The ideology of American exceptionalism: American nationalism’s nom de plume

Abstract

For most American politicians and officials, American exceptionalism is the conviction that the United States is both different from and superior to other nations. There are distinctive strands within this overarching, exceptionalist discourse–conservative, neoconservative and liberal, for example–but what they all share is the unshakeable conviction that America is qualitatively different from all other nation-states, and that this difference has a providential quality. This understanding of American exceptionalism is an excellent example of the ‘positive valorization’ of ‘one’s own nation’ which Michael Freeden describes as one of the core tendencies of nationalism. Because of how American exceptionalism is employed in public discourse in the U.S. we will argue here it is most usefully understood as an ideology. We argue that American exceptionalism is, in essence, a strand of American nationalism that only emerged in its distinctive modern form during the Cold War.