Mitt Romney and a Theology of American Exceptionalism

“Let me make this very clear,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech he gave at the Citadel in 2011. “As President of the United States, I will devote myself to an American Century. And I will never, ever apologize for America.”

Indeed, and that is a serious problem.

I am not naïve enough to imagine that for a presidential candidate humility will ever be a trait to trumpet. The specter of Jimmy Carter still looms over those who aspire to sit in the Oval Office. Thus we cannot be surprised that Romney used his most important speech on foreign affairs to affirm his belief in American Exceptionalism. “I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney told his audience in an attempt to distinguish himself from President Obama’s statement (of fact) that many countries have their own versions of exceptionalism. “We are a people who, in the language of our Declaration of Independence, hold certain truths to be self-evident: namely, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. It is our belief in the universality of these unalienable rights that leads us to our exceptional role on the world stage, that of a great champion of human dignity and human freedom.” In short, the United States is good, great and under God.

Like his fellow Neocon exponent, former president George W. Bush, Romney’s misguided understanding of the American founding turns a unique historical moment (as every moment is) into a normative claim about the nation’s exceptional character. In a witty and biting 2007 piece for World Affairs, essayist David Rieff called this kind of logic a “theology of American exceptionalism”: “At its most extreme, this faith — and it is faith in the sense of being a religious rather a political construct — can lead to the claim … that the United States is an ‘inherently’ good country.”

To put it another way, America is so exceptional that even in failure — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name a few — it still succeeds because it is, at base (in its soul) good.
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