“The actual state of the country has never been measured or determined by the wealthiest and most powerful—even in those few instances when those people are Black or Brown. A more accurate view of the United States comes from the ground, not the perch of the White House. When we judge this country by the life of Charleena Lyles, a thirty-year-old, single Black mother, who was shot seven times and killed by Seattle police officers in June 2017, the picture comes into sharper focus.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor1
“We tend to continuously allow negotiations in our feminism or support of women: we forgive multi-billion dollar exploitative corporations as fast as they can put a headscarf on a model or imperialism as fast as it can put on a pink pantsuit.”
—Hoda Katebi2
“If feminism only concerns itself with the women at the very top of our society, it’s not feminism at all. It’s just elitism.”
—Liza Featherstone3
The United States’ obsession with Russia may signal the beginning of the end for American exceptionalism. That the U.S. and the corporate media have relied so heavily on fears of Russian subversion says very little about the so-called strength of American “democracy” in the current period. Not only does Russia have an economy and military a fraction the size of America’s, but everything that Russia has been accused of doing are proven staples of American imperial policy. U.S. imperialism overthrows democracies abroad, possesses the most advanced surveillance and police-state ever developed, and is ruled by corporate oligarchs that have used their money and influence to control all three branches of Washington. Hysteria over Russia covers up the fact that American imperial dominance has become a drag on the political, economic, and cultural advancement of humanity. The 2016 elections and the Russia hysteria that developed from them were a sign that times have changed. Millions of Americans are fed up with the dramatic difference between how the American nation-state presents itself to the world and the misery that it has imposed on many people both within and beyond its borders.
To imagine and then develop a new society and a new world, it is important to understand why American exceptionalism appears worn out from overuse. This is not an easy question to answer. Most would retort that American exceptionalism is not worn out at all, and that it remains in daily operation in all spheres of American society. Such an assertion is correct, but not entirely. It is possible for two opposing trends to exist at the same time. American exceptionalism and its partner American innocence are durable ideologies, but U.S. imperialism is in crisis. The system these narratives rely on is struggling to maintain legitimacy on a global scale. As the system of U.S. imperialism has decayed, the system’s ideological influence has decayed as well.
The decaying influence of American exceptionalism and American innocence was at a low point in 2007. President George W. Bush had led disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq based on lies. The indefinite detention of hundreds of people—many charged with nothing other than suspicions of terrorist links—at Guantanamo Bay quickly became a national embarrassment. Legislation such as the Patriot Act represented a vast extension of the U.S.’s ability to conduct surveillance on anyone it pleased. To make matters worse, the American capitalist economy crashed just prior to the 2008 presidential elections. At this juncture, America looked neither exceptional nor innocent. Something had to be done to take American exceptionalism off life support, lest anger over war, surveillance, immigration, and the financial crash boil over into an open rebellion.
It is precisely at this point where the Democratic Party became the political engine of American exceptionalism. For decades, the Democratic Party had played the role of “lesser evil” to the increasingly conservative and Reagan-leaning Republicans. It was the party most credited as the champion for civil rights, women’s rights, and labor unions in Washington. This took a marked policy shift during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton used his corporate backing to deregulate the banks, destroy welfare, sign the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and wage international wars of “humanitarian intervention,” all of which decimated living conditions for workers and the poor wherever they resided. Clinton also passed legislation that led to a dramatic increase in the number of Black Americans put behind prison walls and undocumented migrants detained and deported. His Administration represented the first Presidency of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a prominent nonprofit made up of Democratic leaders often credited with shifting the party’s politics rightward to appeal to a more conservative and wealthy base. The Democratic Party engine of American exceptionalism, then, was constructed to forward the agenda of the ruling class.
