and back to politics..

this is basically an essay i wrote for my history class, but i think it's good enough, and entertaining enough, to put up here. so, here goes:


Ever since its inception, the United States of America has had a superiority complex. This philosophy of “exceptionalism” is basically the idea that, because the United States is somehow an inherently superior country, they should be allowed to do basically whatever they wanted. This has shown itself from the beginning of the country all the way up to the present day, influencing our interactions with other countries and giving the United States of America a decidedly arrogant outlook at the rest of the world.

The first major instance of exceptionalism was in the idea of “manifest destiny” in the late 1700s and early 1800s. This was the idea that, because it was a “civilized” nation, rather than the native American tribes, who were seen as uncivilized, should control North America from the East Coast to the West Coast. It was an idea that was made reality by a series of treaties and wars, until the United States controlled not only the contiguous 48 states, but also Alaska and Hawaii, and there was even talk of buying Greenland (Time). One of the best-known pieces of written work that was pushing Manifest Destiny was Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, The White Man’s Burden. This poem basically said that it was not only the right, by means of their inherent superiority, but the duty of western, white countries to take over other countries in order to civilize them. This idea of imperialism for the good of the colonies was an idea that was prevalent in the British Empire at that time, and with most Americans being two generations or less removed from Britain, was also a prevalent view in America. This philosophy of expansion stayed around until the very core of the United States was shaken by something that even the framers of the Constitution, for all of their foresight, could not have predicted.

In 1861, the Confederate States of America Seceded from the United States. This was a major blow to the pride of the nation. The sense of national pride and superiority wouldn’t allow for the thought that people who had once been part of the United States would choose another way of life. This lead to the Civil War, one of the worst the US has ever taken part in, if not the worst. This war was fought because the North generally believed itself superior to the South. While this may or may not have been true, it is yet another example of the innate exceptionalism of the American outlook on life and the world. It seems that more and more, we desperately want to spread our form of representative democracy to the rest of the world. It may be that this is some kind of attempt to prove to ourselves that our system of government is the best in truth, and not just in our collective minds. When the North finally defeated the South, they imposed harsh reconstruction policies that were strongly against the South. This was simply an effort by the North to try to re-establish their superiority in their own eyes over the South, further evidence of the national superiority complex. These policies were downright childish, trying to re-establish the United States as the dominant power in the Americas. In our interactions with the rest of the world, we needed to maintain the appearance, if not also the fact, that we were the true power on our continent. Allowing some other nation to grab territory from right under our noses was a slip we could not afford to let happen, at least in terms of foreign opinion of us at that time, a thought that has persisted to the present day.

Recently, especially under President George W. Bush, we have become increasingly bent upon bringing the ideals of “freedom” and “democracy–at least as we see them–to the rest of the world. Even before the recent slew of conflicts, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, we were engaged in a battle for global supremacy with the Soviet Union–a battle lasting up until 1992. We went through two conflicts that are now recognized as major wars in their own right, and dozens of other, smaller confrontations, both directly and indirectly, to prove to the Soviets and to the rest of the world that democracy could triumph over communism. Not only was this a failure, but the rhetoric was invalid. Democracy is a political system, whereas communism is an economic system. In recent years, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have both been aimed at replacing admittedly tyrannical governments with a western-styled government, which may not even be the most suitable form of government for the region.

Most nations that have had empires and their root, rampant exceptionalism, have been toning down their rhetoric and their actions recently, from Britain, which controlled most of the world in the 1600s and 1700s, to Germany, which has twice in the past 100 years controlled or been allied with most of mainland Europe. The United States, on the other hand, started off exceptionalist and has not lost this world view since its creation. This philosophy has influenced policy both foreign and domestic, and not in a good way. If we ever want to have our primary influence of foreign policy be soft power, rather than hard power, we will need to first learn humility.