Facets of Exceptionalism

The second meaning of “American exceptionalism” holds that the domestic United States “homeland” is a uniquely excellent and unmatched global role model of political and societal democracy, freedom, and opportunity. This is what US politicians mean when they customarily refer to the US as “the envy of the world” (a phrase Obama has used more than once), the “greatest nation on Earth,” the “leader of the free world,” and the like. It’s what Republican US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) meant when she called the US “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” – this during a speech given on the floor of the US Senate in support of Congress authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq if he wanted to.

So what if the current “New Gilded Age” United States is now the most savagely unequal society is the industrialized world, an ever more openly plutocratic nation where the top 1% owns more than 90% of the wealth and a probably comparable share of the nation’s democratically elected” officials? So what if 6 Walmart heirs possess as much wealth between them as the bottom 42% of US citizens (or ex-citizens) while 16 million US children live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level and 1 in 7 US citizens rely on food banks for basic nutrition (half of those people are employed, incidentally). And who cares if these and numerous other terrible facts reflect more than three decades of deliberately engineered upward wealth and income distribution: a ruthless state-capitalist concentration of riches and power that has brought the “homeland” to a New Gilded Age of abject oligarchy and (along the way) to the brink of environmental catastrophe? Or that white median household wealth is 22 times that of Black median household wealth while Blacks make up more than 40 percent of the nation’s 2.4 million prisoners in the US, the world’s leading prison state (a curious achievement for the self-declared Land of Liberty!) and 1 in 3 Black adults males carry the crippling mark of a felony record?

More from Paul Street.

Be sure to read it this weekend because you will be tested come Monday.


TS