A total assault on working people and poor people occurred as a result, with Republican Party politicians openly espousing policies that their Democratic Party counterparts carried forward more effectively. The Democratic Party’s political shift to the right was not without complexity. As the engine of American exceptionalism, it maintained its political appeal to women, Black, LGBTQ, and union voters while globbling up funds from wealthy donors on Wall Street and inside of the military industrial complex. Republicans shared in the spoils of these funds but appealed instead to white, conservative voters. These voters defined American exceptionalism in terms of white male advancement in stark contrast to the more “inclusive” image promoted by Democrats.
The politics of inclusivity reached their high point of success with the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. The politics of inclusivity emerged from the ashes of the Black freedom, feminist, and working class LGBTQ struggles of the 20th century. Obama came at a most convenient period for the American imperial system. With the system in economic crisis and political turmoil, the first Obama campaign raised a record-setting $750 million from the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase to save American exceptionalism. His popularity with the American ruling class grew as it became clear that his candidacy personified the politics of inclusivity. The Obama campaign masterfully used its support from the U.S. ruling class to appeal to millions of people sick and tired of “business as usual” politics in Washington.
Indeed, as the first identifiably “Black president,” Obama branded himself as the quintessential “hope” and “change” that people could believe in. His personal story held the promise of a mythical restoration of American exceptionalism through the possibility of entrance into the channels of American power. The Obama campaign was advertised as a “movement” to develop a more inclusive imperial system, one that allowed more Black, Latino, and other oppressed people to co-manage the American imperialist project alongside the largely white ruling class. This “movement,” Donald Pease explains, exploited the “pervasive fantasy of dispossession—of citizens stripped of their constitutional rights by the Patriot Act, of parents separated from their children by war, of families forced from their homes by the subprime mortgage crisis—that was already inscribed and awaiting enactment in the script responsible for the production of the Bush Homeland Security State.”4 In other words, Obama inspired a form of hope, a hope rooted in the restoration of “citizenship” and American exceptionalism, that allowed the campaign to promise sweeping changes while failing to address the structural causes of targeted problems.
Obama was thus the “trojan horse” of the American imperial system. Armed with the politics of inclusion, Obama’s charming personality and crafty campaign rhetoric to “change” all that had gone awry with the U.S. invaded the hearts and minds of progressive Americans. Indeed, as Pease remarks, Obama used his life story to curry favor with a large number of Americans yearning for solutions to the crumbling conditions of the American imperial system:
Obama represented his life as itself the outcome of the confluence of three heterogeneous American lineages—the immigrant’s dream of escape from economic poverty and political persecution, the minoritized American’s endlessly deferred dream of “one day” being included within the American dream, and the white middle-class Americans’ dream of future prosperity—and he promised to open up a future for all three of them.5
In other words, Obama’s very presence in the White House held promise for the revival of American exceptionalism. This version of American exceptionalism vowed to “include” the most oppressed communities in the spoils of prosperity, superiority, and democracy. But Obama’s promises were merely an exercise in public relations. His fame and celebrity were made possible not only because he represented the realization of the “deferred dream” of inclusion into the American project, but also because there was no question about his loyalty to U.S. imperialism. Once in office, Obama led a full assault on the progressive and radical principles that elected him in the first place.
His administration carried out this assault under very favorable conditions. The politics of inclusion ensured that criticisms of Obama’s policies were neatly associated with the racist attacks hurled at him by his Republican Party opponents. His mere presence in office sent the thousands of American liberals who took to the streets against Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq back quietly into the comfort of their homes. Obama also silenced the American corporate media’s criticisms of his predecessor’s efforts to privatize public education, bail out bankers responsible for the economic crash, and develop a draconian police-state under the guise of the War on Terror. However, Obama didn’t silence opposition to Bush policies because the Obama Administration had any plans to reverse them. Rather, silence came amid the Obama Administration’s escalation of the very policies he promised to “change” during his campaign.
