Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other

By Mugambi Jouet

Why did Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Why is America so polarized? And how does American exceptionalism explain these social changes?
 
In this provocative book, Mugambi Jouet describes why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, Jouet then lived in the Bible Belt, Manhattan, and beyond. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, he wields his multicultural sensibility to parse how the intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. While exceptionalism once was a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts. They also shed light on the intriguing ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, a visceral suspicion of government, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than the rest of the Western world—Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Exceptional America dissects the American soul, in all of its peculiar, clashing, and striking manifestations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780520966468

Mugambi Jouet

Mugambi Jouet is Associate Professor at the USC Gould School of Law. His writing has been featured in The New Republic, Slate, Boston Review, Mother Jones, The San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Salon, The Hill, Truthout, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, and academic journals. He has traveled widely within America and internationally.  

Book preview

ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA

Mugambi Jouet traveled from Paris, France, to Houston, Texas, as a college freshman and has been trying to make sense of the American experience ever since. The result is a richly textured account of the forces that make the United States unlike anywhere else in the world.

— JUNE CARBONE, Robina Chair in Law, Science, and Technology, University of Minnesota Law School, and coauthor of Red Families v. Blue Families

Using a comparative perspective, and seeking to place American values in a larger context, Mugambi Jouet provides perspectives on the pervasive culture war that divides Americans.

— NAOMI CAHN, Harold H. Greene Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School, and coauthor of Red Families v. Blue Families

"Exceptional America is a seminal work written by a French author from a comparative framework. It is an eye-opening presentation of America’s contradictions, highly relevant in contemporary politics and a must-read for policy makers."

— PASHAURA SINGH, Chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside

Exceptional America

Exceptional America

WHAT DIVIDES AMERICANS FROM THE WORLD AND FROM EACH OTHER

Mugambi Jouet

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Mugambi Jouet

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jouet, Mugambi, 1981– author.

Title: Exceptional America : what separates Americans from the world and from each other / Mugambi Jouet.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016046909 | ISBN 9780520293298 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520966468 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Exceptionalism—United States. | National characteristics, American. | United States—Social policy. | United States—Economic policy. | United States—Politics and government—21st century.

Classification: LCC E169.12 .J68 2017 | DDC 973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046909

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

It is impossible to understand a country without seeing how it varies from others. Those who know only one country know no country.

Seymour Martin Lipset

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1 • One Nation, Divisible

2 • From the American Enlightenment to Anti-Intellectualism

3 • The Exceptional Influence of Christian Fundamentalism

4 • The Culture Wars of Faith, Sex, and Gender

5 • Between Democracy and Plutocracy

6 • Millions Standing against Their Own Economic Interest

7 • Mass Incarceration, Executions, and Gun Violence in the Land of the Free

8 • America and the World

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Incarceration rates

2. Mentions of American exceptionalism in U.S. media, 1980–2015

3. Party polarization in Congress, 1879–2015

4. Top marginal individual income tax rate, 1913–2016

5. Percentage of national presidential speeches invoking God

6. Distribution of net worth in the United States

7. Correlation of health and social problems with income inequality

8. Annual health spending per capita

9. Incarceration rates: juveniles and adults

10. Homicides by firearm

11. Percentage of global military spending

TABLES

1. Accuracy of statements by U.S. politicians

2. Religious affiliations in America

3. Faith in various countries

4. American public opinion on the morality of premarital sex between a man and a woman

5. Number of executions by U.S. region from 1976 to November 14, 2016

6. American states and federal district without the death penalty

7. Percentage of correct answers to international affairs questions

PREFACE

On November 9, 2016, a puzzled world woke up to a new face of America. How could Donald Trump follow Barack Obama into the White House? Experts were stunned.

I began writing this book several years before the election, and it went to press shortly afterward. I also did not expect Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton, insofar as polls predicted her victory. I was nonetheless skeptical of the conventional wisdom that Trump hardly reflected the views of the Republican Party or most ordinary American conservatives. My research instead suggested that the difference between Trump and the G.O.P. establishment was often one of style, rhetoric, and temperament. While he built his platform on conspiracy theories about Obama’s forged U.S. birth certificate and other spectacularly fact-free claims, scores of Americans were already convinced that climate change and the theory of evolution are myths. Some of Trump’s campaign promises, such as barring Muslims from entering America, surely went beyond what contemporary leaders had called for. But it was not as if he had suddenly brought bigotry back to America after the civil rights movement of the 1960s ended it once and for all. Yes, Trump’s incendiary declarations demonstrated reservations about democracy and the rule of law, yet many citizens and prominent politicians had come to embrace torture and indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo.

