295“But you have there the myth of the essential white America, all the other stuff, the

love,
the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is
hard, isolate, stoic a killer. It has never yet melted.” D.H Lawrence.
It is even more striking that generations of politicians and scholars insisted that the USA has
a singular and essential American soul summed up by some defining virtue and a mission of
global significance, inhabited and being shaped by a continental stage that commands the
attention of the rest of humanity.
The American nation was to be an exceptional nation, either a community of saints or if
necessary a republic of the damned.
According to the logic of this exceptionalism, the exemplary, the clearly defined nature, the
illumination of its essential soul is all.
The phrase, the American exceptionalism was first coined in the mid 2Oth C when social
scientists realized the difficulty in coming to a revolutionary response to the failure of
industrial capitalism in the Great Depression. The American character differs intrinsically
from the European one despite the few parallels leveled by the social scientists.
The American sense of exceptionalism might find its echoes in the idea of wilderness. The
USA was seen as both a former British colony and a representation of the very early human
life before the advent of money and the sophistication of life aspects. And unlike those to
whom wilderness stood as a insurmountable debacle before their adaptation, the New settlers
tamed the wild nature of the land and made of it their at last rest.
Within the Puritan patrimony, lots of instances and sayings would confirm this belief and
errand towards exceptionalism, just to name few, John Winthrop promises; we shall be a city
upon a hill and the eyes of the world shall be upon us.
American exceptionalism has been consistently defined in reference to outsiders, the racial
and the temporal others by which Americans define their identity and their mission.
The Native American communities were deemed by the European Monarchs agents as Rival
political communities, yet, for Puritans, those tribes lacked agency and were therefore
associated with the divine scourging that is needed to identify and purify the anointed people
of God. Additionally, those people who were thought to be heathens by Europeans observers
served as physical borders preventing America from the uncertainty of the wilderness.
America’s sense of exceptionalism was well developed in its sacred wars. Race would mark
the barriers between being a chosen nation and getting exposed to the divine chastisement
being a sign of God’s scourging. And even after the fall of the Puritan elites, the claimed
American exceptionalism was still echoing through the sound structure it has founded upon.
Hartz writes “Locke dominates the American thought”, in the sense that most of the principles
and ideals connected to liberties and Human rights were mostly inspired by the Lockean
philosophy of individualism.
Locke conceives of America as being an exemplary image reflecting the state of the world in
its beginning. Once landed on the American shores, the Immigrated Puritans found
themselves stranded in a mysterious setting where almost no traces of modern life like those
witnessed in their mother lands were abundant or existent even; they had to invent and to
provide for the needed life facilities and requirements; schools for knowledge, currency for
commerce, and other types of social codes and contracts.
‘‘Locke dominates American political thought,’’ Hartz writes, ‘‘as no thinker anywhere
dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché´’’
The American tradition of Liberal individualism was mostly abetted and extended in place as in
time for there was no enemy or real opponent striving to denude people of those principles; no
unjust feudalist system to combat or a tyrannical monarchic dynasty to oust. This would account
largely for the survival and the maintenance of the typical liberalistic individualist aspect of the
American society.
American Liberalism is premised on the ideal of enlightened self-rule among free people, trusting
as self-evident the truth that governments exist to serve the interests of these industrious and
rational citizens.
For Jackson Turner, the essential American soul is rather based upon its colonial history of
territorial expansion and suppression of indigenous cultures in the West. This, according to the
latter, shaped to a large extent the essentials of the exceptionalist American essence.
Conquering a perpetual west, an incessant battle between civilization and barbarism on the
frontier is, for Turner, much more central to American identity than democracy per se could ever
be.
With the weakening of those expansionist momentums, the USA started to lose much of its
identity traits.
The American liberal citizen doesn’t believe in force and political struggle to grant his inalienable
rights like equality. They tend to treat governments with much suspicion yet they view the
prevalence of law and the popular sovereignty as the bedrock upon which their living rests.
