American Exceptionalism has long been one of our country’s defining traits. From the men and women who won world wars across both oceans, through decades of global admiration as the undisputed land of opportunity, to our lingering halo as the self-proclaimed Shining City on a Hill, we’ve long been a country that embraced our unique strengths. Embraced them, that is, until suddenly we did not.
The collapse of American Exceptionalism has been both abrupt and absolute. A quick search of Google will find that our only remaining pillars of global exceptionalism would appear to be our world-class American incompetence, arrogance and divisiveness. And our fall from grace appears to cause few people any concern. In fact, we’ve seemed to make an art out of celebrating our collective failures. Mainstream and social media have both joined in the fun, pinpointing each new example of our ineptitude with breathless exaggeration. American Schadenfreude — the deriving of pleasure from our own cumulative misery. It’s the new national pastime.
The evidence of the new Schadenfreude is everywhere, but perhaps most obvious with our self-immolation over the US Covid response. Headlines slam our bumbling approach, telling us that although Covid may be a global pandemic, it’s a uniquely American tragedy. #1 in the world, we tell ourselves, with almost a quarter of the world’s cases in 2020 (as reported by Worldometer). Except “cases” is a tremendously flawed metric, as it ignores drastic differences in country-specific testing and reporting. The far more accurate measure — one that is difficult to get wrong, and one that measures the only thing that ultimately matters — is the per capita Covid fatality rate. And in terms of Covid deaths, the USA doesn’t even make the top 10. We ended 2020 far down the list in the 14thspot, behind the UK, Spain, and a host of other prominent countries with supposedly much better Covid responses than our own.
Okay, so maybe we’re not as awful as we thought, but we still failed miserably in our Republican-led, Trump-aligned states, right? Actually, no. According to Statista’s Dec. 22 report, six of the ten states with the highest Covid death rates are led by a Democrat, proving that we are not plagued by a conservative monopoly on incompetence. Our country responded in a surprisingly uniform manner, and again, on a global scale, that uniform response was actually pretty standard.
So why the self-loathing? Many would assign an inflection point to the Trump presidency, but that would wholly miss the unrest of the Obama years (Ferguson 2014, Baltimore 2015, among others) that gave rise to Trump in the first place. Other precipitating incidents have been mooted, but in truth, there is unlikely to be any singular recent event that engendered our antipathy. Our self-disgust would seem to originate from someplace much deeper. A place so deep, and so damning, that perhaps only a movement like Black Lives Matter can properly shine the necessary light on our nation’s origin, examine our guilt, and awaken us to the fact that our country was built on a deceit so contemptible that it alone can explain our national animus.
Project 1619, named after the year that the first slaves arrived in Virginia, is a powerful new movement that aims to correct this deceit. The project establishes that our country was not built through democratic ideals, American ingenuity, or industrial prowess, but through the strength and resilience of African slave labor, and any argument that ignores this fundamental truth merely perpetuates the lies that underpin our national identity. And as young Diana Prince learned in Wonder Woman 1984, an accomplishment built on a lie is no accomplishment at all. Our racial reckoning has obliterated our sense of national pride as we have come to grips with our culpability as the undisputed world leader in slave history and racism.
This moment of recognition would be even more powerful if it were unconditionally true. But importantly, it is not — our belief in the uniqueness of our failings misses as much critical context as the critique of our Covid response. Slavery and serfdom are global abominations that pre-dated the US and persisted elsewhere long after it was abolished here. And though racism is still a blight on our nation, a recent study by the World Values Survey indicates that we are actually one of the least racist countries on the planet. In our rush to self-condemnation, we’ve allowed ourselves to be swayed by misleading narratives, resulting in a false sense of failure and unwarranted self-reproach.
Grounding ourselves in factual reality — on Covid, on racism, or on any issue in between — is a powerful exercise in cathartic relief. It may also serve as a pathway out of our national malaise. On a global scale, America ranks near the top in an overwhelming number of country metrics, from economic measures such as GDP per capita and total social welfare spending, to societal indicators such as access to gay marriage, abortion, and anti-discrimination protections. We are still one of the most open, accepting, and successful societies on the planet. Instead of fabricating reasons for exaggerating our failings, we should rely on factual reality to recognize and celebrate our strengths.
So stand up tall, America. It’s time to be honest with each other, and to stop hating ourselves. We’re not nearly as bad as we think.
