Jessica Gavora, in The Atlantic (July 25, 2024, 7:31 AM ET) wrote:
I thought of Dad last week, when the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, said something that profoundly misjudged and disrespected his memory.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance said in his introductory speech to the American people at the Republican National Convention. Americans won’t fight and sacrifice for “abstractions.” Shared history, he assured us, is what we care about. And shared dirt. He used the morbid image of a cemetery plot in Kentucky coal country, where generations of his family have been laid to rest. He expressed his desire for his children to one day bury him there and—carrying his morbidity to the extreme—for them to eventually follow him.
The notion that America is an idea has always lifted up our country, and for good reason. The fact that America was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the governing limits of the Constitution makes us unique among nations. Most countries trace their origins to tribal identity. But America has its origins in the revolutionary idea that the government cannot deny men and women an equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Both our friends and foes have recognized this difference. No less than Joseph Stalin railed against American “exceptionalism” when our workers refused to join in solidarity with his murderous revolution of the proletariat.
Vance went out of his way to trash this exceptionalism, to say that America is not distinguished by its creed, no matter what Stalin thought….
Gavora correctly calls out J.D. Vance for insulting the American Ideal, an Ideal that has great value for our world today, as it did in the past. Here Gavora is correct, but he, as with Vance, still misunderstood the doctrine of American exceptionalism as perceived outside of the United States. United States is not being criticism in its exceptionalist belief because of its Ideal (vision, national mythology). The criticism for any nationalist exceptionalism is the belief that the persons of one nation think differently to other persons on the basis of belonging to one national culture, and in these prejudices included attempted legitimatization of every position on every subject. The prejudice is a gross misunderstanding of our global-regional-local humanity.
Back in May 2022, I published a blog article called, Exceptionalism and Conceit. This is what Gavora correctly draws upon. It is worth quoting a section of that work:
Do we ennoble savagery, and do we falsify civility? These are the questions for the times, and it goes to exceptionalism for personal and national conceit.
Exceptionalism is the condition of being different from the norm. For nations, it is the belief that characteristics are not global, but unique to what persons want to believe is a very large ‘national community’; the norm. For persons, it is a legitimation of identity.
The world population has become so drugged on entertainment that it is too less perceived outside of critical reflection….
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To then divert away from war, is to do what Joseph Rouse (2015) describes as ‘Articulating the World.’ Rouse has a deep technical argument on philosophical naturalism, and this swings us back around to the Rousseauan thinking. The critical question is the idea of ‘human nature’, a tug of war, not merely between Rousseau and Hobbes, but between Hobbes and Locke; for it is Locke who opens ups the possibility of having both liberated human nature and civility.
The postmodern era has put an end to the confidence in the Lockean project, which is why we have screen films like Black Sails. In rejecting the Lockean view of civilisation, we have become pirates. What I suggest, however, is a humanism against privateers (pirates in its original conception), and a humanism for public and educated dialogue. It is not a war I propose but peace in the educative process.
Where Gavora is incorrectly positioned is the paradigm target of J.D. Vance’s insult. It is less a doctrine of American exceptionalism and more a doctrine of American modernism. Earlier this year I drew this point out in the blog article, The American Modernism of The Great Gatsby: Concepts of Landscape, Persons, and Time-Past:
Re-reading novel The Great Gatsby and watching Baz Luhrmann’s film (2012 trailer), The Great Gatsby, I realised I had been in the novel’s fictional geography, albeit a century later, during my 2023 American research tour. The film re-creates the fairly accurate sense of the novel‘s historic landscape, but fails to capture well the novel‘s personalism and cultural modernism, as American modernism was just emerging as literature in 1922….
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The landscape of the early 1920s Long Island speaks to us of American modernism. Visions of relaxing suburban life outside of the madness of the Megacity, and yet the truth was that it came with the Valley of Ashes. It is the industrial dumping site, a significant representation of industrialisation in the landscape, which in the twentieth century came and went, and the prosperity of the Jazz Age had long gone with the loss of this economy.
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There is irony in Nick’s final judgement of Jay. Jay’s character had no scruples other than his romantic vision of Daisy as the “nice girl”. He was in the end revealed as the bootlegger in the crime network of ‘Wolfsheim’ who is based on New York gangster, Arnold Rothstein. One of the biggest shortfalls in American modernism of the 1920s, and 1930s, was the celebration of brutal crime and thuggish characters, as if there were no significant moral or ethical judgements; only aesthetical ones. Unfortunately, there is a swing back to this kind of nasty love of criminality in our own time. Swings and round-a-abouts. For example the Ned Kelly mythology is celebrated, and then it is correctly criticised.
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The Great Gatsby is a work that draws out the concept of time-past for us, a hundred years later. It would have been difficult for the readers in 1926 to appreciate the historiography which was only just happening in the emergence of American modernism as literature.
The historiography of American modernism draws out several important themes: the nature of the past between what we think is modern and what came before; and the romantic recurrent past where modernism is confusingly represented as realism, but, in truth, European Enlightenment (as 20th century modernism) never escaped its Romanic roots. Fitzgerald originally, as American modernism, proposed the question of time-past: can we re-grasp what has come before?
We see the same themes today in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy thinking, a replication of the abuses in the references to the Ideal, to the vision of the American national mythological stories.
Featured Images: The American Flag. The flag of the United States isolated on a white background with a sign reading American Exceptionalism. Photo 171077862 © Ben Gingell | Dreamstime.com with Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California, a symbol of American Modernism. Photo 52267330 | American Modernism © Joe Sohm | Dreamstime.com
Neville Buch
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