My thesis was that conservative America has become an outlier in the Western world because of its growing radicalization over the past three decades. Four peculiar mindsets especially stood out: profound anti-intellectualism, fervent Christian fundamentalism, a visceral suspicion of government, and racial resentment. This nexus has fostered an exceptionally hardline and anti-rational ideology, which culminated in Trump’s election, although it has much older roots in the birth of modern democracy in the United States. It is therefore my hope that this book will humanize Trump voters by tracing their ideology to the fabric of America, including its history, culture, politics, law, economics, religion, and race relations.

Longstanding features of American exceptionalism have shaped the nation’s intensifying polarization, from an egalitarian spirit to a tradition of religious liberty and a remarkable demographic diversity. These traits can manifest themselves in inspiring, contradictory, and destructive ways. They ultimately led to the presidency of a man whose movement has cast a shadow over the principles of democracy and human rights that America helped spread throughout the world.

Introduction

I exit the subway and walk past the Flatiron Building toward the Manhattan state appellate court, crossing elegant Madison Square Park on the way. Escaping the city’s bustling corners on a weekday afternoon, quiet parkgoers sit pensively by the water fountain or chat lightheartedly on the lawn. But now is not the time for dawdling, as I am about to argue a criminal case before a panel of five judges.

It is 2009 and I am a public defender, namely a human rights lawyer defending poor people who cannot afford an attorney. My colleagues and I represent the most underprivileged members of society in a broad range of criminal cases, from homicides to petty drug offenses—an uphill battle at a time when America has the world’s top incarceration rate. Over 2.2 million people live behind bars in the land of the free.¹ America has 5 percent of the global population and 25 percent of its prisoners.² It is also among the countries that execute the most people, alongside authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. No other Western democracy still resorts to the death penalty, which has been abolished by two-thirds of all countries in law or practice.³ Capital punishment is primarily a Southern phenomenon but harsh justice is not limited to red states. Judges in New York routinely inflict draconian prison terms regardless of mitigating circumstances.

Upon arriving at the courthouse I am greeted by my client’s mother, who asks me whether the judges are likely to overturn her son’s conviction for selling a small quantity of drugs. I explain that there is no basis to challenge his guilty plea, though the judges have the discretion to reduce his six-year sentence. Despite her resilience, she has little hope after witnessing the toll of the War on Drugs on her neighborhood. The young Afro-Latino man I defend is among the multitude of destitute New Yorkers incarcerated in distant rural counties whose economies heavily revolve around the prison-industrial complex.⁴ I previously visited my client in an austere upstate prison, but the judges will never have to look him in the eye. Unlike for trial proceedings, prisoners have no right to attend the appellate arguments that seal their fates.

I sit down and gaze around while several other cases are heard. A remarkable feat of architecture, the Manhattan state appellate courtroom is decorated with Renaissance-inspired murals.⁵ The salient figure is Lady Justice waiting to render her noble judgment. In God we trust is engraved above the judges’ bench. Yet a peculiar brand of justice is meted out here every day.

The five judges in black robes finally grant me seven minutes to present my case. That is a fairly long time by the court’s standards. Once I was afforded barely five minutes to argue in an attempted murder case.

May it please the court. Mugambi Jouet, appearing on behalf of Hector Merced.⁶

I am defending an American citizen by relying on American law even though I am not American by birth. I have always wondered whether judges can tell my background. My accent is sometimes hard to place, as I grew up in Paris in a bilingual environment.

I urge the judges to find that the two years that my client has already served in prison are sufficient for a mere fifteen-dollar drug sale, as it would be senseless to force him to spend four more years behind bars, away from his family. The judges are uninterested in my references to studies showing that lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenders are ineffective in reducing crime and costly to taxpayers. They are likewise unfazed by my appeal to the humane principle of rehabilitation.

As expected, a judge eventually asks me a familiar question: Your client is serving six years in prison. Under the law, couldn’t he have received up to twelve years for this crime?