Obama’s two terms in office did indeed bring “change,” but it was the type that benefitted U.S. imperialism at the expense of oppressed and exploited people. Obama chanted “Si, Se Puede” (yes, we can) during his campaign, then deported 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, many of them at the heavily militarized border shared with Mexico. His solution to the 2007–2008 economic crisis was not to punish the finance capitalists responsible (as promised), but to feed them trillions of dollars worth of public “bailout” money that only enhanced wealth and income inequality. Under his administration, Obama would massively expand the War on Terror surveillance apparatus to the extent that the National Security Agency possessed the phone, email, and online communications of every American citizen. He also prosecuted a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917. By 2014, the Obama Administration had transferred three quarters of a billion dollars worth of military weaponry to police departments. This twenty-four fold increase from the Bush Administration was heavily criticized after it was revealed that Black Americans were being murdered by police at a near daily rate.
Obama’s foreign policy was equally destructive. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 only to tell his aids in 2012 that he was “good at killing people.” He wasn’t lying. In contrast to just 52 drone strikes under George W. Bush, the Obama Administration conducted several hundred drone strikes and murdered over 4,000 people, including several American citizens, in countries such as Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Obama’s method of “signature strikes” chose targets based upon “suspicious behavior,” which to the administration was defined as all military aged men in the aforementioned countries. Covert warfare, such as Special Operations forces trained in strike-and-kill missions, expanded greatly under Obama to the point where they were deployed in over 70 percent of the world’s countries. American Special Operations Forces carried out 674 operations in African in 2014 alone.
The Obama Administration was also no stranger to the expansion of overt war operations. Obama’s expanded the theater of American war into Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and across Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. occupation in Afghanistan “surged” forward in 2009 and continued indefinitely, while the Iraq war was formally “ended” in 2011 despite the continued presence of American military forces. While the Obama Administration planned a “Grand Bargain” to cut Social Security and Medicare, it was arming the terrorists that successfully overthrew the Libyan government in 2011. That same year, it started a similar, protracted proxy war in Syria. Both wars have led to the displacement and death of millions. This is not to mention the devastation wrought by Obama’s coup in Honduras in 2009, which handed power to oligarchs and paramilitary groups responsible for the murders of Berta Caceres and thousands of other Indigenous and environmental activists.
The Obama Administration’s commitment to U.S. imperialism brought about an unprecedented expansion of Wall Street and the Pentagon’s hegemony over American political life. In doing so, Obama succeeded in convincing some of the most radical and politically militant sections of the population to buy into the myth of American exceptionalism. According to Pierre Orelus,
Obama led the American people—a good number of them—and the world to believe that, with him as president, the United States would be a force of good, not a warmonger, not a human-rights violator, not a destroyer of the environment, not a racist society, not a society based on injustice and hatred but one that was naturally superior, one that embraced the almost incomprehensible notion of “American exceptionalism.6
This is why so few Americans protested the subsequent decline in living standards that accompanied the Obama era. Or why no massive worker uprisings occurred during his presidency despite the fact that over 95 percent of the jobs created on Obama’s watch were part-time or low wage. Despite the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike in 2013, the privatization of education led by Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative closed hundreds of public schools around the country and fired thousands of mostly Black teachers without significant opposition. Black Americans lost significant economic ground and remained the most incarcerated segment of the American population under Obama, yet studies have shown that the same demographic was the most optimistic about its economic prospects.
The Obama Administration was particularly devastating to the left-leaning politics of Black America. As Aziz Rana explains, the vote of Black Americans and other so-called “minority” groups became increasingly important on the eve of the 2012 elections:
When Reagan’s victory over Carter put the final nail in the coffin of the left dream of a class-rooted progressive political base, 65 percent of the voting public were whites without a college degree. In 2012 exit polls, that percentage was cut nearly in half, to 36 percent. As long as Obama’s repackaged liberalism could hold minority voters, it seemed, a new Democratic majority would not need a majority or near majority of working-class whites at election time. And with the rise of white nationalism and ethnic xenophobia on the right, it was inconceivable that minorities would go anywhere else.
