American exceptionalism
Based on Wikipedia: American exceptionalism
Joseph Stalin invented the term "American exceptionalism." Or rather, he condemned it as a heresy.
This might be the strangest origin story in political vocabulary. A phrase now beloved by American conservatives—a staple of Republican party platforms and patriotic speeches—was first deployed as an insult by Soviet communists arguing about why Marx's predictions kept failing to come true in the United States.
The year was 1929. Jay Lovestone, head of the Communist Party USA, had a problem. According to Marxist theory, capitalism was supposed to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Class warfare would intensify. Workers would rise up. Revolution was inevitable—a scientific law of history, as certain as gravity.
But America wasn't cooperating with the script.
The Heresy That Wouldn't Die
Lovestone looked around at the booming American economy of the late 1920s and saw something that didn't fit the Marxist framework. The United States had abundant natural resources. Its industrial capacity was staggering. And most troublingly for communist theory, Americans didn't seem to have the rigid class distinctions that defined European society. Factory workers owned homes. Immigrants became businessmen. The son of a farmer could become a senator.
So Lovestone made an argument that would get him expelled from the party: perhaps America was different. Perhaps the laws of Marxist history didn't apply the same way here. Perhaps America was, in a word, exceptional.
Stalin was furious. In a tense meeting with Lovestone, he denounced this reasoning as "the heresy of American exceptionalism." The term appeared in the Daily Worker, the American communist newspaper, in January 1929, used derisively to describe this dangerous deviation from orthodox Marxism.
Then came October. The stock market crashed. The Great Depression began. And suddenly Stalin's critique seemed vindicated—American capitalism was falling apart just like Marx predicted. At their 1930 convention in New York, American communists triumphantly declared that "the storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism."
They were wrong, of course. The house of cards rebuilt itself. But the term they meant to bury took on a life of its own.
A Frenchman Saw It First
Nearly a century before Stalin's denunciation, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America and noticed something peculiar. He had come ostensibly to study the prison system, but what he actually produced was one of the most penetrating analyses of American society ever written.
In his 1835 masterwork "Democracy in America," Tocqueville used a word that would echo through the centuries: exceptional. "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional," he wrote, "and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one."
What made America exceptional in Tocqueville's eyes? A peculiar combination of factors that existed nowhere else on Earth. The Puritan religious heritage of the early settlers. The commercial habits of a trading nation. A vast continent that focused American minds on practical matters rather than abstract philosophy. Proximity to Europe, which allowed Americans to borrow European learning without having to develop it themselves. And perhaps most importantly, the absence of a feudal past.
This last point matters enormously. When Tocqueville looked at France, he saw centuries of accumulated hierarchy—kings and peasants, nobles and serfs, established churches and landed estates. The French Revolution had tried to sweep all this away, but the old structures kept reasserting themselves. Class conflict was baked into the social DNA.
America had no such inheritance. There were no hereditary nobles. No established church with centuries of accumulated power. No peasant class tied to the land for generations. Americans arrived as individuals and made their own way. The playing field wasn't perfectly level—it never is—but it was flatter than anything Europe had ever seen.
The First New Nation
The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset spent his career studying why America developed so differently from other Western democracies. His answer centered on something often overlooked: the United States was born in revolution.
This might seem obvious, but consider what it means. Most nations evolved gradually from kingdoms, principalities, and tribal territories. Their constitutions emerged from centuries of negotiation between kings and nobles, churches and parliaments. Their founding myths reach back into a hazy past of legendary kings and ancient battles.
America was different. It was founded on a specific date, based on explicit principles, by identifiable people who wrote down exactly what they believed and why. The Declaration of Independence isn't a legend—it's a document. The Constitution isn't ancient custom—it's an argument.
Lipset called this distinctive ideology "Americanism," a term that has no real equivalent in other countries. You can't be "un-French" or "un-German" in quite the same way you can be "un-American." Other nations are defined by ethnicity, language, territory, or shared history. America is defined by ideas—liberty, individualism, democracy, meritocracy, limited government.
This ideological founding had practical consequences. Americans developed a deep suspicion of centralized power. The federal government that emerged from the Constitutional Convention was far weaker than any European state of comparable size and wealth. Powers were divided between branches, between federal and state governments, between the government and the people. The whole system was designed by men who had just fought a war against concentrated authority and wanted to make sure it could never happen again.
