American Exceptionalism

So many different groups of people claim the title, "The Chosen People," something that's an easily understood euphemism for privilege, that human life on the planet once again finds itself in another ludicrous situation. The obvious question is this: how can so many different groups be special--and not just special but the only special ones? It doesn't really matter precisely how any one particular group managed to get this designation, although it's often seen as a divine gift or responsibility: of course, that so many groups believe they are the privileged group almost inevitably encourages conflict with some other group, which may or may not make claim to the same distinction. Having a sense of privilege encourages people to think of themselves as the natural rulers of others (and defeating them creates slaves who can reinforce a feeling of divinely sanctioned privilege) or provokes anxiety when encountering another group making the same claim. Hence American exceptionalism, often seen as divinely bestowed on this country. Instead of seeing American power as mainly the result of viciously conquering a relatively sparsely populated land with a less technologically advanced population and of a continent filled with valuable resources (and at first a mostly pristine environment), many Americans, like so many other groups of people now and in the past, claim a divine mandate. (This undergirds the notion, often promulgated in commercials, that individuals deserve certain things.) There's nothing wrong, I suppose, with having confidence, though unearned confidence is always worrisome. It would still be possible to have a social democracy within American borders even with this sense of exceptionalism, although in much of American history we have made distinctions within the country as well, designating certain people as true Americans (white, male, wealthy, etc.) and others as natural serfs or even below the threshold of humanity. To criticize this tendency to see one's group (and, ultimately, oneself) as privileged is understood to be an act of existential terrorism, thus cutting off all discussion and analysis.

Privilege

One problem, of course, is how to reconcile the inherent human need for privilege and the possibilities of social democracy. Human history would suggest that, for the most part, they cannot be reconciled: we cannot find a way to be concerned about a more general social good and our own need to feel special, to feel that we have the often unearned right to something that others don't. De Toqueville in The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution argues that the revolution was not just an uprising that manifested itself out of the blue: French society was already changing during the years before the revolution, and the emergent middle-class and newly land-owning peasantry found the unearned privileges of the aristocracy unendurable, yet following the revolution, France quite quickly reverted back to a centralized administration. The French revolution didn't alter the fundamental cultural perspectives of the French: it just removed a heretitary government and replaced it with a middle-class bureaucracy, a system that already was in place before the revolution. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss--same as the old boss. Ok, when The Who function as meaningful sources of political understanding, we're in trouble.