Hartz, following in the footsteps of Madison and especially Tocqueville, sees a profound (if
somewhat shapeless) threat in American liberal democracy, a majoritarian and conformist
democratic mass that destroys or absorbs the individuals in whose name it ostensibly speaks.
According to Hartz, the threat posed by the American culture is duly accountable for the
exceptionalist American aspect that recommends a sort of unanimity in deciding both the traits of
an American citizen and those friends and enemies of the nation.
Americans insist on knowing their ‘‘essential soul,’’ but this question of identity can never be
decisively answered. In a society of private economic and political actors, after all, how does one
ever know with whom one is dealing? Lockean liberalism provides a larger descriptive definition
for America while at the same time undermining identity for individual Americans.
The American republic had no ‘‘covetous’’ or ‘‘contentious’’ aristocracy, in Hartz’s account, but
it did not lack a population barred from public life; and Americans legally defined African and
African-American slaves, women, Native Americans, and the poor as those radically unproductive
and dangerously irrational forces to whom political action had to be denied.
Once having excluded those eccentric factions in the American society, American liberals
experience a coming back to their lockean doctrine and self governing, demonizing all those
standing against the democratic conformity, turning eccentricity into sin. They depict their enemy
as being lunatic and irritating, worth exclusion, getting recourse to their trusted Lockean faith,
with the state powers properly immobilized and the essential industrious and rational soul of the
nation is saved and protected
America clearly began not with primal innocence and consent but with acts of force and fraud. Indians
were here first, and it was their land upon which Americans contracted, squabbled, and reasoned with
one another. Stripping away history did not permit beginning without sin; it simply exposed the sin at
the beginning of it all.
Race serves as the singular contrast around which others are defined.
According to Rogin, the American exceptionalism was Lockean and individualist,
Nationalist and white.
Race becomes, in American political life, a clear marker of who one is—
rational or irrational, citizen or outsider, master or slave. The power of
subjugation for Lockean liberalism, in short, comes from the ability to name,
to identify precisely, who was rational and industrious and who was
quarrelsome or covetous. White Americans could know whom they were by
identifying Native Americans as the slothful wanderers who refused to labor
the earth and African slaves as the victims of just wars, and both as examples
of scientifically verified ‘‘inferior races.’’ And thus we return to racial
Othering, to Indian dispossession, slavery, and blackface, at the core, not the
frontier, of American exceptionalism.
Smith seems to offer us an alternative to American exceptionalism—the
United States, in the ‘‘multiple traditions’’ account, is summed up by no one
narrative, it has no ‘‘essential soul.’’
America has let Locke down by being racially ‘‘ascriptive’’—quarrelsome and
contentious, as it were—rather than rational in its politics.
American citizens are bound by duty to love their nation, at least for as long
as the
American republic is the ‘‘best hope’’ for the enlightened portion of mankind.
As Hartz pointed out, the interventionist strain in American foreign policy has
long been premised upon the exportation of exceptionalism.
When the United States began the war to consolidate their control of the
Philippines,
Woodrow Wilson defined the occupation as a pedagogical duty: ‘‘they [the
Filipinos] are children and we are men in these great matters of government
and justice’’
In 2003, President George W Bush invoked these lines with approval; the idea
that the American occupation of Iraq is part of a lesson in democratic self-rule
is premised upon the ideal of a singular and exemplary American soul that
must be learned from.
Indeed, the Bush national security statement is itself an exercise in American
exceptionalism, asserting that ‘‘only one model of national success’’ survived
the twentieth century, and that the United States is uniquely responsible for
exemplifying and extending that model throughout the world.
The exceptionalist American soul is therefore summed up in a set of
distinctive features; modernist, fundamentalist, blandly homogeneous and
violent. The very notion of violence although aberrant and peculiarly evoked
still has its echoes in contemporary contexts; the identification of crimes’
interrogators as Satan reveals the violent nature that still projects itself in
various contexts.
In Smith’s account, the American exceptional nature cannot be decided
simply through legal studious conceptual fiats, he rather assumes it is too
central to political thought. This very moot concept is only reachable and
coverable according to Smith through detective narratives and romance
genres.