[governance] Bloomberg - The Overzealous Prosecution of Aaron Swartz

[William Drake]

Hi Adam

On Jan 20, 2013, at 10:30 AM, Adam Peake <ajp at glocom.ac.jp> wrote:

> I understood the term "US Exceptionalism" to mean something along the lines that US culture was in some what superior.  Guru, your comment encouraged a search, and finding a result on wikipedia "American exceptionalism is the proposition that the United States is different from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy." And this would fit with Riaz's use, given the context. 
> 
> To the first, hard to think how US culture is superior (special and often great, and often not so great). Second, idea that the US has some god given mission to spread liberty and democracy does seem to live on in the US State department and they seem blind of the hyprocacry of (etc etc) Bradley Manning, SOPA, Guantanamo Bay... and (IG/IGF context) sale by US companies of software/hardware that enables repressive regimes to block/track/monitor etc (as discussed at the 1st IGF, when Google and Cisco were criticized.)
> 
> I don't recall support the notion of US Exceptionalism from anyone on this list.  


The first sentence you quote from the Wikipedia article is a reductionist misrepresentation of not only the actual history of the concept but the rest of the article itself.   The piece moves back and forth between distinctly different uses of the term without comment---it could use more editing and integration—and that sentence picks up on just one of them.  For social theorists from de Tocqueville and Tom Paine to Louis Hartz and Seymour Martin Lipset, the concern was to understand why the US appeared not to follow some high-level generalizable patterns of social organization and development found particularly in Europe, e.g. with respect to property rights, money making, the balance between groups and individuals, state/society relations, soccer and socialism, etc.  As the article notes, factors like the lack of a transition from feudalism to capitalism, republicanism and the revolutionary rejection of the British model (sorry), puritanism and the frontier (real and imagined) have been among the proposed causal variables, depending on the analysis, but the core concept is an attempt to explain an 'exception from a pattern'.  

Then you have all the agenda-based misappropriations by various analysts and political actors that take you further and further from the original concern.  One step taken by some was to add on the normative judgement of not only different, but 'better'.  Another was to draw the programmatic implication that exceptionalism had to be protected from the meddling 'old world' and its wars and social upheavals via an isolationist foreign policy.  Yet another was to draw the opposite programmatic implication that exceptionalism provided a mandate and even a moral responsibility to promote US values and visions of social order around the world through an expansionist foreign policy.  There have been liberal (in the US sense of the word—another instance an exception from the pattern) and conservative versions of this notion, as well as multilateralist and unilateralist versions, etc.   In the past decade or so, the neocon foreign policy establishment took another step farther out with this totalizing construct where expansionism is wedded to gun toting preemptive warring world changing hubris. So that's one agenda-driven misappropriation. The jaw dropping assertion that everyone around the world who supports multistakeholderism a la ICANN or is skeptical that UN-based alternatives would be better is a proponent of US exceptionalism (whatever that means) is just another, and one you can only get here, so enjoy.  It's a fair bet though that de Tocqueville might be a little confused…

Bill


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