Exceptionalism and Revolution

After reading about revolution and revolt, I think I’ve decided that US citizens have a relatively weak set of rhetorical resources to draw on in constructing arguments for revolution. The primary obstacle is the narrow sense of what freedom or liberation really means for most people living in the US: opportunity (whatever that means). The Revolutionary War was a bourgeois affair, at least in its goals if not primary constituency. The creation of economic opportunity and nominal, narrow equality for all founded the American dream. We even lack an effective term to refer to people who live in the US, owing to the presumption of equality: ‘US citizens’ implies a sense of opportunity and security in rights of its own, and the term ‘American’ smacks of nativism (not everyone who lives here was born here, notably) but also could be used for people of other nations. The term US citizen does imply particular inalienable rights which may be put to use as motivation, but that use remains constrained by the particular formulation of those rights, primarily an individualistic bent, concerned with individualistic opportunity (ex: the use of the term in anti-affirmative action battles, equating equality with a particular type of blindness to identity). In many ways, no great American promise has gone unfulfilled because of the type of promise made with the Declaration of Independence: a claim to government non-intervention in a variety of affairs, rather than the (explicit) promotion of any social system or equality.

Another constraint comes from a marred history of rebellions. The Civil War reflects very poorly on US revolutionaries. Drawing on the uniquely US American heritage of revolution pins social movements with right wing anti-government groups (McVeigh), or a bizarre agglomeration of Alex Jones-ish libertarians (From Freedom to Fascism), or just gun-nuts. Liberation is justifiable on such narrow and vague grounds in the declaration, positioning radical social groups in a poor position to leverage it in social movements.

Peter already said good things about how drawing on other country’s models for rebellion tempts posturing and pandering.

I think that the idea of US exceptionism plays a role in the pigeonholing of revolutionary or radical groups. The American democratic promise is a peculiar one: the constitution is a short one (relatively speaking), and the Declaration of Independence is vague. Ultimately, the terms freedom, representation, liberty, rights remain open to reclamation by a variety of social groups, for good or ill (ex: Senaca Falls Declaration, MLK ‘I Have a Dream, but again, the Confederacy). I think America remains relatively conservative in its revolutionary fervor because of the sense of exceptionality. The democratic promise, because of its vagueness, gets judged in terms of the relationship between the US and other countries in general- a relationship that favors the US strongly for its history as the democratic ‘savior’ versus fascists, communists and terrorists alike.

Duncan