Shutdown Challenges Notion of American Exceptionalism

A good college friend took his own life this week. He was a groomsman in my wedding. I served as his best man. In the years after college, we were neighbors. But as often happens, we drifted apart, his family growing up as mine began. In recent years, he battled demons a little bigger than most of us encounter. And now he’s gone.
Yes, it’s sad. More than likely, you’ve experienced a similar, unexpected death, a passing that made you pause and wonder. My friend’s sudden death reminds me how fleeting our time is on earth and that we should use it wisely.
Often, however, we do not act wisely. If you want evidence, just look to Washington and, to a lesser degree, Columbia.
The recent government shutdown that brought the nation to the brink of defaulting on its debts is a symptom of how America’s place in the world is changing. As Americans, we continue to believe in the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the theory that the United States and its political and civic cultures are qualitatively different from anywhere else. It’s the notion that what we have here in the United States is so good that everyone should want it.
But the shutdown, expected to cost more than $20 billion and cause fourth-quarter growth to dip, seems to show the hate-government movement is having an impact. Americans are growing tired of duplicitous, ideologically-driven leaders just like people have had for years in scandal-plagued Italy or cash-strapped Greece.
More worrisome is the likelihood that the shutdown and associated nonsense from Washington is causing a weariness with the whole notion of American-style democracy as people shake their heads at elected representatives who seem to be able to do nothing other than keep their special Capitol Hill gyms open.
It’s long accepted that members of Congress have low overall approval ratings from American voters. But voters have generally said they liked their own member of Congress — so much so that the same nimrods kept getting elected. Now, the scent of a shift is in the air. A new Pew Research Center poll shows almost 40 percent of voters say they don’t want to see their own legislator re-elected because they’re so dissatisfied with what’s happening in Washington. Furthermore, the anti-incumbency fervor is so strong that three in four of those polled say they want most members of Congress defeated in 2014.
Will this new mood remain? Probably, because Congress only kicked the default can down the road for a few months and didn’t solve any real problems. After Christmas, tea partiers and a hyperactive media will inject new anti-government fervor into what we call the United States of America. And it probably all will devolve into more spitting matches and ubiquitous cable countdown clocks.
It’s as if the whole country has migrated from wearing suits and ties to Dockers and T-shirts. And the rest of the world sees it. The result? Now there’s talk about something other than the dollar being the world’s standard, solid financial base. There are serious questions about America’s leadership overseas as the Chinese continue to loan us money and now build major projects in neighboring countries.
Thanks to this shutdown, brought on by the lack of respect for compromise among ultra-conservative extremists, Americans are less confident in their government, which would make our framers ashamed. Perhaps more importantly, we seem to be itching to prove that we’re no longer exceptional.
“We are diminished,” University of South Carolina political scientist Mark Tompkins notes, “both in international perceptions of our capacity as a nation and, in fact, as the tangible and intangible costs of this episode are tallied in coming weeks and months.
“This is a blow to the story of ‘American exceptionalism.’ Others will be less receptive to the idea that they should look to the U.S. as an exemplar of the way of the future.”
Thanks, tea partiers and wingnuts. Wouldn’t it be better to start being wise and not, as my college friend sadly did, throw away something important?
 
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.