American Unexceptionalism

So we have been downgraded.  The Standard and Poors downgrade of our credit rating was the big thud you heard Friday evening.  No doubt, the next few weeks will be spent in earnest effort by anyone in need of votes to ward off impending unemployment making sure you understand how the other guys are to blame for it.  It is always the other guys.

As we listen to the clamor of “The tea party did it!” and “Tax and spend liberals did it!” know this.  Many of those screaming loudest are the most culpable.  Some of yesterday’s big spenders are today’s tea partiers.  Of course, all economic policies are not created equal but that is not my point today.

The downgrade, in as much as it is a statement about our trustworthiness, reaches deeper I think.  It leaves me with the feeling that others have just acknowledged something we have known about ourselves for a long time.  We have been found out.

We, Americans that is, like to think that the rules somehow do not apply to us.  We watch Greece and Portugal go under for spending gobs more than they produce and we tut-tut.  They should have known better, we say.  Oblivious to the fact that we are behaving in exactly the same way.  But no, we are different.  Somehow we are different.  Sure, we spend $1.40 for every dollar we take in, but we will make up the shortfall in volume, right? Wrong.

America is not exceptional.  Sure, we may have been founded centuries ago upon some ideals that were exceptional at the time, or even today.  But we were not up to the task of preserving it.  True liberty requires morality and we have long been bereft of both.  There was nothing exceptional about Americans, at least not enough to preserve us from the excess of excess.  We want it all and we want someone else to pay for it.  Like it or not, this has been the American dream for the last seventy years and many people have lived it.  But the dream is over and its wakey wakey time.

The S&P didn’t downgrade us, we downgraded us.  The tea party didn’t do it and even Nancy Pelosi didn’t do it.  We did it.  We downgraded ourselves a long time ago, it is just that others are beginning to notice and we find this coming out, unpleasant.

We have come out as greedy and selfish.  Foolish and petty.  Preachy and petulant.  And you know who we are just like?  We are like every other despot that has ever put his interest ahead of his people’s.  The only difference is that we are our own despot.  The ideals of our founding fathers have granted us the right to be our own despots and we could not miss the opportunity.  Why should kings have all the fun?

So yes.  We have been downgraded.  If we look inside, we know we had it coming.  We haven’t felt or behaved like AAA+ citizens for some time and it hurts that others have noticed.  But perhaps what hurts the most is the notion that we are just like everyone else.  We are just like the Germans of the 1920’s, the Soviets of the 1970’s, and the Greeks of today.  We are just as selfish, just as deluded, and just as shortsighted as all those who came before us and those who will come after us.  We are sinners in need of salvation, everything else is wishful thinking.