This is the first in a short series of diaries in which I will be singling out certain concepts, attitudes, arguments, and philosophies as Boring and/or Stupid and/or Wrong; most often, my targets will be all three.
Notwithstanding the apparent subject of this first installment, my target is not the great, beached, helpless hulk of the witless Right Wing Leviathan.
Regrettably, my purpose is an epistemological critique of American liberalism, neoliberalism, leftism, and progressivism, from my idiosyncratic perspective as a self-perceived radical humanist, radical leftist, and radical rationalist.
Most of y'all are not going to like much of what is coming. Not one bit.
And so: Once more over the orange vulva, gentle readers, and otherwise.
It should be recognized as embarrassing and tragic that there even exists a critique to be leveled at American liberals with respect to American Exceptionalism.
To briefly review: "American Exceptionalism" is a concept first popularized by Josef Stalin. Generally speaking, Stalin deservedly does not enjoy a high reputation for his quality as a philosopher, but in his dismissive contempt for AE, he got it pretty much right. Depending on the context, AE may be either an explicit philosophy, or an unconscious attitude or something in between. Its dogma is that there is something fundamentally special about American people, or American politics, or American culture. The implications of that specialness depend on the flavor, on the observer, and on the objective.
In particular, an American Exceptionalist might take the view that AE confers moral virtue upon any pursuit of American interests; or alternatively one might take the view that AE confers only a values-free inevitability upon that same pursuit. Either way, the primary implication of AE is that America Can't Lose, because we are just plain better than everybody else.
This implication is, of course, Boring, Stupid and Wrong. There is nothing about "us" that is both fundamentally better than everyone else, and fundamentally unattainable by everyone else.
Sadly, there are lots of not-wingnut, not-Republican, not-even-DLC folks out there who buy into that implication, one way or another, including a very large fraction of dKos contributors. These are the sorts of folks who believe that if we can just even the playing field, American workers and businesses and scientists and engineers and artists and whatevers can out-compete, indefinitely, a global population that outnumbers us 20 to 1.
We can't.
Get this through your thick fucking skulls: We aren't smarter than 2 billion citizens of China and India. We don't work harder than they do. Our intellectual institutions are not generally superior to theirs, and whatever superiorities might exist are infinitely imitable.
Assuming that civilization doesn't collapse first, there is only one foreseeable outcome to continuing "business as usual", by which I mean the fascist structures of free trade, corporate citizenhood, and economic financialism. These are the three wicked snapping tails of the lash of competition, with which our masters drive us forward; and so we scramble and crawl and claw forward, in desperation and fear and hatred, to keep ourselves above and ahead of our our fellow humans.
Anybody on this blog who believes that there is anything special about us, some ineffable quality passed down to us by our ancestors, that will keep us somehow ahead of all other comers, ahead in science, ahead in engineering, ahead in finance, ahead in any damned thing at all, is a chauvinist (and probably racist) fool. We are not more creative. We are not more dynamic. We are not more any damned thing at all, perhaps other than delusionally self-impressed. Our dollars are not sacred, our government securities are not infallible, our military bears not a charmed life.
We. Are. Not. Special.
The world will overtake us, in all things.
The hope for working people (whether in the US or elsewhere), the objective, the purpose, cannot be to outcompete one another at the behest of our masters, but must be rather to smash the structures of competition that set us one against the other. The imperative of economic competition -- more accurately, economic conflict -- is exactly as fallacious and as evil as the imperative of political competition that sent millions of men into the hells of the Somme and Ypres and Verdun, to kill and be killed by one another, men with no real reason to fight one another, to hate one another, to hurt one another.
Grow up everybody. We're not special.