Death To American Exceptionalism

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WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 27: An anti-abortion activist protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 27, 2022 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturned the landmark 50-year-old Roe v Wade case and erased a federal right to an abortion. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

It’s unclear if Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong was serious when he announced last Friday that he would renounce his US citizenship after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 vote depriving women of control over their own bodies. But it is clear he’s not the only American looking at exit strategies as a rogue right-wing Supreme Court and radicalized Republican Party conspire to dismantle the democracy and expansions to human rights that have underpinned this country’s success.

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The right-wing reaction to Armstrong was predictable: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. But the right’s canned, kneejerk response to anyone who dares point out America’s shortcomings and its drive to replace multicultural liberal democracy with authoritarian white Christian patriarchal rule stem from American exceptionalism and illustrate how our inflated national ego will be this country’s undoing.

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Where slavery is our country’s original sin, American exceptionalism is its personality disorder. If the American experiment is to survive, then American exceptionalism needs to die.

American exceptionalism is why the Republican Party, with the help of the Supreme Court, in marching the country to fascism, either ignorantly fails to recognize the parallels with Europe in the 1930s or stupidly assumes American fascism in the 2020s won’t, like its relatives across the pond, inevitably lead to national ruin. It’s also why the typical right-wing response to people saying we should improve socioeconomic conditions by taking cues from other countries – e.g. implementing universal health care – is to call them “socialists” and tell them to live elsewhere, branding as unpatriotic heresy the very notion that anything in The Greatest Nation in the World could ever need fixing.

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It’s also why so many moderates and liberals fail to adequately address the danger we’re in. Would President Joe Biden have tweeted that the Jan. 6 attack does “not represent who we are” if he accepted that the undercurrents of white Christian reactionism that led to the attack are as old as the country itself and were in fact central to its founding?  Would Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema repeatedly obstruct legislation designed – like the New Deal in the 1930s – to dampen the allure of extremism and protect democracy if they didn’t assume, to quote the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about fascism in America, that “it can’t happen here?” Would media outlets like The New York Times and CNN cling to outmoded “bothsidesism” in covering right-wing threats to democracy and human rights if they didn’t place blind faith in America’s institutions to keep us from the cliff’s edge?

We need to let go of the self-destructive delusion that we’re unique above all other nations and immune from history in the face of daily headlines that echo some of history’s darkest chapters. We need to stop telling ourselves we’re “The Greatest Nation in the World” in the face of mountains of evidence showing we’re at best mediocre, and at worst on par with some developing countries.

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As we prepare to mark our country’s 246th birthday, the shining city on the hill looks more and more like a decrepit polygamist compound in the swamp.

We already have the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, while remaining the only industrialized nation without universal health care or paid maternity leave. In infant mortality, among OECD nations, only Chile, Costa Rica, Turkey, Mexico and Colombia have worse rates than us. And no developed country has anything close to our levels of gun violence.

Numbers like that would embarrass leaders in other high-income nations. But with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade and the legal right for a woman to get an abortion, the Supreme Court just voted to make them even worse.

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American exceptionalism goes a long way toward convincing many of our leaders and fellow citizens that not only maintaining but exacerbating such a drastic decline in our living standards, quality of life and democracy is sustainable, that we can keep letting the foundations of our society crumble and make the same mistakes as countless great powers before us, yet somehow avoid their fates.

But it’s not sustainable, and many Americans know that. Data from Google Trends in the hours after the Dobbs ruling show spikes in searches related to dual citizenship as well as relocation to Canada and Europe. Even ahead of the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, amid violence, racial strife and the divisive presidency of Donald Trump – a psychopathic authoritarian strongman who could only have become the leader of a country convinced it was too exceptional for his election to cause it harm – many Americans were already looking for a way out.

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With Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs stating an interest in overturning decisions allowing contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex intimacy, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pledging to defend his state’s sodomy law, the number of American emigrants is likely to increase, especially women, LGBT people and racial and ethnic minorities.

And who can blame them, with the right doing all it can to make this country as inhospitable as possible?