What Exceptionalism Actually Means
The term "American exceptionalism" carries different meanings depending on who's using it, and this ambiguity has caused no end of confusion and argument.
In academic political science, American exceptionalism is primarily descriptive. It refers to the ways the United States is a statistical outlier among wealthy democracies—an exception to patterns that hold elsewhere. America has higher rates of religious observance than comparable nations. It has weaker labor unions. It has a more powerful military. It lacks a major socialist party. It has higher rates of both wealth and poverty. It incarcerates more of its citizens than any other developed country. It spends more on healthcare while covering fewer people.
None of these observations necessarily imply that America is better or worse than other countries. They simply note that it's different—that explanations for how other democracies work often don't apply to the American case, and vice versa.
But there's another meaning of exceptionalism that goes beyond mere description. This is the belief that America has a special mission in the world—that it was founded not just to govern itself but to serve as an example and perhaps even a leader for all humanity. This version of exceptionalism has deep religious roots.
God's Country
The Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s believed they were establishing a "city upon a hill"—a phrase from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount that has echoed through American rhetoric ever since. John Winthrop, the colony's first governor, used these words to describe their mission: to create a godly commonwealth that would serve as a model for the reformation of Christendom.
This sense of divine mission never entirely disappeared. It evolved and adapted, but the basic structure remained: America as a chosen nation with a special role in God's plan.
Different religious traditions interpreted this differently. Some Protestants believed American progress would hasten the return of Jesus Christ and the Christian millennium—a thousand-year reign of peace and righteousness. They saw America as preparing the way for the end times.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—developed perhaps the most elaborate theology of American exceptionalism. In Mormon belief, the American continents are a unique and chosen land. The Constitution of the United States was divinely inspired. Joseph Smith, the church's founder, taught that the millennial New Jerusalem would be built in America, and he reported God as saying: "It is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose."
Even Americans without strong religious convictions often absorbed a secularized version of this exceptionalist faith. The frontier played a crucial role. As settlers pushed west across a seemingly endless continent, many believed they were enacting a providential drama—spreading liberty and civilization across virgin territory. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier experience itself shaped American character, creating a practical, democratic, individualistic people unlike any in Europe.
The Critics Strike Back
Not everyone finds the idea of American exceptionalism convincing or benign.
Critics point out that the concept can slide from description into self-congratulation—from "America is different" to "America is better" to "America can do no wrong." When exceptionalism becomes a matter of national faith rather than empirical observation, it can blind Americans to their country's failures and crimes.
The postnationalist school of historians rejects the notion that America truly broke from European patterns. They see familiar themes of class conflict, racial hierarchy, and imperial ambition running through American history just as they do through European history. Slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, the acquisition of overseas colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico—these don't fit neatly into a story of liberty triumphant.
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a different critique in a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, responding to President Barack Obama's invocation of American exceptionalism to justify potential military action in Syria. "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation," Putin wrote. "We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal."
The response from American conservatives was predictable outrage. More surprising was the reaction of Donald Trump, then a businessman and television personality, who called Putin's op-ed "a masterpiece." Trump pointed out the obvious problem with American exceptionalism as a diplomatic stance: "You think of the term as being beautiful, but all of sudden you say, what if you're in Germany or Japan or any one of 100 countries? You are not going to like that term. It is very insulting."
The Hartz Thesis
The most influential academic explanation of American exceptionalism came from Louis Hartz, a political scientist at Harvard. In his 1955 book "The Liberal Tradition in America," Hartz offered an elegant theory for why American politics looks so different from European politics.
The key, Hartz argued, was what America lacked: a feudal past.
European political development was shaped by centuries of conflict between different social classes and interest groups—kings versus nobles, church versus state, landed aristocrats versus rising merchants, peasants versus everyone above them. These conflicts produced the full spectrum of European political ideology, from reactionary monarchism on the right to revolutionary socialism on the left.
America inherited none of this. The colonies had no established aristocracy defending ancient privileges. They had no peasantry seeking liberation from feudal bonds. They had no powerful church hierarchy intertwined with state power. What they had instead was a relatively broad consensus around what Hartz called "Lockean liberalism"—named after the English philosopher John Locke, who emphasized natural rights, private property, individual liberty, and government by consent.