The importance of Black and “minority” groups to Obama’s electoral success cannot be understated since their near unanimous 100 percent support for him proved decisive in both general elections. Obama was advertised as the first “Black president” but not the president of Black America, a reality that Obama would often repeat during his tenure. This contradiction was often confused in a period where Black politicians, Congressmen, and other political elites became more prominent in all spheres of U.S. imperialism. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains in her article, “Black Faces in High Places,” the increase in Black politicians has not changed the fact that “Black elected officials have largely governed in the same way as their white counterparts, reflecting all of the racism, corruption, and policies favoring the wealthy seen throughout mainstream politics.”7 Baltimore’s Black mayor from 2010–2016, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, for example, did nothing to hold the Baltimore police accountable for its brutal murder of Freddie Gray in 2015. In fact, Mayor Rawlings had taken a page out of the Obama playbook in calling Black Americans “thugs” while forwarding the agenda of the ruling class. What passes for Black leadership in the era of Obama effectively neutralized the Black radical tradition and its long history of anti-war, pro-peace politics. In fact, a 2013 poll revealed that Black Americans supported the proposed bombing of Syria that summer more than white Americans or Latinos. Another poll showed that Black Americans favored NSA-spying more than any other racial group.
Obama’s two-term Presidency was a devastatingly successful project in counterinsurgency warfare. The politics of inclusion was the weapon the U.S. ruling class used to repair the damage done to American exceptionalism and American innocence in years prior. Obama’s significance was likened in the media to Martin Luther King Jr. and even Malcolm X. His presence created a virtual industry dedicated to managing the discontent of the masses with the proliferation of a more “diverse” empire. Obama confirmed to many, especially in Black America, that the achievement of the “American Dream” was indeed possible. He gave legitimacy to a formidable class of collaborators with imperialism, with figures such as Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton benefiting mightily from their defense of Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus’s imperial policies. That this class was fully indebted to Wall Street and the U.S. war machine mattered less than the careers it occupied. Careerism and opportunism replaced principles, leading many to vigorously defend Obama from any criticism of his policies. Criticism of Obama often provoked allegations of racism, an accusation that rendered Obama’s most heinous crimes invisible or exonerated Obama altogether.
The Obama Administration’s expansion of war, privatization, and state repression was fully protected by American exceptionalism and innocence personified by Obama himself. While the right-wing contemplated racist questions of his immigration status or whether he was a Marxist, his administration could do no wrong in the eyes of most liberals and even many progressives and radicals in the Black community. It was assumed that the stability Obama brought to the American imperial project would continue under Hillary Clinton. After all, Clinton was the favorite to succeed Barack Obama as the first woman president of the U.S. Her pockets were full of Wall Street donations and her career in politics was well established. The inauguration of a woman to the Oval office was a logical extension of the politics of inclusion that proved so effective in misleading its class enemies below to ignore or support the most egregious yet profitable ventures of U.S. imperialism.
Like Obama, Clinton was a war hawk and a champion of neoliberal capitalism. She was the presumed face of a neoliberal version of women’s empowerment in the U.S., similar to how Obama was the face of Black empowerment. And like Obama in 2012, she had the backing of over one billion dollars’ worth in campaign donations, by far and away more than any Republican could raise in the 2016 race. What Clinton lacked was the shrewd and stealth charisma Obama possessed. Unlike Obama, Clinton had decades of experience at the highest level of American politics. While Obama also possessed years of experience in ruling class legal and economic institutions such as the International Business Corporation, Clinton’s record in service of U.S. imperialism as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State under Obama could not be as easily hidden from the public eye.
In many ways Hillary Clinton’s inability to win the 2016 election falls on the growing popular disillusionment with the politics of inclusion. For eight years, millions of people, many of them workers, Black Americans, and poor people, hoped that the presence of a Black president would resolve the misery caused by U.S. imperialism. What they received instead was an even more miserable condition than the one inherited under Bush. Yet Clinton promised to repeat what she assumed Obama already delivered; that is, an exceptional America defined by the uplift of a few at the expense of the many. Her candidacy forcefully opposed both Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right for their audacity to question American exceptionalism. For Clinton, the American nation-state was already exceptional, and her candidacy as a woman proved it most of all.
