Since 2001 Americans have nursed a profound doubt, a subliminal, never-spoken-of suspicion that they actually have no claim to exceptionalism. This is something new in the American story. As I have mentioned among you previously, those two attacks on American soil brought Americans face to face with the realities that they are as vulnerable to the might of others as anyone else, that they are not as previously assumed immune from the force of history, that they are as defenseless as anyone else against the ravages of time.
There is no separating politics and psychology. This seems to me an especially useful truth as we explore our topic this evening, and I go to Fromm and Jung to explain it. People, individuals, make societies, but societies, just as truly, make individuals.
This evening I will look to the latter side of this matter more than the former. Americans have made America, true enough, but I am more interested for now in how America has made Americans—how it has shaped the psychology that defines Americans—the consciousness that marks them out, indeed, so distinctly from others.
Being an American and seeing things from the inside out, so to say, I have thought for a very long time, and certainly since the events of September 11, 2001, that my country’s conduct and altogether its direction, which I would say has been consistently downward these past two and some decades, is to be understood primarily as a case of collective psychology—social psychology might be the best term here. There are many events to be considered, but it is the underlying psychology that drives Americans in these events, and I urge that we look to this so as to understand them. Since 2001 we have been a wounded, uncertain people. This psychological state simply cannot be left out of any consideration of American policies and politics so far in this century.
So I come to our topic this evening, and it extends vastly beyond the consequences of the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. What America has been the whole of its existence, what the United States has been even before it was called the United States, has got to be understood first in terms of its psychology. I am talking now about the shared presumption we commonly call American exceptionalism.
Richard Hofstadter, a noted and very fine historian during the postwar decades, once observed that America was less a nation than an ideology. It goes directly to my point. What has given America its distinct character for four centuries now has been what I call its exceptionalist consciousness, although we can do just as well following Hofstadter and call exceptionalism America’s ideology.
Little that America has done, from the earliest settlements and the Quaker hangings in the late seventeenth century to its nineteenth century wars, expansions, and annexations, to its anti–Communist crusades in the last century, to Vietnam, and all the coups and interventions in the post–1945 decades: To grasp all of this fully we must see the underlying, driving psychology. I do not say this—and I must emphasize this point strongly—to discount the importance and force of politics and history, as one must never do. I say it because all of these events, disparate as they are as historical phenomena, arise from the same consciousness: They are all part of the same root phenomenon.
And all of this goes, it hardly bears mentioning, for all that we witness now: The cruelly inhumane proxy war in Ukraine, the dangerously provocative encirclement of China, America’s unruly conduct in the Middle East, in Latin America—America’s claim to exceptionalism lies behind all of this.
So we must remember our starting point: There are the politics of these events and there is the underlying psychology these events reflect…
https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/08/patrick-lawrence-american-exceptionalism-and-its-consequences/
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After the truth-shower 