This consensus had profound consequences. American political debates have historically taken place within much narrower bounds than European debates. The American "left" would be considered centrist or even center-right in most European countries. The American "right" lacks the aristocratic and monarchist traditions that defined European conservatism. Socialism never took hold as a mass movement.
Some practices with feudal origins did cross the Atlantic—primogeniture, for instance, the custom of passing an entire estate to the eldest son. But these were abolished during the Revolutionary era, confirming rather than contradicting America's fundamentally liberal character.
Not everyone accepts Hartz's thesis. The political theorist Sheldon Wolin argued that colonial America actually did experience something like feudalism, and that the Revolution was partly a reaction against it. But Hartz's framework remains influential, offering a compelling explanation for why Marxism failed to take root in American soil and why American politics has remained so consistently focused on individual rights and limited government.
Exceptionalism as Political Football
In recent decades, American exceptionalism has become a partisan battleground.
The Republican Party has made it an official plank of their platform since 2012. The 2016 platform defined it as "the notion that our ideas and principles as a nation give us a unique place of moral leadership" and affirmed America's duty to "retake its natural position as leader of the free world."
Democrats have generally been more cautious with the term, wary of its implications of superiority and concerned that it can be used to justify unilateral action abroad. When President Barack Obama was asked about American exceptionalism during a 2009 press conference in Strasbourg, he gave a carefully calibrated response: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
This answer infuriated conservatives. Mitt Romney attacked it during his 2012 presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee declared that Obama's worldview was "dramatically different from any president, Republican or Democrat, we've had... He grew up more as a globalist than an American. To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation."
Obama pushed back four years later during the Syria debate, arguing that America's willingness to act against atrocities was precisely what made it exceptional. "When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our kids safer over the long run, I believe we should act," he said. "That is what makes America different. That is what makes us exceptional."
The Paradox of the Exceptional Nation
American exceptionalism contains a paradox that has puzzled observers since Tocqueville.
On one hand, America claims to be founded on universal principles—truths held to be self-evident, applicable to all humanity. The Declaration of Independence doesn't say that all Americans are created equal; it says all men are created equal. The principles of liberty and self-government aren't supposed to be American inventions but natural rights belonging to every human being.
On the other hand, exceptionalism implies that America is unique—that its particular combination of circumstances has produced something that cannot be replicated elsewhere. If America's success depends on its exceptional conditions, can its principles really be universal?
Different Americans have resolved this tension in different ways. Some have emphasized America's role as an example—a city upon a hill that demonstrates what's possible but doesn't impose its model on others. Others have taken a more active view, seeing America as having a mission to spread liberty throughout the world, by force if necessary.
The tension remains unresolved. Perhaps it's irresolvable. Perhaps American exceptionalism is less a coherent doctrine than an ongoing argument about what America means and what role it should play in the world.
Where We Are Now
The McGuffey Readers, used to educate most American schoolchildren from the 1840s through the late 19th century—120 million copies sold—taught American exceptionalism as simple fact. America was God's country. It had a manifest destiny to spread liberty across the continent and eventually the world. This was not presented as opinion or interpretation but as obvious truth.
Today the concept is contested in ways that would have seemed strange to earlier generations. Some Americans embrace it fervently; others reject it as dangerous mythology. Some scholars try to separate the descriptive from the normative—acknowledging that America is statistically unusual while avoiding claims about superiority or divine mission.
What seems clear is that the idea isn't going away. For better or worse, Americans continue to believe—or at least to argue about whether they should believe—that their country represents something unique in human history. The term that Stalin meant as a condemnation has become one of the defining concepts of American self-understanding.
The communists who first used the phrase were trying to explain a failure—why their predictions about America kept proving wrong. Perhaps that failure contained a truth they didn't intend to reveal. Something about America really was different. The arguments continue about what that difference means and whether it's something to celebrate or something to overcome. But the difference itself—the exception—keeps asserting itself, refusing to fit neatly into theories designed for other places and other histories.
Stalin called it a heresy. Perhaps he was right about that much. America has always been a nation of heretics.