"Rising" to Empire, Falling from Grace

The following article is adapted from my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays addressing America's descent into imperialism.

“If we have to use force, it is because weare America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see furtherinto the future.”

This panegyric to what is commonly called“American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number ofGOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, ortheir legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcingan embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. 

“We have heard that a half million children have died,”observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that's more children than died inHiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even atremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, butthe price--we think the price is worth it.”

By reconciling Albright’s statements we learn that when “we have to”impose policies that result in the avoidable death, through starvation anddisease, of hundreds of thousands of children, “it is because we areAmerica.... We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

For some reason, the self-styled seers and visionaries whodefended the Iraqi embargo didn’t foresee how that policy, coupled with decadesof U.S. meddling in the Middle East, would cultivate and nurture the seeds thatbore murderous fruit on September 11, 2001. 

To ordinary people not blessed withAlbright’s oracular insight, it seemed obvious that some variety of murderous blowback would be the inevitable product of a foreign policy thatfeatured deliberate mass starvation punctuated with bombing raids. However, the custodians of permissible opinion havedecreed that history began on the morning of 9/11 – that nothing the U.S.government did prior to that date has any organic connection to the motives andactions of those who carried out the attack (at least as that attack isdescribed in the officially sanctioned narrative). To suggest that Washington’spolicies had some relationship to anti-American sentiment in the Middle East isto commit a grave blasphemy against American Exceptionalism – the officialcreed of the ruling Establishment, irrespective of party.

What makes America exceptional, from this perspective, isnot the blessings we have been allotted by Providence, or the individualliberties promised by our country’s founding documents. America is exceptionalbecause of the power of the government that rules us, as manifest in itsability to kill people in distant lands. 

Death-dealing herald of empire: A Global Hawk drone.

That view, once again, is not limited to bellicose left-winginternationalists like Albright. On several occasions, Rush Limbaugh – who,like fellow late-blooming militarist Dick Cheney, had “other priorities” whenhe was of draft age during Vietnam – has related an anecdote about witnessing amilitary fly-over during a Super Bowl in the 1980. Aroused by the spectacle tothe point of rapture, Limbaugh (by his own account) was moved to exclaim, “Howcan you see something like that, andbe a liberal who hates your country?”

Offensive as it would be to both Limbaugh and Albright, acompelling case can be made that their reflexive militarism is a repudiation ofour country’s founding principles. The Framers of the Constitution, painfullyfamiliar with the uses to which large military establishments could be put,never intended for the united States of America (in Congress assembled) to havea standing, centralized army. While they did have the lamentable intention of creating a consolidated central government -- and pretty clear ambitions for territorial expansion to the West -- they did not entertain grandiose ambitions ofpolicing the world. 

The most admirable members of the Founding Generation understood that love of country was not measured by one’senthusiasm for government-inflicted bloodshed. That’s why Washington’s FarewellAddress emphasized both adequate provision for defense and thecompelling necessity to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other countries. 

Imperialism by joystick: A drone operator carries out an attack.

“Whereverthe standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, therewill her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” observed John QuincyAdams in his 1821 Independence Day Address. “But she goes not abroad, in searchof monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independenceof all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She well knows thatby once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the bannersof foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power ofextrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice,envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy wouldinsensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatressof the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” (Emphasisadded.) 

Unlikethe supposedly far-seeing Madeleine Albright – who couldn’t foretell how herarrogant endorsement of genocide in 1995 would help catalyze the enmity thatled to the devastating 9/11 assault six years later – Adams displayed uncannyforesight in describing the degenerate state of American “patriotism” today,190 years after he delivered his warning against interventionism: “Patriots”today celebrate force, not liberty.

Today,what Adams and his generation called “Independence Day” is simply called the Fourthof July. Rather than being a celebration of individual liberty, the “Fourth”has become an annual orgy of militarism, often involving saturation-levelbarrages of propaganda in the form of televised war “movie marathons” andmilitary parades that wouldn’t be out of place in Pyongyang. 

Lestit be forgotten, Independence Day originally commemorated an act ofinsurrection against the “legitimate” government – an incomparably powerfulglobe-spanning empire on which the sun never set. The men who committed thatact of rebellion would probably consider it perverse that they are “honored” bypublic rituals extolling the imperial power of a government that is morecorrupt and oppressive – by several orders of magnitude – than that of GeorgeIII.

Americawas unique because of its origins in principled rebellion against lawless rule,and because of a set of founding political instruments that, while imperfect, did provide individuals some protection against government aggression. Those traits that are typicallycelebrated as tokens of “American Exceptionalism” – an interventionist foreignpolicy; a Chief Executive with unqualified power to kill, imprison, and torturepeople at whim; a badly overgrown military establishment – are, in a specificsense, un-American. 

A commercial republic in which both citizens and theirelected representatives are governed by law, and individual liberty is regarded asthe highest political good, would be truly exceptional. A sprawling empireruled by a corrupt oligarchy that plunders both the national treasury and theresources of distant lands is actually quite commonplace. 

 To catch a glimpse of the America that could have been, it's useful to pay a brief visit to the period between the end of the War for Independence and the mercantilist counter-revolution in Philadelphia that abolished the Articles of Confederation and created a more centralized constitutional Union.

 In 1782, a year after the British surrender at Yorktown andone year before the Treaty of Paris finalized American independence, a formerFrench Lieutenant named J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur composed a series ofessays entitled Letters from an AmericanFarmer. Six decades before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Crevecoeur devotedhis considerable literary gifts to an examination of the question: “What, then,is the American, this new man?” 

Unlike Europe, a continent plagued by entrenched elites,there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, noecclesiastical dominion, no invisiblepower giving to a few a very visibleone” in America, he wrote. The inhabitants of this new-born confederacy ofconstitutional republics were “a people of cultivators, scattered over animmense territory … united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreadingtheir power, because they are equitable.” (Emphasis added.) 

At its best, the "mild" government to which Crevecoeur referred was self-government; it was the spontaneous cooperation of productive people, rather than the imposed order of a parasitical elite. This state of affairs was hardly uniform throughout the confederation, of course, but that it existed at all was something truly inspiring.

On "Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783, British troops ended their occupation of New York. In comments recorded by the New York Packet newspaper, a departing British officer expressed a bemused admiration for the Americans, who distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to be ruled:

“Here,in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet we couldnot keep the peace of it. Scarcely a day or night passed without tumults. Nowwe are [leaving] everything is in quietness and safety. These Americans are acurious, original people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody elsecan govern them.”

The promise of the War for Independence was the establishment of asystem of individual liberty protected by law – and, at least at that early stage, that promise was being kept. Thatgenuinely exceptional America earned the admiration of the world – not becauseits government possessed the power to murder people by remote control, orannihilate entire continents in a nuclear paroxysm, but rather becauseits people were free and independent, and its society -- although displayingall of the imperfections to which fallen man is heir – aspired to be governedby the Golden Rule. 

 

Tragically, "our" government’s rise to global power has meantour country’s fall from grace. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!