That habitual question epitomizes how superficial the debate over criminal justice has become in modern America. One might imagine that in Manhattan—the cosmopolitan center of the nation’s intellectual, cultural, and artistic life—appellate judges would be inquisitive about the latest studies in criminology or prisoners’ prospects for rehabilitation in the age of mass incarceration.⁷ Nevertheless, local judges, whether Democratic or Republican appointees, often embrace the tough on crime ideology or fear appearing soft on crime.

I readily concede the judge’s point for strategic reasons but press on. Six years behind bars is excessive for a relatively minor drug offense. The judges’ notion of what constitutes an excessive sentence has been skewed by the ruthless penal laws now commonplace in America. If the maximum sentence for a drug sale is twelve years, then six years in prison can seem lenient. The court will issue its official decision in a few weeks, although the outcome is predictable. My client will spend six years in a grim cellblock in the name of justice. In Europe, he might have served a few months in prison.

•  •  •

Seven years later, the dehumanizing justice system I fought against as a public defender finally received more public attention. After declaring her candidacy for the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows by denouncing the tough on crime policies that once helped her husband win the White House. The spotlight had turned to criminal justice after police killings of unarmed black men led to peaceful and violent protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, and beyond. Clinton promised that as president she would not only strive to stop police brutality but also end the era of mass incarceration and fight institutional racism. Americans ultimately chose as their president a man advocating a harsher penal system. Casting himself as the Law and Order Candidate, Donald Trump vowed to make America safe from threatening undocumented immigrants and inner-city thugs.

However, mass incarceration reveals far more about America than persistent discrimination or the difficulty of finding common ground for genuine reform.⁸ Figure 1 illustrates how American justice is on the fringe of contemporary Western civilization.

FIGURE 1. Incarceration rates (prisoners per 100,000 people). SOURCE: Institute for Criminal Policy Research, World Prison Brief (2016).

One can judge a society by its prisons. This timeless observation attributed to Albert Camus, the French novelist and philosopher, evokes Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s earlier reference to nineteenth-century Russia: The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.⁹ Indeed, one can learn much about a society from whether it recognizes that even people convicted of serious crimes should be treated with dignity and compassion. When future generations look back on modern America, they may see its inhumane justice system as the embodiment of disturbing trends. In the words of Bryan Stevenson, a prominent attorney who has devoted his life to defending vulnerable Americans, you judge the character of [societies] not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it’s in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are.¹⁰

The degeneration of American justice embodies American exceptionalism. Readers may pause to ask: American exceptionalism? Isn’t that the belief that America is a superior country chosen by God to enlighten the world? No, it is not. Or not really.

While the word exceptional can imply greatness or superiority, the concept originally referred to how America is exceptional in the sense of unique, different, unusual, extraordinary, or peculiar. Put differently, American exceptionalism means that America is an exception compared to other countries, for better or worse.¹¹ We will see in Chapter 1 how Republican leaders misleadingly redefined this concept as American superiority, then used it as a rhetorical weapon against Obama by relentlessly accusing him of lacking faith in American exceptionalism. In their view, the unpatriotic Obama precipitated the nation’s decline by seeking to transform it into Europe with his socialist and un-American agenda. These accusations matched the spread of conspiracy theories claiming that Obama is not truly American because he has a forged U.S. birth certificate and is a closeted Islamist. The partisan redefinition of American exceptionalism obscured its original meaning and why it matters today.

Throughout this book I turn on its head the popular belief that American exceptionalism means that America is a shining city upon a hill picked by God to be a beacon of light to the world. Major features of American exceptionalism are instead sources of serious conflict and injustice that could spell American decline. Ironically, scores of Americans equate exceptionalism with their nation’s superiority when it might be its Achilles heel—a self-destructive vicious circle threatening admirable dimensions of American society. Compared to other Western democracies, modern America has the worst degree of wealth inequality and the worst human rights record. Even though American exceptionalism has both positive and negative dimensions, some of its troubling features have intensified in recent decades. This book describes how Americans are now profoundly divided over their core values and what path their country should take. The people who pay the greatest price for these social problems are usually the most vulnerable members of society. The struggling poor, working class, and middle class. Women. LGBTQ people. Racial and ethnic minorities. Immigrants. Prisoners.

