Extreme American Exceptionalism: Narcissism and Paranoia

The Concept of American Exceptionalism

American exceptionalism is the idea that this is a special country whose people are a model for humanity with a special mission to enlighten others. This vision has inspired both the drive to improve the lives and human rights of other people and justified a sense of national superiority, entitlement, and exemption from international standards.

There are positive sides to American exceptionalism that should not be ignored. For example, the idea fosters generously helping others in times of need, as revealed by assistance sent to Haiti after the recent earthquake. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were established as a consequence of the actions of U.S. presidents. Since 1945 this country has played an exceptional role in the establishment of standards of human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the United Nations committee that wrote the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a statement of ego ideals that continues to do much to help spread freedom and human rights around the world.

However, the U.S. insistence on exemption from the standards it would like others to live up to is a less positive aspect of its policies (Michael Ignatieff, ed., American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, 2005, 3, pp. 304-338, passim). Many on the political left cringe at the very mention of the term, since it represents to them

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the type of jingoism associated with former President Bush’s justification for a preemptive “war on evil” in Afghanistan and Iraq and a long American tradition of bullying smaller countries.

Of late, presidential hopefuls and political operatives Dick Armey, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (2010); Newt Gingrich, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine (2010); Mike Huckabee’s speeches; Mitt Romney, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (2010); Sarah Palin; and others have forcefully embraced the concept (Karen Tumulty, “An Old Idea and a New Political Battle,” Washington Post, November 29, 2010). Palin specifically devotes a whole chapter to it in America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Flag (2010). Drawing on more academic conservatives such as Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review (“The Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” February 24, 2010), she argues that this country, whose workers celebrate success, is more democratic, dynamic, and individualistic—in fact, freer and more entrepreneurial—than other countries, and therefore rightly “a model to the world” (p. 63). The problem is not the characterization of America nearly as much as that it is used as a distraction from facing up to the country’s problems.

President Obama’s belief that America is exceptional, that it is “a light to the world,” is too modified for the Right, since he suspects “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Consequently, it is dismissed out of hand by the conservative politicians and more intellectually by Lowry and Ponnuru (Greg Sargent, “The Plum Line: What the Right’s ‘American Exceptionalism’ Attack Is Really About,” Washington Post, November 10, 2010). Their focus on American exceptionalism is, in part, a way to distance themselves from Obama and liberal Democrats.

Grandiose Fantasies amidst Economic Recession and Decline

All nations view themselves as exceptional; however, historical reality has a way of diminishing the grandiose fantasies that abound among peoples—fantasies fed by chauvinistic historians, nationalistic politicians, and media outlets more interested in an audience than reality. Compared to most other countries in the

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world, there were fewer challenges to American fantasies of being special throughout the 20^th century. From America’s leading economic position and victories in two world wars, it seemed blessed, protected from continental invasion by two great oceans. Its rapidly growing population, greatly increased life expectancy, high standard of living, and technological superiority gave it great advantages over other countries that often suffered from murderous leaders and/or devastating world wars fought on their own territories.

However, the U.S. has been living in a fantasy world, most notably since the fall of European communism in 1991. The American government pays many of its bills with money borrowed from foreign countries while exporting its manufacturing capacity abroad. Millions of its citizens drive oversized vehicles fueled by oil from countries whose people often hate Americans, and this money for oil sometimes even provides funding or shelter to anti-American terrorists. Americans have an obesity problem that will probably cost a trillion dollars in medical bills over the next 10 years. This country thinks of itself as the policeman of the world, while its military is stretched thin by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—the costs of which were not even included in the national budget until 2009. When the American economy, built partly on a financial house of cards, dramatically slowed in 2007-2008, it was bailed out by Congress and the Fed under the Bush and then Obama administrations to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet in one of the great ironies of history, the Chinese communist government is focusing on future growth by overseeing vast development of its economic infrastructure. The divergence between the mythologies and realities of economic and political systems is enormous.

