There are pros and cons about being mates with the biggest kid on the block. We who live under Pax Americana are no different from the Brits, Gauls, Greeks and of course Romans who saw the pros and cons of Pax Romana.
It is unsurprising that the thesis of US exceptionalism is the thesis of Virgil’s Aenied, a foundation myth penned for an emperor: Virtue + Mission = Destiny. An early example was the sermon by John Winthrop in 1630:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
The expression American exceptionalism is de Tocqueville’s. Writing in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, he observed:
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.
At the same time, journalist John L O’Sullivan was using a variant. On 27 December 1845, he famously wrote in his New York Morning News:
And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
Over the next week, the use was pooh-poohed by the Whigs in the House of Representatives. Representative Robert C Winthrop said:
The right of our manifest destiny! There is a right for a new chapter in the law of nations; or rather, in the special law of our own country; for I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation!
So, one Winthrop is a father of exceptionalism and six generations on, another questions it.
In more recent times, one politician has lamented:
Before Donald Trump, we used to talk about American exceptionalism. The only thing exceptional about the incoherent Trump foreign policy is that it has made our nation more isolated than ever before. Joe Biden knows we aren’t exceptional because we bluster that we are; we are exceptional because we do exceptional things.
The commentator was well placed to use the language. He had lost in his bid for the presidency to President George W Bush, a firm exceptionalist in a post-2001 world and he later had his own opportunities for exceptionalism as secretary of state under President Obama.
For current purposes, John Kerry through his mother was a 10th generation Winthrop, straight from John and directly through Robert.