Hillary Clinton’s second run for president was an exemplary case of the relationship between the politics of inclusion and American exceptionalism. Clinton was not hesitant to stake her rightful place as president with the claim that it was “her turn.” Her defense of the claim was based on her identity as a woman with years of political experience. However, as Liza Featherstone explains, Clinton and her supporters were forced to rely on the politics of inclusion in the form of “faux feminism” because her candidacy offered little of benefit to struggling Americans. “It’s understandable that Clinton supporters are only happy when they find sexists to attack,” Liza Featherstone writes. “What else could give this campaign a righteous fervor. After all, her record shows that in her many decades in public life, Hillary Clinton has done an excellent job of advancing the Clintons, and an abysmal job of fighting for women less powerful than herself.”8
There is no shortage of examples pointing to Clinton’s abysmal record fighting for women—or anyone not in the ruling class for that matter. Clinton’s foreign policy has been a disaster for women all over the world. As Secretary of State, Clinton helped engineer the coup in Honduras, the overthrow in Libya, and the ongoing war in Syria. When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was illegally murdered by American-backed terrorists, Clinton cackled to the media “we came, we saw, he died.” As Senator, Clinton supported the Iraq war that killed over a million Iraqis. Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy translated directly to her 2016 campaign. Her repeated calls to “stand up to Putin” and institute a no-fly zone over Syria a la Libya made it clear that a Clinton Presidency was committed to expanding the murderous theater of American warfare abroad.
Hillary Clinton’s record as First Lady most starkly highlighted her unpopular domestic policies in all spheres of imperial governance. Her fervent support of Bill Clinton’s elimination of welfare led to the further impoverishment of the most vulnerable women in America, especially Black women. Clinton also championed the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which lowered barriers for corporations to invest in Mexico and Canada at the expense of millions of industrial jobs. This increased unemployment, pushed workers into low-wage service sector employment, and placed downward pressure on wages, especially for women. And when Hillary Clinton called Black youth “super predators” who needed to be “brought to heel,” she backed up her remarks with support for her husband’s 1994 and 1996 crime bills that dramatically increased the Black prison population. Black women are currently the fastest growing prison population due to criminal justice policies that disproportionately criminalize Black Americans as a whole.9
Clinton’s record certainly should not undermine the importance of sexism. U.S. imperialism and male domination are intimately connected and have been for centuries. However, this is a new period, one where the politics of inclusion have effectively shrouded the structural character of the U.S. imperial system. Women such as Hillary Clinton personify the ways in which the politics of inclusion have led to the uplift of a select few women at the expense of the rest. Her illustrious career is filled with deep connections to the ruling class, all of which have made her a willful champion of the worst machinations of the system. And it was her attempt to avoid her political record by latching onto the ideology of American exceptionalism that ultimately gave the fractured Republican Party under Trump the electoral edge.
Clinton evoked American exceptionalism during the campaign whenever she could. The hope was that American exceptionalism would protect her from criticisms coming from the Sanders faction of the Democratic Party as well as Trump. American exceptionalism had never failed Hillary Clinton at any other point in her life. Her career defending American exceptionalism from naysayers helped her move up the class ladder first as a lawyer, second as a board member of Walmart, and third as a politician who defended the interests of the likes of Walmart. This is why, as Diana Johnstone explains, “Hillary Clinton personifies the hubris of American exceptionalism. She seems incapable of doubting that America is ‘the last hope of mankind.’ Above all, she certainly believes that the American people believe in American exceptionalism and want to hear it confirmed and celebrated.”10 It was Clinton’s strong belief in American exceptionalism which led her to believe that the U.S. was ready for a woman president, regardless of the cost.