Just take a look at the accelerating attacks against LGBT people nationwide. The Republican Party of Texas formally adopted a platform that calls homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice” and opposes “all efforts to validate transgender identity.” In New Hanover, North Carolina, more than a dozen Proud Boys terrorized an LGBT reading event for children, the fascist thugs reportedly receiving help from sheriff’s deputies with whom witnesses say they saw the thugs exchanging fist bumps and casual banter. In Sparks, Nevada, Proud Boys terrorized a Drag Queen Story Time at a library, with one of them interrupting the event armed with a rifle. In San Lorenzo, California, a group of Proud Boys showed up at a similar event, shouting homophobic slurs and one of them wearing a T-shirt that read “kill your local pedophile.” This is happening as right-wingers revive the libel that LGBT people are pedophiles with the slur “groomers,” notably the sinister hate blogger Chaya Raichik.

This is why, I can say from anecdotal experience, many LGBT Americans are making serious moves to get out of the country – before it’s too late.

To be clear, moving abroad, especially to another rich country, is easier said than done unless you’re young and able-bodied with a job lined up or have highly in-demand job skills, family connections enabling dual citizenship or piles of cash. But Americans frightened at the country’s deteriorating political situation seriously looking to emigrate represents a remarkable inversion of history, when it was people from other countries tripping over each other to come here.

Most Jewish and Romani Americans descend from people who came here to escape antisemitic and racist discrimination and violence in Europe. Most Irish immigrants came here fleeing deprivation due to British colonial rule over their homeland. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century came here amid strife, colonialism and socioeconomic collapse in the Qing Dynasty. And Italian immigrants came from a newly unified country beset by social and political unrest. Many immigrants today come to the US to escape oppressive authoritarian rule and domestic instability in their home countries too.

So it’s a historical irony that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free are increasingly Americans hoping to escape their homeland’s rising tide of authoritarianism, civil unrest, racism and anti-LGBT hate, looking for greener pastures in Canada, Europe and the Asia-Pacific.

But while the MAGA crowd salivates at the prospect of a country they no longer need to share with mouthy women asking to be treated like human beings, scary people of color asking for equality or icky LGBT people asking for basic rights, history shows that the violent, fascist society of their dreams would result in an America that was poorer, weaker and doomed to eventually collapse.

Look at Iran, for example. Once the center of one of the world’s greatest empires, the Islamic Republic today is a global pariah. Same with Russia, whose fascist dictator labors under a delusion analogous to American exceptionalism as he seeks to conquer Ukraine and revive his country’s lost colonial empire, drawing ruinous economic sanctions and sending many of Russia’s best and brightest abroad. Or look at China, which has certainly seen enormous economic development in recent decades, but whose economic engine has run into trouble as it has become more authoritarian, aggressive and xenophobic, and whose millennia-long history contains multiple examples of a society that did well when it was open and liberal but declined when it became more closed-off and conservative.

We’re already seeing this play out in the US on a micro scale. In Idaho – a state with the fourth lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate in the country – 9,000 health care jobs remain unfilled, which experts attributed to health care workers going through “an incredibly traumatic period.” That trauma no doubt included violence and threats against health care workers in a state that is a longtime hotbed of far-right activity. Earlier this month, police in Coeur D’Alene arrested dozens of neo-Nazis who showed up at a Pride event intending to start a riot. Idaho was already a net exporter of talent: In 2018, 54% of people aged 25-34 moving into the state had college degrees, versus 58% of those moving out, while 70% of those decamping for the neighboring and much more liberal state of Washington were degree holders, compared to 50% of those moving in the opposite direction.

While Seattle offering better job prospects than Boise certainly plays a role, nobody can argue that the prospect of death threats and an unwelcoming environment for anyone but white, Christian men makes Idaho attractive.

If, heaven forbid, democracy falls and the US becomes a haven for white Christian male supremacy and a hell for women and anyone with the wrong ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, it’s those with education, talent and ambition who will be the first to seek life elsewhere. And the universities, companies and government agencies that lose them will, like Idaho’s health care systems, have a tough time replacing them.

And as the country’s talent pool dries up, as the government becomes more oppressive, as it becomes little more than an irritant on the world stage, as its economy and society decline, how long will it be before America finally looks in the mirror and realizes, maybe it’s not so exceptional after all?

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @alaricnyc.

Topics

Abortion Rights, Authoritarianism, Democracy, Fascism, LGBT rights, Supreme Court