Exceptional Victims (Christian Appy, in the Boston Review)
To understand our current political moment, we must understand how political and media forces, especially on the right, responded to this embarrassment and to criticisms such as King’s. Conservatives at the time were determined to rebuild everything they thought the war had destroyed—U.S. power, pride, prestige, and patriotism. Above all, they sought to resuscitate a faith in U.S. exceptionalism. That restoration project was surprisingly successful, but it produced a new, makeshift form of U.S. exceptionalism that is different from its original model. In place of the universalistic, idealistic, intrinsically confident faith in national superiority of the 1950s, the post-Vietnam version of exceptionalism is ever more nationalistic, defensive, bombastic, and xenophobic. Both versions are dangerously imperialistic and aggressive, but our latest model is more explicitly founded on a demonization of foreign—primarily nonwhite—others.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the new U.S. exceptionalism is the belief that the world’s greatest nation is not the envy of the world, not a shining city on a hill, but the victim of outrageous and inexplicable attacks from nonwhite countries and cultures. Whether the attacks are real (such as 9/11) or imagined (such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction), they are almost always attributed to “rogue” nations, terrorist groups, religious extremists, or nonwhite immigrants whose actions are represented as barbaric hate crimes with no plausible historical motive or U.S. provocation.
The new U.S. exceptionalism has many sources but two important ones were born from the bitter memory of failure and defeat in Vietnam: the effective campaigns to vilify the antiwar movement and to instill deference to the military by constructing an image of U.S. troops and veterans as icons of heroic victimhood.