The United States’ extraordinary polarization is partly explainable by peculiar dimensions of contemporary American conservatism: virulent anti-intellectualism, visceral anti-governmentalism, and fervent Christian fundamentalism. They foster an uncompromising, hardline ideology that impedes rational decision-making and problem-solving. Data on voting patterns confirm that the G.O.P. has moved sharply to the right in recent decades, though the Democratic Party’s leftward shift has been more modest.¹² Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election may have been unexpected, but his rise should have surprised no one. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the run-up to the vote, Trump’s views on many issues are similar to those of the Republican establishment, as exemplified by how both have supported reintroducing torture into Western civilization¹³ and insisted that climate change is a myth.¹⁴ Evidence further indicates that mainstream politicians have long incited animosity toward minorities with dog whistles, racially coded language recognizable by sympathizers.¹⁵ Trump did so more openly. His actions as president might not always match his vitriolic campaign rhetoric, which often lacked coherence. In any event, Trumpism is a product of conservative America’s peculiar ideological evolution.

Intriguingly, America and other Western nations are moving apart and closer at the same time. While liberal America is mainly evolving in the same direction as the rest of the West, conservative America has become an outlier because of its unusual ideology. Liberal America’s worldview is not simply vastly different from the worldview in conservative America but also closer to the dominant worldview elsewhere in the Western world: Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.* Tellingly, universal health care is broadly supported by both liberals and conservatives in all Western nations except America, where Republicans persistently denounce the evils of socialized medicine. In other words, conservatism tends to have a deeply different meaning in America than other Western nations.

The growing radicalism of American conservatism is not the only source of the nation’s intense polarization. Singular dimensions of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations have shaped the views of conservative and liberal citizens by leading to peculiar ways of approaching a wide range of issues. On one hand, crippling polarization could foster America’s decline, including its ability to tackle fundamental problems at home and its credibility as a global leader. On the other hand, modern America’s acute social conflicts and injustices appear to be part of a historical cycle, as they have old roots even as they take on new forms.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America remains the most insightful book on the roots of American exceptionalism. Traveling through the young nation in the 1830s, the Frenchman remarked that Americans could live in different worlds given the hierarchy between whites and blacks, as well as the divide between North and South. However, he published his essay almost two centuries ago, before the Civil War and other major developments. Among later generations of comparatists, Seymour Martin Lipset stands out for noting that the American Creed can be described in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.¹⁶ But America has also changed in the nearly two decades since the publication of his magnum opus, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.

This book aims to go further than traditional explanations of American exceptionalism focusing mainly on how America as a whole compares to other nations. I argue that American exceptionalism is not only what divides Americans from the world—it is also what divides Americans from each other. Compared to other Westerners, Americans are far more polarized over fundamental questions regarding the purpose of government, socioeconomic equality, the literal veracity of the Bible, sexual morality, science, human rights, and foreign policy. As a result, America is torn apart by conflicts and injustices existing nowhere else or to nowhere near the same extent in the modern Western world.

The first chapter begins by examining the history and meaning of American exceptionalism. This storied concept became a recurrent topic in recent years as Republican politicians turned it into a rhetorical weapon to impugn Obama’s patriotism. Meanwhile, intensifying social polarization emerged as a major dimension of American exceptionalism’s true meaning. The already huge rift between conservative and liberal America during the George W. Bush presidency worsened during the Obama era,¹⁷ when Congress reached its worst degree of partisan polarization since the post–Civil War Reconstruction period.¹⁸ Throughout the Bush and Obama years, America faced a series of grave crises. The War on Terror. Hurricane Katrina. The financial collapse and Great Recession. Health care reform. The government shutdown. Climate change. Ferguson. Criminal justice reform. The list goes on, from the clashes over gay rights and Planned Parenthood to the incendiary rhetoric and violence at Trump rallies. Polarization shows little sign of abating during his presidency.

