American Exceptionalism
I know this horse long ago left the barn, but Andrew Sullivan's slapping around of Dinesh D'Souza for abusively misquoting Tocqueville reminded me of a long-standing pedantic peeve of my own.
How is it that nobody remembers what the phrase American exceptionalism was intended to mean?
The phrase is traceable to the work of a German economist, Werner Sombart. In the early years of the 20th century, Sombart wondered: Why is there no socialism in the United States? At the time, every other advanced industrial economy had some kind of mass labor party that seemed to have a serious shot at gaining power in a democratic election. Yet the United States, the most advanced of them all, had no socialist party. Why not?
Over the next half century, many different historians, economists, sociologists and non-specialized intellectuals would offer answers to this question, many of them very brilliant. But as the debate proceeded, something curious happened: socialism died, at least "socialism" in any form that Sombart would have recognized.
Increasingly the answer to the question: "Why does the United States not have a mass-based political party advocating state ownership of basic industries, the elimination of large fortunes, and more or less equal incomes for everybody?"
is:
"Because no other advanced democracy has any such party either."
It's true that Europe retains socialistic practices and institutions despite the discrediting of the socialistic idea. European economies are generally more regulated than the United States, taxes are somewhat higher, the poor are less poor, the rich are less rich.
But in this regard, the United States is less an "exception" than simply one edge of a bell curve.