Clinton’s adherence to American exceptionalism was demonstrated throughout her 2016 campaign, especially in opposition to Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again.” Clinton’s response to Trump was that America was already great. In a speech to the American Legion in August of 2016, she outlined her case against Trump as follows:
If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United States is an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth. We’re still Reagan’s shining city on a hill. We’re still Robert Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country. And it’s not just that we have the greatest military or that our economy is larger than any on Earth. It’s also the strength of our values, the strength of the American people. Everyone who works harder, dreams bigger and never, ever stops trying to make our country and the world a better place. And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation.11
Yet what Clinton saw as indispensable many others saw as reprehensible. As Clinton spoke of an infallible America, she went on to criminalize whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for supposedly leaking secrets that endangered “national security.” When WikiLeaks revealed a treasure trove of Clinton’s secrets such as her use of the Clinton Foundation as a slush fund for political favors from the likes of Saudi Arabia, she criminalized the source of the information as mere dupes of Russia. Her campaign refused to endorse single payer health care, a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage, or any other progressive recommendation that came from her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, even after it was found that her influence over the Democratic Party had played a decisive role in his loss. To make matters worse, Clinton spent much of her campaign courting traditionally Republican ruling class interests while insulting Republican voters as a “basket of deplorables.” Under Clinton’s “Big Tent” of billionaires and national security mercenaries sat over fifty GOP officials, national security hawks such as the CIA’s Michael Morell, and a host of billionaires such as Mark Cuban, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg. With friends like these, Clinton thought, who needs voters?
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign highlighted the arrogance of American exceptionalism. It also laid bare the stark reality that the American nation-state was exceptional for increasing the profits of the billionaires supporting her campaign but little else. After eight years under the Obama Administration, the politics of inclusion had proven to be an extremely effective but violent weapon in the hands of the ruling class. American wars continued to devastate the planet and finance capital continued to plunder it. Workers and poor people all over the world, especially Black workers, saw their income and wealth plummet as a result. Politicians in Washington, especially Obama and Clinton, showed little concern.
Yet these were the politicians that were supposed to represent the most oppressed segments of American society. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama certainly diversified the rule of U.S. imperialism. However, their reign both stoked right-wing white supremacy and curtailed the independent strength of the American left. The right-wing hated Obama for soiling the white nation under Black rule, while the ruling class loved Obama for his service to their profit and hegemony. All that was left was resentment on both sides of the political aisle when Clinton declared that it was “her turn.”
The American ruling class refuses to look at the growing resentment of large sections of the U.S. population because that would mean placing a mirror in front of the ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence. This is something the ruling class cannot do publicly. Such an admission would strip the oppressive and exploitative relations of the system down to their most naked form. The politics of inclusion was a saving grace for U.S. imperialism in the era of Obama, but not in the period that has followed. And it is not as if many Black Americans or women remember how Obama used racist language to describe Black American men or how Hillary Clinton shamed women who didn’t vote for her as being controlled by their male counterparts. However, the contradiction between the false hope that inclusion politics brought to Americans and the actual policies implemented by the representatives of inclusion ultimately led many to equate “diversity” with violence.
