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"AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM" is in the news once again. For months, European observers of the United States have been virtually unable to write about the country without recourse to it. After a decade of talk of global convergence and of the irresistible, international diffusion of a neoliberal "Washington consensus" the language of American incommensurability is back in vogue. The Economist leads off its analysis of the post-9/11 United States with charts of stark national differences. European commentators struggle with the strangeness of American religiosity, the moral self-righteousness of American public discourse, and the unfathomable peculiarities of the American mind. At home, the rhetoric of muscular, power-projecting American patriotism reverberates, with a different spin, to precisely the same themes. It does not seem to matter that intensity of religiosity in the United States is unusual only in comparison with the nations of Europe and East Asia; within the Americas the religiosity of the United States is just about the norm. It does not seem to matter that contempt for alliances and world opinion has been, in a pinch, a strategy of governments everywhere. Nor does it seem to matter, finally, that while the president of the United States could barely get his tongue around the messianic language of Wilsonian world responsibility, the most persuasive articulator of the Americans' high moral mission in Iraq has been the prime minister of unexceptional Britain.
Exceptionalism dominates the news because it is an easy and reflexive category of analysis. It highlights the intense contrasts of the moment, marshaling behind them a train of supporting evidence, all hitched one-by-one to an explanatory locomotive of profound, enduring historical difference. Exceptionalist narratives in this regard are virtually an exact mirror of convergence theories, which marshal their discrete boxcars of historical and contemporary evidence to opposite effect. But grand theories of global convergence-fashionable as recently as Francis Fukuyamas prediction a little more than a decade ago that history had come to an end except for the unrolling forward motion of liberal capitalist democracy-have fallen apart in the last decades international upsurge in nationalist political movements, interethnic violence, and religious militancy. As these grand theories have faded, the rhetorical formulas of exceptionalism have again come to the fore.
But the categories of "exceptionalism" are irmch more...