Chapter 2 considers the exceptional weight of anti-intellectualism in parts of America. This peculiar mindset is animated by outright skepticism of education, leading to a cult of ignorance.¹⁹ Anti-intellectualism has exacerbated the polarization of American society by precluding a rational debate on nearly every single political issue. The Bush administration’s debunked justifications to invade Iraq²⁰ were followed by the normalization of propaganda during the Obama era, as numerous politicians routinely made absurd claims about his fake birth certificate and covert Muslim faith, the perils of socialized medicine, the creation of death panels, the myth of climate change, the tyranny of the federal government, radical tax hikes that never occurred,²¹ the treasonous Benghazi plot, and other canards. Trump’s ludicrous rhetoric was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Much like other peculiar mindsets that might spell American decline, anti-intellectualism was ironically shaped by positive dimensions of U.S. history. We will see that it stems from an unusual conception of equality rooted in America’s heritage as the first modern democracy to emerge from the Enlightenment. As Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, the birth of modern democracy in the United States generally led to a greater equality of conditions among white men there than in Europe.²² A pitfall of this progress was the rise of a populist creed viewing knowledge as little more than a badge of elitism of the pseudoaristocracy, because all one needs is common sense.²³ Anti-intellectualism proved particularly influential in the South, the poorest region of the country. By encouraging irrationality, gullibility, and skepticism of education, the profound anti-intellectualism in parts of America has facilitated disinformation—false information deliberately spread to manipulate public opinion. By contrast, the evolution of democracy in Western Europe was less shaped by the conflation of egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism. While political extremism in contemporary Europe is troubling, it is less mainstream and more focused on immigration—the main target of far-right European parties. Disinformation has a far less important role in Europe than in America today, unlike in the era of European fascism, Nazism, and communism.

Interestingly, anti-intellectualism in America coexists with a vibrant intellectual life, exemplified by its outstanding universities, which may be the best in the world. In criminology and other fields, American scholars are widely esteemed by their peers abroad. Nevertheless, laws and policies are less likely to be crafted in consultation with experts in America than in other Western democracies.²⁴ The eggheads’ knowledge is commonly deemed futile in the United States. The surge of its prison population to world-record levels would probably not have occurred but for the weight of the oversimplistic perspective behind slogans like Tough on crime, Zero tolerance, You do the crime, you do the time, and Lock people up and throw away the key.

The next two chapters explore the extraordinary role of religion in shaping American exceptionalism. Chapter 3 explains why organized religion remains highly influential in America at a time when it frequently inspires indifference, skepticism, or suspicion in other developed nations. I call into question the conventional view of an America divided between believers and nonbelievers. In reality, the divide is mainly among people of faith, since nonbelievers are a limited, albeit rapidly growing, group of Americans. Roughly four in ten Americans gravitate toward Christian fundamentalism—an ultratraditional faith practically nonexistent in other modern Western nations. A similar proportion of Americans share liberal-moderate faiths. Chapter 4 analyzes the culture wars over faith, sex, and gender. In almost no other developed country are issues such as abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and sexual education as controversial as in America. However, the political impact of Christian fundamentalism is not narrowly limited to religious issues. By fostering anti-intellectual, retrograde, black-and-white, and authoritarian mindsets, Christian fundamentalism also influences how millions of Americans think about education, science, climate change, economics, crime, foreign policy, war, and more. This sheds light on why many religious traditionalists flocked to Trump’s movement regardless of his evident irreligiosity and unabashed vulgarity.

Like anti-intellectualism, religious radicalism paradoxically stems from admirable aspects of American history. The relative separation of church and state since the United States’ founding spared Americans the long history of religious warfare and clerical domination that Europeans once suffered. This is among the factors behind the comparatively limited skepticism toward organized religion in America, which has largely enabled Christian fundamentalism to thrive despite its radical theology. Around 40 percent of Americans, a huge minority, are creationists, who deem that God made humans in their present form ten thousand years ago.²⁵ The same proportion expects Jesus to return by 2050.²⁶ Legions are persuaded that apocalyptic biblical prophecies are relevant to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.²⁷ But a peculiar conception of religious freedom that equates questioning dogma with intolerance has recurrently shielded fundamentalist theology from critical analysis in America.

The following chapters turn to wealth inequality, which is much sharper in America than in other Western nations. Chapter 5 describes how it has evolved from a relatively middle-class society into a winner-take-all economy since the 1980s. Chapter 6 considers why millions of ordinary Americans vote against their economic interest. Several factors help explain this puzzling dimension of U.S. politics: myopia molded by anti-intellectualism; the role of racial divisions in hindering economic solidarity; the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and market fundamentalism; and unbridled faith in the American Dream, fostering the conviction that any hardworking citizen can become affluent without government assistance.

