Does Mark Levin Know?

Frequent FF contributor Jamie Kirchick has an important oped in today's Los Angeles Times about President Obama's global apology tour.

Obama apologized some more in Turkey. "I know that the trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. Let me say this as clearly as I can: The United States is not at war with Islam."

Here, Obama seamlessly joined the Bush administration's irritation at Ankara's refusal to allow American troops' passage to Iraq with the bogus claim that the United States has, until Obama's presence in the White House, been "at war with Islam," an assertion that essentially (and falsely) blames Bush for declaring such a war.

When not establishing false premises about the previous administration (the easier to glorify his own) or apologizing for his country, Obama has shown unusual deference to autocrats. At the Summit of the Americas, he calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez. There's nothing wrong with the president participating in a multilateral summit where criticism, even egregiously unfair criticism, of the U.S. is expressed. But if he can sit and take verbal abuse from Latin American demagogues, then surely speaking a little truth in response to their lies is appropriate.

One possibly amusing footnote. Jamie opens his piece with this arresting anecdote:

At a stop on his grand global apology tour this spring, President Obama was asked by a reporter in France if he believed in "American exceptionalism." This is the notion that our history as the world's oldest democracy, our immigrant founding and our devotion to liberty endow the United States with a unique, providential role in world affairs.

Rather than endorse the proposition -- as every president in recent memory has done one way or another -- Obama offered a strange response: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

President Obama's intent here seems clear: He resists and rejects any attempt to claim credit for the United States, revealing his longstanding ambivalence about the country's history and purposes. Indeed, President Obama has spoken clearly and frankly about this ambivalence, as I discuss here in an blogpost about liberal patriotism. Obama's speeches have sought to

distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy.

Yet there is also a footnote to this story that may carry even more alarming meaning. The term "American exceptionalism" originated not as a compliment to the United States, but as a criticism! In the early 20th century, social scientists were much vexed by the question: Why was there no mass socialist party in the United States, as had appeared in every other advanced industrial society? The short answer was "American exceptionalism" - a unique series of historical factors that had somehow thwarted the supposedly natural development of socialism.

Could the well-read President Obama have failed to know this history? When he evaded that reporter's question in France, was he sending an implicit message that the United States was not exceptional any more? Was he signaling to those familiar with Marxist code that the long postponed hour of socialism had at last arrived? Most important: Does Mark Levin know? This has to be worth at least a mention in his nightly tirade against the man he regards as America's first Marxist president.

Update: Here is a link to a short restatement of this history by the late great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in his eponymous book, American Exceptionalism. The classic presentation of the case was published in 1906 by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in his "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" The essay should be in the public domain by now, but unfortunately I could find no text online.

Double Update: I should add as a precaution that the last paragraph of the main post above was meant as a joke ...