The Slide Into Fascism Has Been Brought To You By "American Exceptionalism"
When a myth gets weaponized, it truly is a slippery slope.
It started with a BlueSky post about a column in Foreign Affairs by centrist professor of diplomacy at Tufts University Daniel Drezner. The column was titled The End of American Exceptionalism and a commenter said that it was a hubris that led to a quasi-dictatorship. Drezner asked for the commenter to draw a causal chain. I decided to take the mantle up myself. Upon some further reflection, I felt like this would be better in a longform piece, working off of my “skeet” as an outline.
The United States operated for over a century before submitting to imperial ambitions. What changed? For one, the premature end of Reconstruction and the readmission of the Southern rebel states. Because Reconstruction was shut down early, the temporary gains of African-Americans were quickly, violently rolled back. Rather than do something about it, and reopen the wounds, presidential administrations looked outward over the horizons. Just as Manifest Destiny would paper over the divisions on slavery, so would Pax Americana do so for reunification and the resumption of oppression towards Black Americans.
Under William McKinley, the United States annexed Hawaii, launched the Spanish-American War (in which they seized Cuba and Puerto Rico), and collected both the Philippines and Guam from the Spanish after the war. The Philippines tried to declare independence and we put the rebellion down. Theodore Roosevelt continued this expansionist desire by building his “Great White Fleet” of the U.S. Navy to provide these colonial outposts with adequate defense, and building the Panama Canal after surreptitiously helping Panama secede from Colombia. The U.S. would intervene repeatedly over the next three decades, invading Cuba twice, ruling Haiti for twenty years, sending incursions into Mexico, ruling the Dominican Republic for eight years for unpaid debts. We kept projecting our power until the Great Depression, at which point we backed off because Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-imperialist.
Once we became a global power post-World War II, we took it on ourselves to defend "the free world." The American Empire was born. Military bases in every corner of the world. The Marshall Plan. NATO. SEATO. Coups in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, South Vietnam, Chile. A navy so large that Edwardian Britain would blush. Vietnam War. We helped build China into a challenger against the Soviets; when the USSR fell China became the Big Bad. Afghanistan. Iraq War. We failed repeatedly to establish imperial domination and refused to self-reflect as we did.
Republicans told us it was always someone else's fault for our failings. There was always an excuse, always an enemy. If one couldn’t be found overseas, they’d blame domestic policies. We have to slash the safety net because the poor can overcome their poverty with hard work. We have to get rid of welfare because it makes people lazy. We have to cut food stamps because poor people might buy a steak with it. If we help people, they won’t work hard, and hard work can get you anywhere, because we’re America!
If you don't overcome these obstacles, it's not America's fault. We're the greatest country on earth. It's those immigrants that are screwing it up. Brown people. Asians. Arabs. They're polluting our blood. Getting all sorts of government assistance that you, the hardworking American, deserves instead [Please ignore everything we said before when we tell you this]. They are destroying our American exceptionalism with their otherness, their laziness, taking those grossly underpaid jobs in the fields picking our food or cleaning our buildings [please ignore all the contradictions in that sentence].
While all this happened, we stopped enforcing monopoly laws. Stopped collecting taxes properly from the rich. Allowed corporations to create blatant tax dodges by stashing money in the Caymans, Panama, and elsewhere. Did nothing to stop the offshoring of our jobs. The billionaires started to appear, and then there were more, and more, and soon there were 400+, and they owned more wealth than over half of the country combined. They owned all of our major news media outlets. Our Internet and phone providers. Our grocery chains, food providers, television stations—the list goes on forever.
Wages stagnated, interest rates rose, and yet the rich got richer. Despite it, they managed to convince America they were job creators, and we should be grateful for their benevolence. Their avatar, a career con man who was sometimes a billionaire, sometimes not (depending on how creative the math was), has now been twice elected president, not despite his blatantly fascist policies, but because of them. He convinced America that he, and he alone, could make it better, and that the last four years were terrible. He succeeded in making despite record low unemployment, massive investment in infrastructure, the building of new high-tech manufacturing facilities, and so much more. He was aided in this by those billionaires, who used their monopolies to artificially cause inflation where none was justified, raking in record profits for themselves while telling people that the president whose policies were materially improving their life was to blame.
They successfully attacked marginalized people and have convinced half of the population that what is in their best interest is to allow Donald Trump to rule as a near-dictator. He is naming cabinet nominees whose goal is to destroy the rule of law and turn the government into his personal fiefdom, where you must bend the knee or be punished. The military will be used to squash dissent and put twenty million immigrants, legal or not, in concentration camps [these are their promises, repeatedly stated]. The Senate will either give Trump what he wants or he will combine with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to adjourn Congress and he will appoint his entire Cabinet by fiat. The Supreme Court, filled with his lackeys, will acquiesce.
And that, dear reader, is how you get to fascism. The promise of American exceptionalism was nothing but a myth, used to get the people to repeatedly vote against their best interests, fight against policies meant to help them, and punch down at minorities while the power and wealth all flowed upwards. The irony, of course, is that this billionaire-driven fascism will destroy the country because most of these clowns don’t understand what happens when any structure becomes too top-heavy: it falls down and shatters.