceptionalism? Do we interrogate it to the nth degree? Do we argue for a diferent kind of American exceptionalism? A second line of inquiry found in this review concerns how we enact American exceptionalism, particularly as it relates to U.S. foreign policy. his debate over how we relate to the world has existed since the presidency of George Washington, but has grown more vociferous, in part, because of the litany of post–Cold War interventions the United States has undertaken. It appears the United States has grown more militaristic since the Cold War ended, leading some to argue that the United States is now engaged in a unique form of empire building, even as the recent lack of quick military success has suggested, to some, that together Afghanistan and Iraq are America’s twenty-irst-century Vietnam. Both the drive to empire and the creation of a new Vietnam, seen in this light, were underwritten by American exceptionalist rhetoric. Fanning the lames of this debate are the deep divisions in the United States concerning the proper role it should play in the international order. here is a deep strain of noninterventionism and isolationism within the United States, as evidenced by the popularity of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. At the same time, political leaders in both parties, President Obama, and all the Republican presidential candidates except Paul 366 Rhetoric & Public Affairs constantly assert that the United States must maintain and extend a military presence to protect American interests and allies, ight terrorism, and meet the challenge of rising powers like China, Iran, and North Korea. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once wrote that U.S. foreign policy and its accompanying rhetoric has always had at its heart a tension between those who would argue that “America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting as a beacon for the rest of mankind” and those who maintain that “America’s values impose on it an obligation to crusade for them around the world.”11 Rhetorical scholars are uniquely suited to analyze and map this tension. As such, more efort should be paid by scholars, when making those critiques, to share their insights with politicians, pundits, and the American public. American exceptionalism is one of the most, if not the most, important narratives that pervade contemporary American culture. Debates concerning exceptionalism seem to be at their apex during junctures of anxiety for the American polity, and these books suggest that another era of debate is at hand.12 Certainly, America’s current political, social, economic, and cultural environment is a time of great anxiety. he task for informed citizens is to see where the ebb and low of this debate will continue, how it afects domestic and foreign policy, and how it inluences our relationship to the world around us. he debate has only just begun. notes 1. Barack Obama, “he President’s News Conference in Strasbourg,” he American Presidency Project, April 6, 2009, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=85959#axzz1hN6ndSBX (accessed February 2012). 2. James Kirchick, “Squanderer in Chief,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2009, 23A. 3. Monica Crowley, “American Exceptionalism . . . ; Without Exception,” Washington Times, July 1, 2009, A19. 4. “Obama and America’s Decline; he President Doesn’t Believe in U.S. Exceptionalism,” Washington Times, November 10, 2010, 2. 5. Mitt Romney, No Apology: he Case for American Greatness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 4–8. 6. Susan Page, “America’s Place in the World Could Play Part in 2012 Elections,” USA Today, December 21, 2010, 1A. Review Essay: An Exceptional Debate 367 7. Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 8. Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), 2–3. 9. See Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: he Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Andrew J. Bacevich, he New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 10. David Lake, “Is America Exceptional: Liberals, Conservatives Agree—and Disagree,” CNN, December 2, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/opinion/lake-americaexceptional/index.html (accessed February 2012). 11. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 17. 12. Examples of other eras of debate over American exceptionalism can be found throughout U.S. history. Oten they center around speciic events that cause civil strife such as the debate over the Mexican War, the Civil War, the atermaths of the SpanishAmerican War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, as well as during the Great Depression, to name just a few.