The prison system provides a revealing window into this aspect of American exceptionalism. The surge of wealth inequality in America since the 1980s has paralleled the mass imprisonment of poor people, although the concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent of Americans has received greater attention than the plight of the 1 percent of American adults behind bars.²⁸ Tighter control on the poor via a stringent penal system has coincided with greater liberty for the rich,²⁹ as symbolized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing moneyed interests to spend unlimited sums on political campaigns.³⁰ Penal systems are often mirror images of socioeconomic systems. Statistical research indicates that the more unequal a country is, the likelier it is to imprison people.³¹

In addition to being the Western nation with the sharpest wealth inequality, America is the only one without a universal health care system. Prison is therefore the sole place where certain Americans can receive public health care. In recent years, a number of desperate people have deliberately gotten arrested to receive shelter and medical care in prison. For example, Rickie Lawrence Gardner, a forty-nine-year-old white man, staged a bank robbery in Moulton, Alabama, since he preferred heading to prison rather than face homelessness after being on the verge of losing his job because of a leg injury. His is the first bank robbery I’ve ever worked where the robber was waiting outside the bank for the police to turn himself in, the local police chief said.³²

The full story of American exceptionalism cannot be told without looking more specifically at the disturbing evolution of the nation’s penal laws, which I do in Chapter 7. This is an area where the stark divide between American ideals and reality hits home powerfully. Modern American justice is astoundingly harsh. The nation not only has virtually the highest incarceration rate worldwide, but is also the sole Western democracy to retain the death penalty. American justice is further characterized by pervasive discrimination and other degrading practices. It was not always so, as foreign observers once saw American justice as enlightened.

Police shootings are far more common in America than in other Western democracies, a tragedy influenced by racial animus. Strikingly, British civilians are one hundred times less likely to be shot by police. Most British police officers do not even carry a gun.³³ Of course, another reason why U.S. police officers are more trigger happy is that more criminals are armed in America. Nearly one gun is available to each American on average—a world record. Yemen is a distant second in the number of guns per capita.³⁴ The obsession with guns among numerous Americans and die-hard groups such as the National Rifle Association epitomizes the visceral suspicion of government in much of the country. The right to bear arms is not merely envisioned as a way to defend oneself from criminals—it is equally envisioned as a way to defend oneself from the government. In this view, armed patriots might well be the last line of defense when the federal government goes one step too far in violating the American people’s liberty.³⁵ The extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by this far-right ideology is a major reason why America has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West. Americans are generally three to five times likelier to be murdered than Europeans.³⁶

Still, America does not have an exceptionally ruthless justice system because it has an exceptionally high crime rate. Homicides aside, its crime levels are comparable to those of other Western nations.³⁷ The degrading punishments routinely inflicted on American prisoners instead reflect a peculiar view of human dignity. Illustratively, the Supreme Court held that the incredibly long sentences imposed under California’s three-strikes law are not cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The court therefore upheld the fifty-year-to-life sentence of a man who had shoplifted videotapes worth only $153, since he had prior convictions for petty theft, burglary, and transporting marijuana.³⁸ America further stands apart from other Western democracies by relying on solitary confinement for lengthy periods, regardless of the enormous mental harm it causes. A United Nations expert on torture denounced these practices, pointing to two American prisoners who spent over four decades alone in tiny cells.³⁹ The U.N. Human Rights Committee has additionally expressed concern about the U.S. practice of shackling pregnant prisoners even while they give birth.⁴⁰ Perhaps one may see progress in the fact that, since a 2005 Supreme Court case decided by a 5–4 vote, it is no longer constitutional to execute juveniles in America.⁴¹ But America remains essentially the only country to sentence teenagers to life imprisonment.⁴²

Other fundamental human rights issues are also extremely divisive in America. The Bush administration’s creation of the Guantánamo camp stood for the proposition that terrorists have no human rights—and that it is therefore acceptable to torture and detain them forever without trial. Although many citizens condemned such practices as un-American, this treatment was not as much a deviation from contemporary American values as they thought, since it fit within the notion that criminals’ lives are worthless. America’s self-defeating War on Terror recalls its War on Crime in how both emphasize striking hard at offenders, downplaying root social causes behind their actions, and dismissing humanitarian concerns.⁴³