The younger generation is mostly concerned with the instant gratifications stemming from consumerism, entertainment, finance, and sports rather than upon strengthening the industrial base of the economy. The intense focus on consumerism and sports since World War I rather than industrial development only became a major problem for the U.S.A. when the rest of the world greatly increased its level of industrial development and stopped destroying so many of its resources in warfare. There is a winner-take-all psy-

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chology that results in an undue building-up of celebrities of finance, media, politics, and ordinary people suddenly getting their 15 minutes of fame on television. The individual has been aggrandized at the expense of the good of the group.

Much of current American political discourse is based on a society that never existed, for example, the Republican Party rhetoric of laissez faire capitalism, which has never existed anywhere in the world, and the Democratic Party’s assumption of having a monopoly on speaking for ordinary people. These ideas are held onto without regard to the facts of the given situation, much as a narcissistic patient ignores reality until and even after it comes crashing down. Liberals and conservatives often act as if there are separate realities as they get their information and “talking points” from separate sources. This was reflected in the early January, 2011 statement by the newly sworn in Speaker of the House that “no one believes that health care will lower costs,” even when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost $230 billion to repeal the health reform passed in 2010. If the recent

U.S. political/financial system were a patient, a diagnosis of pathological narcissism would be under consideration.

Psychoanalytic and Psychohistorical Reflections

American exceptionalism has expressed itself in a variety of ways and reached its most dangerous point in the administration of the second President Bush, who felt that the country was empowered by God to fight evil in the world and spread its vision of democracy. At its worst, it results in the U.S. thinking it owns the world and has no limits. It is an extension of what Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism,” in which people want everything and take responsibility for nothing (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Era of Diminishing Expectations, 1979). For example, while gaining enormous benefits from government and demanding additional services from it for their needs, millions of citizens view government as a socialistic evil. They ignore extensive public hearings and debates in favor of television entertainment, yet go to Tea Party protests to question why the issues have not been brought before the public and to voice their rage— Kohut’s term, narcissistic rage, seems appropriate (Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoana-

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lytic Treatment of Narcissistic Disorders, 1971, 214n., 263, passim). Much of the public is geared to the fantasy, encouraged by advertising, that you can have instant gratification at almost no cost. Just as the narcissistic personality is unable to realistically view the needs of others and the situation because of the lack of internal boundaries, the narcissistic society verges on catastrophe. Their diagnoses and treatment are similar: boundaries must be established to limit the unregulated desires and grandiosity. For example, in the financial arena, the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act of 1933) had done a fairly good job of controlling excesses in the banking industry until it was eliminated in 1999.

Millions of people have lost their jobs, some have lost their homes, and far more are in danger of being evicted. The enormous economic costs of long-term decline for ordinary workers and the recent recession—joblessness, growing economic inequality, and the export of high-paying manufacturing jobs—are not the focus of this paper, but the human and psychological costs are enormous. People who have lost their jobs are inclined to also lose their self-respect. Alcoholism, substance abuse, and wife and child abuse increase under these circumstances, as does public displacement of anger at the federal government to the point of many seeing the single most important instrument necessary to solve societal problems as the problem rather than the solution. Optimism is often replaced by depression and despair.

Given this situation, complacency in America has given way to increased anxiety and fear that its days of dominance are numbered. Concern about losing jobs, homes, comfortable lifestyles, and fear that their children will have a lower standard of living, has led much of the country to suffer from what psychoanalyst Peace Sullivan (personal communication January 9, 2011) calls “a collective anxiety” manifested in the irrational fear of Obama’s health reform resulting in “death panels” and Americans no longer being able to choose their own doctors. Frightened people feel nostalgia for the good old days symbolized by Sarah Palin’s plain-speaking values, rhetoric, and life in our most rugged, most frontier-type state. The rhetoric of Palin and others like her frighten people into believing that government is bad.

