Rootedness

Today I Learned, as the kids these days like to say, about President Trump's 1776 Commission. I think that I'd heard of it before, but this was near the end of the Trump Administration, and I pretty much stopped paying attention to going's on in Washington, D.C., because keeping up with politics had become such an unpleasant way to spend free time.

The 1776 Commission had no real reason for existence than to perpetuate a particular front in the Culture Wars, namely long-simmering "Right vs Left" dispute over whether the founders of the United States were the best people ever, or simply people, with the good and bad that such a status entails.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. While I will admit that I find the debate utterly trivial, the people on the Right who I know have engaged with it do actually see something important in all of this; namely, the idea that history is (or at least can be) important in the here and now. While the term "American Exceptionalism" is tossed around a lot, I don't know that it has a consistent usage. While there is the idea that specific circumstances of the nation's founding and its specific ideological impulses make the United States both a unique nation and a specifically positive force for overall human well-being and flourishing, there is also the understanding (and this is the one that many of the Conservatives I've talked about it with seem to favor) that the United States is superior to other nations... and that this superiority comes with privileges when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.

I will admit to not having an understanding of the idea that "because the people who came before us were great and wonderful, we're worthy and valuable." I understand the human propensity to pursue feelings of worth and value; back in the day, being considered unworthy or valueless was a quick ticket to being abandoned by one's community. And humans are social animals because as individuals, it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a point where one has a realistic chance of surviving for any length of time. But that's at the individual level. Once one arrives at the scale of the nation-state, that sort of insecurity seems strange.

After all, much of the ways in which nations project power and show their value has little or nothing to do with the past. If each of the group of men we understand to be the "Founding Fathers" of the United States were proven to have been right jackassess tomorrow, the United States would still have the world's largest economy and the financial power that comes from having a ubiquitous reserve currency. Not to mention a military that can do a number of most of its contemporaries. And those are the things that make the United States the current big man on campus.

A status that, of course, will not last forever. And therein, I think, lies the rub. As I see it, American Exceptionalism is a special pleading the the United States, unique among nations, should be immune to the forces of geopolitical gravity. In part, I think, because if one sees history as what goes around comes around, once the United States starts to slip away from the top spot, there are going to be any number of people with scores to settle. (I notice the same thing in domestic politics. I think that part of the reason why "race relations" in the United States are so touchy, so often, is that there are more White Americans than one credits who are of the opinion that once they no longer have the whip hand, the whip is going to be used on them.) But if the United States is legitimately special, then such worries need not be entertained.

Personally, I think that there are any number of former powers that are doing all right for themselves, despite a certain disgust for their histories. And I think that the United States will one day be a member of that club, and it will become evident that the nation will survive being just like everyone else.