America considers itself the leader of the free world, yet it regularly violates international human rights standards. Paradoxically, the human rights movement that came to life after World War II was partly led by Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt.⁴⁴ Her vision of universal human rights bore more fruit abroad than at home. References to human rights are rare in the U.S. legal and political debate. In modern America, human rights often evoke foreign problems like abuses in Third World dictatorships.⁴⁵

This brings us to the last chapter, examining America’s singular relationship to the world. The United States has long been far more inclined than other Western democracies to defy norms of diplomacy, international law, and human rights deemed against its interests. Americans are thus quite divided over key aspects of U.S. foreign policy, as shown by radically different perspectives on the invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo, and torture. These attitudes reflect diverse facets of exceptionalism, such as America’s superpower status, its relative geographic isolation, and the idea that God chose it to lead the world.

Insularity helps explain why America often stands alone among developed nations in pursuing the numerous counterproductive policies discussed throughout this book. Studies show that Americans are generally less knowledgeable than other Westerners about foreign countries.⁴⁶ They also travel less internationally, as nearly two hundred million do not have passports,⁴⁷ in the image of Sarah Palin, who had left North America only once before becoming the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate.⁴⁸

Insularity is a curious state of mind in a country that considerably influences the world culturally, economically, geopolitically, and militarily. Yet a tension between globalism and isolationism has long existed in the United States. Millions of Americans are well traveled and sincerely interested in foreign cultures. American universities have some of the finest international programs of all academic institutions worldwide. In the end, America is a land of immigrants. While millions are uninquisitive about the countries from which their ancestors came, America’s global citizens are mindful that their country now lags behind other industrialized nations in areas like criminal justice, health care, and human rights.

In sum, this book explores the intriguing relationship between different dimensions of American exceptionalism. Even though no chapter is specifically devoted to race and immigration, they are recurrent themes. Next to other Western democracies, America has historically had a far bigger proportion of racial and ethnic minorities, which now constitute 38 percent of its population.⁴⁹ Racism has therefore played a bigger role in shaping American attitudes. That may be counterintuitive at first. After all, America has been more successful at integrating immigrants than European nations in a number of ways. It was the first Western democracy tolerant enough to choose a person of color as its leader. Obama’s election was a source of inspiration to millions of people worldwide, as he came to embody the idea that anything is possible in America.

The flip side is that America’s extraordinary diversity has had troubling consequences by hindering socioeconomic solidarity. For instance, scores of Americans believe that most beneficiaries of universal health care would be minorities on welfare, who should work harder instead of expecting a handout. Such stereotypes are among the reasons why the Republican base virulently opposed the Obama administration’s health care reform. In reality, millions of Americans who would benefit from universal health care are white and employed.⁵⁰

By contrast, few Europeans think of universal health care as a program primarily for racial minorities or even poor people. Race has had less influence in molding attitudes toward inequality in Europe than in America. This may again seem hard to believe, given the growing sway of far-right European political parties, not to mention discrimination against Muslims, blacks, and other minorities on the Old Continent. The difference is probably due not to lower racism but rather to the fact that there were few people of color in Europe until recent decades, when a surge of immigration from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Caribbean islands, and beyond increased their proportion.** European institutions like national health insurance were created before their arrival. Similarly, European attitudes toward social justice were framed long before the current immigration crisis, as illustrated by the creation of the European Court of Human Rights in 1959. Simply put, part of the reason why white Europeans are more inclined than white Americans to think that depriving people of health care or executing prisoners is an affront to human dignity is that these attitudes largely originated at a time when nearly all Europeans were white. Conversely, race has always been an issue in America, thereby coloring attitudes toward inequality and human dignity.

In our journey through America we will see that it incarnates progress in countless ways but is also a nation of stark contradictions. Why does a country that prizes liberty so dearly have virtually the highest incarceration rate in the entire world? Why is America the only Western country to retain the death penalty, even though its people are the most suspicious of the authority of big government over their lives? How could the first Western nation to elect a person of color as its head of state suffer from institutional racism? Why is anti-intellectualism so prevalent in the United States, considering the quality of its universities and the impressive contributions of Americans to human thought? Why has Christian fundamentalism remained so prominent in one of the countries that spearheaded the advent of science, the sexual revolution, and other modern developments? How does one explain the insularity of many Americans given their country’s influential role on the global stage? And why do myriad Americans vote against their self-interest by opposing sensible reforms in an age of staggering inequality?

