[governance] Bloomberg - The Overzealous Prosecution of Aaron Swartz

[Paul Lehto]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 7:44 AM, William Drake <william.drake at uzh.ch> wrote:

> [...] 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, [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'.
>

Without claiming that no other factors would also help to explain why the
US departs from social organization and development in Europe, I would
suggest that the following are quite important in understanding this
departure, as well as a significant part of the force behind US
exceptionalism when understood in the sense of its export (hypocritical or
not) of democracy and empire-tendencies:

1.  The USA was the first and biggest example *of a country founded* NOT on
geography (that keeps changing), or race, or hereditary lineage, etc., but
instead *on the assertion (hypocritical or not) of IDEAS*. * IDEAS are
intrinsically without borders, that is why it would seem so natural and
perhaps even necessary for the USA to export itself in various
ways*because what the USA "is" is inherently intangible and mobile
because it is
a set of ideas and cultural practices.  In some contrast, the "French",
just for one example, are much more of a race/nationality (recent
multiculturalism notwithstanding), with a history in basically one general
geographical place and so it is more readily seen as unseemly for the
French to export their practices or ideas for the English, etc.

In other words, a nation founded upon certain Ideas will tend very much to
be highly "colonial" with respect to those ideals, especially in cases
where those ideals are expressly framed as they are in the Declaration of
Independence as applying to all of "mankind."

2.  Like it or not, legitimate or not, the USA is the world's sole military
superpower and world's largest economy.  Those 'on the top' in ways like
this are extremely unlikely to be humble about using their power from time
to time, and when they are humbled they are soon no longer considered to be
'on top.'

Paul Lehto, J.D.


> 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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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4965 (cell)
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