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Paranoia: Expectations, Popular Rage, and Enemies

The “paranoid tradition” in American politics is alive and well in this age of Tea Party protests, as it was when Richard Hofstadter wrote about it in 1964 in Harper’s Magazine and published The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1966). Within a month of the presidential inauguration, the Tea Party was formed and at its rallies the President was soon the subject of the wildest projections, derided as a socialist, and, to the embarrassment of the organizers, a Nazi. In what Harvard Colonial historian Jill Lepore calls a type of “antihistory,” the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor in 1773 is evoked as an inspiration to resist not a colonial power but rather a popularly elected administration (The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party Revolution and the Battle Over American History, 2010, pp. 3, 8, 15, 92). (For a more detailed study of the historical memory of the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor and its uses, see Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution, 1999.)

After the struggle to hold on to the standard of living during the Bush presidency, Obama was elected amidst powerful savior fantasies, as David Beisel wrote in “Presidential Savior Fantasies and the Election of Barack Obama” (Clio’s Psyche Vol. 15, No. 4, March 2009, pp. 264-270). These unrealistic expectations were bound to be frustrated, no matter what Obama accomplished. From the late spring and summer of the President’s first year in office, anger exploded at public hearings over health care and at Tea Party protests, culminating in the Republican success in the 2010 Congressional elections. The Tea Party is a reflection of enormous anger, primarily of white conservative men. They are older, better educated, and economically better off than most Americans. They think that blacks and Hispanics are getting too much from Washington and that they will pay higher taxes while having some of their own benefits cut—thus their rhetoric of smaller government (Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brennan, “Discontent’s Demography: Who Backs the Tea Party,” New York Times, April 15, 2010).

Sarah Palin, since becoming a media star as the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, has used her celebrity to make considerable money as an author, Fox News commentator, television show star, and speaker at Tea Party protest rallies rather than

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by the much more difficult task of struggling to achieve her gubernatorial campaign promises and completing her term as Alaska governor. Her television program, “Palin’s Alaska,” is a mixture of reality television, family values, conservative politics, caribou hunting, climbing up mountains and over glaciers, and a travelogue displaying the natural beauty of Alaska. She lives in a gun culture with bearskin rugs on the floor and animal heads on the walls. This made it easy for her to use language like “lock and load” against the Democrats and to target on her website the congressional members she wanted to see defeated by showing their districts in the crosshairs of a rifle, as in the case of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head on January 8, 2011 by a disturbed gunman. Amidst the carnage of six killed and 13 wounded in front of a Safeway grocery store, it is important to remember that violent rhetoric and symbols in politics have consequences as Giffords herself had specifically warned. It is not just the former Alaskan governor who uses the violent imagery of the gun. For example, the new generation of conservative congressional leaders—Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy—last September put their political blueprint forth under the title, Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.

The use of enemies in politics is standard, but it is not a stance that comes readily to the 44^th President of the United States with his smiling demeanor and intellectual analysis of societal problems. Conservative Republicans and their media supporters are inclined to have far fewer inhibitions on expressing anger and even rage than the President. Moreover, Obama’s history of success through compromise and perhaps his overriding personal need to compromise—it is mainly his default position—has encouraged his opposition to be much less compromising than if it feared him. Yet if one believes certain of the more extreme talk show hosts and even a few congressmen, Obama is taking the country to totalitarianism, since that is what they see as the end product of socialism. (For more on Obama’s style of compromise, see various books and articles, including Ken Fuchsman, “Obama the Conciliator,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 17, No. 4, March, 2011, pp. 356-358).

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Conclusion

At the moment, the future of America looks bleak, although not nearly as bad as it did when the White House was burned in the War of 1812, in the dark days of the Civil War, or during the Great Depression. The question is whether the narcissistic fantasies of specialness can be put aside to deal with the world in a more realistic manner and whether the paranoia, projections, and extreme rhetoric can be left behind to responsibly govern in a cooperative and conciliatory way. The answer will be worked out in the economic and political arenas, and those with psychoanalytic and political psychological competency can offer some special insights to help in understanding this endeavor.

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