•  •  •

The adrenaline from my court argument slowly wears off as I head back to my office, a few blocks from the World Trade Center’s ruins. I linger around the workplace. Gotham’s nightlife beckons but I am not in the mood to socialize. I am alone with my thoughts as I decide to walk by the Hudson River.

Drifting along the waterfront toward the southern tip of Manhattan, I eventually find a quiet bench in Battery Park. The Statue of Liberty, which left France’s shores in 1885, stands on the horizon, carrying its celebrated message from the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I wonder whether my client will stay in prison. My mind begins to wander as I reflect on the path that led me here.

My roots are American in a sense, as my French mother and Kenyan father met in New York when they were international students at Columbia University. Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different. My father was born in the rural village of Kangeta to illiterate parents who never attended school, since British colonial authorities sharply limited access to education for African children. The Kenyan government did not do much better following independence in 1963, although determination and good fortune enabled my father to attend college in Nairobi before pursuing his studies in America. My mother, on the other hand, is from Brittany, the Celtic region of France. Leaving her comfort zone, she spent years living in America, Ivory Coast, and Kenya.

Unlike Barack Obama, I was actually born in Kenya. I then moved to Paris with my mother after my parents separated when I was three years old. Their short-lived marriage left me, their only child, between worlds: France-Kenya, Europe-Africa, white-black. Growing up a few minutes from the Eiffel Tower, I received a French upbringing at home while attending a bilingual French-English international school.

I first set foot in America in the summer of 1989, at the age of eight, to visit my father, who had become a professor at UCLA. A summer in sunny Los Angeles provided all the youthful excitement I could handle, including visits to Universal Studios and other amusement parks. My fascination with America had begun. During my childhood I returned to California and visited additional parts of the country. Attending college in America seemed inevitable, as I was eager to broaden my horizons and gain independence. My parents encouraged me to do so because they held U.S. universities in high regard. I finally chose Rice University in Houston, since it was a reputable institution in another world, Texas, a state I had yet to discover. I arrived there ready to embrace its people and certainly had the opportunity to do so, as a large share of my fellow students were from Texas and neighboring Southern states.

Houston bears little resemblance to European cities. Urban sprawl. No subway system. The consequent need to drive almost everywhere. The proliferation of strip malls. On the upside, Rice University’s agreeable campus blended elegant architecture with green areas. NASA’s fantastic space station was only a short drive away.

Compared to the French, Americans are generally more informal and outgoing with strangers, perhaps even more so in states like Texas, where people pride themselves on Southern hospitality. It was not uncommon for a stranger to greet me with a smile as I strolled around campus, something I did not experience when pursuing my graduate studies in New York and Chicago. Southerners are reputed to be anti-French, but my Gallic origins usually generated warm reactions. Anti-French attitudes in America typically arise over foreign policy disagreements, such as France’s opposition to the Bush administration’s war on Iraq. However, I no longer lived in Texas by the time America invaded Iraq, so no Texan had a chance to offer me a helping of freedom fries or freedom toast.

Living in Texas was nonetheless a culture shock, as I saw things I had never witnessed in France. People who said grace before meals, rejected the theory of evolution, and preached abstinence until marriage. People who invoked their Christian faith to support the death penalty—an eye for an eye—and interpreted Thou shalt not kill as a license to execute prisoners. People who were content to lack universal health care because it would be a great leap toward the tyranny of socialized medicine in other industrialized nations. And middle-class persons who never left their country except maybe to visit Cancún, a sanitized version of Mexico for U.S. tourists.

Originally a frontier land, Texas enjoyed independence for nearly a decade after seceding from Mexico in 1836. The Lone Star State joined the United States in 1845, although it tends to regard itself as a land of mavericks. In twenty-first-century Texas, the governor can proudly give the following response on being asked whether secession is an option: We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? These cavalier remarks were made by the former governor—and aspiring president of the United States—Rick Perry at a Tea Party rally. Of course, the South had already tried to secede, and the U.S. Civil War cost approximately six hundred thousand lives.

George