Make no exception, save one: American exceptionalism, the American presidency, and the age of Obama

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the circumstances under which U.S. presidents have invoked American exceptionalism in major speeches and how this concept has culminated in the Obama presidency. We find that U.S. presidents have increased their invocations of American exceptionalism since the Second World War and that they have relied heavily on this concept in times of national crises. Moreover, we demonstrate the overwhelming propensity of President Obama, relative to his predecessors, to emphasize American exceptionalism. We argue that this is due to the double-crisis nature of his presidency – two major wars and a recession – in addition to the racial bind that he has endured throughout his presidency. We reflect on the implications for other minority politicians and the broader American public.

KEYWORDS:

• Presidential discourse
• American exceptionalism
• national crisis
• Barack Obama
• national identity
• challenges to patriotism

Notes

1. Former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, for example, stated during the 2012 Presidential Campaign: “Our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do. And I think over the last three or four years, some people around the world have begun to question [it]” (Dwyer, 2012). Louisiana Governor, Jindal (2015), also emphasized in February 2015: “This is a president who won’t proudly proclaim American exceptionalism, maybe the first president ever who truly doesn’t believe in that.”

2. No inferential statistics were employed in this analysis because we examined the entire census of major presidential speeches since the end of the Second World War.

3. The early Cold War lasted from 1945 to 1973. The late Cold War was from 1973 to 1991. We distinguish the two here because scholarship suggests that a fundamental shift occurred both in terms of how the United States conducted its foreign policy and, more importantly, how it perceived its place in the world following its defeat in Vietnam in 1973 (McCrisken, 2003). This was reflected, for example, in the book, The Arrogance of Power, by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Fulbright (1967), in which he argued that America had become an imperialist state due to its cultural arrogance. Noted sociologist, Bell (1975), also published a piece entitled, “The end of American exceptionalism” in which he proclaimed: “Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation’s future.” With this in mind, we were interested in exploring whether any changes indeed took place regarding the prevalence of American exceptionalism in U.S. presidential discourse following the Vietnam War.