Ponnuru and Lowry defend their essay on American exceptionalism. I will confine my remarks to responding to just three points. This is Lowry and Ponnuru in the original essay:

As president [Obama] has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time.

This is their claim now:

We do not think Obama was under any obligation to defend the Bay of Pigs; it would have been fine for him to say that he did not consider it worthwhile to debate any country’s decisions from the early ’60s.

There is no explanation how Obama was supposed to defend “the country’s honor” without defending the military action that Ortega was criticizing. Now they claim that it would have been fine if he dismissed the subject all together, provided that he did it without referring to himself. What about “the country’s honor” that Ortega had so outrageously insulted? Clearly, the authors made a ridiculous criticism that completely failed to show the alleged “detachment” from American history they were attempting to show, and now they have been forced to change the nature of their criticism. The new nonsensical argument is that this was “not the only occasion on which Obama has implied that American history has begun anew with his presidency.” Of course, he didn’t imply or say anything of the kind.

One of their replies to Damon Linker’s critique suggests that they did not read Linker very closely. Linker had remarked on the definition of the American creed Lowry and Ponnuru cited. Linker wrote:

This is what the authors tell us: Americans affirm a creed that upholds “liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics.” These principles then combine with “other aspects of the American character—especially our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force—to form the core of American exceptionalism.”

Some of this is faintly ridiculous. (Is anything less exceptional in human history than a country’s willingness to defend itself by force?) As for the rest, it’s either a string of American banalities and clichés—or an abstract of the Republican Party platform [bold mine-DL]. The next several paragraphs of the essay make it very clear that it’s the latter. That’s right: Lowry and Ponnuru expect their readers to believe that what makes our country exceptional is that large numbers of Americans affirm the ideology of the modern conservative movement.

Lowry and Ponnuru responded:

That Linker considers these commitments unacceptably right-wing tells us more about his views than ours.

This is an amazingly weak retort. It seems quite clear that Linker was saying that these commitments may be “banalities and cliches,” since virtually everyone in the mainstream of American politics would endorse most if not all of these commitments. In this way, their essay is a more elaborate version of the Mount Vernon statement. “We believe in a limited government under the rule of law!” “We believe in liberty!” Well, yes, but who couldn’t claim to believe these things? The alternative is that the definition is supposed to be understood as an identification of modern conservative views with the core elements of the American creed, which the authors claim are at the heart of American exceptionalism. They say that it is “the pillars of American exceptionalism” that American conservatives are supposed to be conserving. It is hardly a reach to conclude that the authors believe that their political principles and the American creed are identical when the authors have said as much. Linker seems to object on the one hand to the conservative appropriation of these commitments and on the other he objects to the reduction or limitation of American political principles that a conservative interpretation of these commitments could entail.

Lowry and Ponnuru distinguish between “the Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles.” This helps make Linker’s point for him. As Samuel Goldman has said:

The difference between “Wilsonian” exceptionalism and the NR kind doesn’t revolve around transcendence of constitutional principles. It’s a disagreement about what those principles are, and the rank order among them. Does the Constitution’s promise of a “more perfect union” trump its formal limitations of government? Are the blessings of liberty material as well as political and juridical? To condemn progressivism as hostile, as such to founding principles is to avoid the argument on the merits, and to ignore the long history of sincere attempts to articulate a left-wing conception of American values. Regrettably, that’s the tendency of the whole piece [bold mine-DL].

Of course, Wilson is one of the most obnoxious American exceptionalists in our entire history. The self-righteous, priggish, missionary desire to save the world from itself through American leadership and force of arms was obviously closely associated with Wilson and his understanding of American greatness. It has been a blight on American foreign policy ever since, but there is no denying that it originated here at home. Of course, this is the part of Wilson’s legacy that the authors like very much. In their original essay Lowry and Ponnuru describe America’s role in the world: “It is also, in keeping with its missionary history, the chief exponent of liberty in the world.” This is a straightforwardly Wilsonian conviction. They are annoyed by Obama because, among other things, he has seemed to be “positively allergic to the word democracy.” Put another way, he has not repeated it mindlessly as a mantra like his unabashedly Wilsonian predecessor. In short, the authors would like to deride Obama for being a progressive at home and for being insufficiently Wilsonian abroad.

This drives home the point that their argument is not really with Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism, but something much more basic. They do not much care for his domestic policy, and they have a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with his foreign policy even though they cannot actually prove it. For whatever reason, instead of advancing policy arguments against the administration’s agenda, they have concocted a half-baked theory to make American progressivism and American exceptionalism appear antithetical to one another when any halfway honest accounting of modern domestic and foreign policy tells us that they have been complementary and closely linked. From my perspective, that is one reason to be very skeptical of American exceptionalism, but there is no real reason why anyone who believes in American exceptionalism should doubt Obama’s belief in the same.

P.S. Just to make this point clearly, it is also quite silly for Lowry and Ponnuru to complain about the “Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles” when they take for granted that the federal government ought to act as the “chief exponent of liberty in the world.” Quite clearly, on matters of foreign policy the authors subscribe quite happily to the idea that the role of the federal government will and should evolve as conditions require. It would not be hard to imagine that they or some of their colleagues believe that the American story has been moving towards America’s present status as global superpower and “chief exponent of liberty in the world.” Their claim that America is the “chief exponent of liberty in the world” reflects a vastly more expansive understanding of the role of the government than could be reasonably derived from our “fixed constitutional principles.” It is a pernicious, dangerous view, and it is also a very strange position from which to attack someone else’s progressive interpretations of constitutional principle.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics