Will advocates of American exceptionalism damage the United States image or advance it?
Tuesday, December 7th 2010
If the notion of American exceptionalism was ever valid, no real reason to believe in it has existed for some time. Incredibly, some still take the concept seriously. Our decline in strength and purpose began years ago, largely ignored by most of us. So did any basis for feeling unique among nations. Crises like the current one only make this agonizingly apparent.
But our present condition was probably always in the cards, even if we hadn’t spent decades exhausting our wealth, undereducating generations of our children, mismanaging our hard-won place in the world, and refusing to continue building a mature society anchored in justice and morality. Throughout history, after all, other nations have had the strength and talent to rise to greatness and, for all sorts of reasons, declined from it.
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John H. Trattner
Board Member
A former career Foreign Service officer and press spokesman of the Department of State, Trattner was also a newspaper, newsmagazine, and network radio journalist in the United States and Europe, press secretary to former Senator George Mitchell, vice president of a nonprofit focused on federal government management, head writer for a public affairs firm, and graduate-level teacher at American University. The author of eight books about the jobs and challenges of federal presidential appointees, he currently writes free-lance and composes choral music.
Author: John Trattner