What resulted was one of the most surprising electoral defeats in U.S. history. A mounting campaign to “blame Russia” for Trump’s win has dominated mainstream explanations for Clinton’s loss. Trump has become the scapegoat for, well, Trump himself. The militarists, financiers, corporate media analysts, and political officials refuse to acknowledge the political reality behind Trump. Many of them call him “unfit” for president, “mentally ill,” “stupid,” or Putin’s ace in the hole. Others, like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, explain what readers can learn from the book How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Kristof warns us that under the authors’ definition, Trump is a “dangerous authoritarian” leader. The criteria includes:
1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media [. . .] “With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” [the authors] say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”12
Such an analysis unveils a fundamental flaw with American exceptionalism and American innocence in relation to Trump. It ignores the fact that every former president easily meets all four of the above criteria. After all, do people really believe that Trump is the first U.S. president to “tolerate violence”? Bush seemed to have “tolerated” (i.e., unleashed) quite a bit of violence in Iraq. As did Obama with his militarized police forces and drone wars. In fact, one wonders what kind of state propaganda is necessary to brainwash so many people to think that any U.S. president has ever demonstrated a strong “commitment to democratic rules.” If history is any indication—and if we place U.S. state violence at the center of our analysis—then it’s quite a tough pill to swallow: We do not live in a democracy. And we never have.13
There are indeed many reasons to criticize or oppose the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the party of the rich, like the Democratic Party. And regardless of how far to the right the Democratic Party reaches, the Republican Party reaches further to demonize immigrants, steal votes from Black communities, and propose the elimination of all public subsidies. Yet to make Trump an exceptional blunder in an otherwise exceptional America is to intentionally ignore the crisis set into motion not by Trump, but the entire class that he is a part of. That crisis is defined by the agreement shared by both parties on the fundamental policies that cause misery to so many, an agreement brokered by the ruling class that administers them.
Beneath the political crisis exists the crumbling economic structure of U.S. imperialism. Trump emerged from an economic infrastructure rooted in “pure” capitalism, one that was unbothered by the fetters of feudalism in Europe. The U.S. government was structured in “pure” capitalism’s image. While Europe’s colonial empires had to contend not only with the colonized populations but also the communal property relations left behind by previous epochs, the American ruling class was able to focus full attention on profit accumulation. This only hastened the pace by which capitalism developed in a country already buttressed by the unique American antagonisms of racialized African bondage and Native slaughter. Herein is why the U.S. government is structured to “check and balance” the interests of the ruling class against the interests of the majority, or why the electoral college, and not the popular vote, remains the most vital aspect of American presidential elections. As a recent study by a Princeton and Northwestern University professor found, elections in the U.S. are more indicative of an oligarchy than a democracy.14 In other words, the American nation-state operates as a government for the rich and controlled by the rich.
Talib Kweli describes the American oligarchy succinctly in “Ghetto Afterlife” when he remarks that “the real thugs is the government, doesn’t matter if you independent, Democrat, or Republican.” This lyric describes in simple terms why the politics of inclusion has gradually become an ineffective tool of social and ideological control. The American political system is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy driven by the disillusionment of the voting and nonvoting sectors of America, a clear majority of the total population. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can be trusted to offer anything of benefit to poor people, workers, and oppressed people more generally. Experience has demonstrated that electing a Black American or a woman only provides a cosmetic change to empire while leaving the violent imperial apparatus intact.
Obama and Clinton were supposed to revive American exceptionalism and save U.S. imperialism from its multifaceted crisis. They succeeded for a time. However, their efforts to save the illusion of American superiority in the face of mass misery quickly turned into its opposite. The declining belief in American exceptionalist discourse, above all, is what led to the rise of Donald Trump. A high-tech capitalist empire capable of nothing but austerity and war has attempted to include a select few of its most vulnerable to help run the state machinery. These attempts led to one of the most politically stagnant periods (as far as left politics goes) in U.S. history under Obama, only to become undone when millions of Americans decided they didn’t want to be included in the imperial apparatus but rather run from it.
American exceptionalism and innocence, however, will not vanish from the planet on their own. U.S. imperialism requires that the American nation-state is viewed as the only “indispensable” nation on earth regardless if such a descriptor fails to reflect the reality of millions, if not billions, of people. The truth is that U.S. imperialism can never truly “include” the oppressed into the ranks of the elite because the elite depends on oppression to maintain political power and accumulate profit and wealth. So American exceptionalism continues to be promoted nonstop by each and every American institution. It will be embraced by many in the absence of a viable ideological and political alternative. And Americans will continue to run from American exceptionalism as its arbiters become less trustworthy, making it painstakingly clear that the task from here is to give them something to run to.