Republicans must take care that “exceptionalism” doesn’t collapse through thoughtless repetition into a mere slogan, another bit of political cant like “Take Our Country Back” or “Move America Forward,” losing all meaning even as it wows the focus groups. ~Andrew Ferguson

It’s too late for that. Clearly, it has become the slogan of choice over the last year, and it is questionable whether many of the people using it have any idea what it is supposed to mean. If many critics of American exceptionalism “pummel it into a caricature,” many of its enthusiasts seem to revel in the same caricature. Indeed, they accept that the caricature is true. Ferguson is no different. It is significant that he never once defines the phrase that he believes the critics have wrong. He makes vague references to America’s uniqueness. That isn’t very meaningful. Each country is necessarily unique and not like any other. Ferguson then insists that the task ahead is to “conserve the arrangements that make us exceptional, reaffirm them, and prepare to pass them on, with an abiding faith in personal liberty.” Of course, this is the heart of the debate: are there “arrangements” that actually make us exceptional?

Ferguson also relies on the same old Obama quote everyone insists on citing out of context to claim that Obama believes that “[s]ince every people believes it’s exceptional, none is.” Not only is this not what Obama believes, but it takes an exceptionally lazy critic to argue that it is. It is not hard to find Obama’s full statement, which at least offers some working definition of American exceptionalism. It’s fair to assume that Ferguson never bothered to check the source of the quote he and every other conservative pundit has relied on as a crutch for the last year.

Obama said:

And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Obama also connected American exceptionalism to the U.S. role in the world when he said, “America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity….”

One part of this is descriptive, and another part is prescriptive: America has an exceptional set of values that no other country has (probable), and America should continue to have an “extraordinary role in leading the world” (questionable). If all that Americanists meant by American exceptionalism was that our political values and constitution are distinctively ours, I wouldn’t object. The trouble is that this is not all that they mean by it. They clearly mean to say that America is not simply unique and has distinctive political values, but that America is markedly superior to and significantly different from all other nations in terms of economic dynamism and political freedom. That is partly what Marco Rubio means by it, and from the praise he heaps on Rubio I assume this is what Ferguson thinks American exceptionalism means.

There was a time when this was true, or at least partly true, but over the last half century America and “the rest of the world” have changed enough that we cannot claim to be the most free or most economically dynamic country in the world. If all that Rubio wanted to say was that the U.S. ought to be the most free and most economically dynamic country, and that he believes that current policies are preventing that from happening, he could say that. Instead, he subscribes to the claim that America is the “greatest nation in all of human history.” Unless this is being measured in the crudest terms of global power, I’m not sure how one would substantiate such a claim, and even then I’m not sure that the claim would hold up.

More to the point, if it is true, why is there this constant need to repeat it and announce it to the world? Even if America were objectively the greatest nation in history, why would we need to talk about it on a regular basis? If a patriot should never boast of the largeness of his country, why do so many people believe they are being truly patriotic by boasting that their country is the greatest that has ever existed?