One issue I want to raise, though, is the specter of American exceptionalism that haunts the book. Haunts, actually, may be too mild a word, since Kahn enthusiastically embraces the exceptional nature of American politics and law, and does so in absolutist terms (perhaps this is just the unfortunate sign of the legal mind at work, as is also the case in Schmitt). Of course, much of the book is devoted to pointing out how “extra-legal” America’s use of violence for political ends is, as opposed to that of Europe, while the typical right-wing elaboration of American exceptionalism tends to avoid this issue in favor of a reliance on the USA’s special, God-given dispensation to address the evils of the world wherever they occur. Even those who do not directly invoke the divinity or the duty of foreign adventurism in expressing their high regard for the country nevertheless often slip into a discourse in which the Sonderweg of the United States is dearly held. Kahn’s is a more sobering account of that Sonderweg, though it still weirdly (as Monod points out) ends up discovering a notion of freedom in Schmitt that could be appropriately applied to America’s exceptional (and exceptionally permanent, for Kahn) “state of exception” where extra-legal violence is concerned.

But it seems to me that all versions of political exceptionalism, whatever the ends to which they are put, are fundamentally wrong-headed. That is, no one would deny that each nation, even each Western liberal democracy, is somehow unique—France’s religious and courtly heritage is obviously quite different from Britain’s national (if we can call it that) Bildung. But if we are going to be historically circumspect and careful, then it does us little good to make such differences absolute. No matter how large the gap when it comes to legal or constitutional formations and predispositions (Napoleonic and codified in France, common-law to a large extent in the UK), we also need to acknowledge how far nation-state structures and geo-political exigencies create remarkable similarities (for example, France and Britain, despite chauvinist claims on both sides, ran empires with similar goals, similar legal chicanery, similar brutality, and similar denouements; both countries today attack the Islamic veiling of women in ways that would be unthinkable in the US; both are highly secular, and so on).

And yet Kahn has no difficulty speaking in absolutes about the US. “The juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no exceptions.” By contrast, Americans “live comfortably with their long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars,” so that popular history is the history of “violent force against enemies,” which is then “endlessly reinforced” when “Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even Omaha Beach.” (For the record, I have been to none of these places.)

I have read these passages numerous times, and I still do not get the supposed appropriateness of the contrast on page 16, the “on the one hand, on the other hand” structure that Kahn presumes is obvious to his reader. Yes, I agree, Americans do wave flags more than Europeans, and yes, as Kahn suggests, they do not see their history through the prism of the concentration camp or bombed out cities. But how the notion of “sacrifice” in war—and “sacrifice” is a crucial term in Kahn’s argument—came to be a uniquely American characteristic, one clearly absent on the Continent, remains a historical puzzle in Kahn’s book. It is as if this sense of “sacrifice” derived solely from the constitution (and I mean this in both the conceptual and legal sense) of the US, whereas its absence in Europe is also fundamentally constitutional. But this makes a hash of twentieth-century political history.

First, as should be obvious, the idea of “sacrifice” for the nation (or the city-state) goes back at least to Pericles. Second, modern European history is in many ways nothing but what Kahn (referring only to the US) calls “the long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars.” The scale on which French and German “citizens” (and they were that) sacrificed themselves during WWI alone dwarfs by orders of magnitude all American “sacrifices” in the last hundred years. We will not even begin to talk about Soviet or German “sacrifices” in WWII, or the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific or in kamikaze squads. Only one American war even comes close—the Civil War—and this of course was the one war not fought against foreign “enemies.” Given the level of the carnage, it is little wonder that Europeans have less of a taste for foreign adventurism than Americans do today. But even this reluctance did not happen overnight (even the Europeans, that is, learn slowly). French soldiers continued to sacrifice themselves in large numbers in Vietnam and—with a fairly enthusiastic use of extra-legal torture against their “enemies”—in Algeria in the 1950s. Of course, outside Europe, Korea and Vietnam made the sacrifice of citizens against foreign enemies something of a sacred cause. The Vietnamese were far more enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves for their nation than the disaffected Americans were between 1965 and 1973—the results prove it, I think. It would be hard to show that the Americans were more willing than the French to sacrifice themselves in Vietnam, and both were less willing than the Russians were (for a time, at least) in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm among British citizens for war in the Falklands was palpable and was far greater than Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, in a comparably ridiculous war, in Granada. Had I the time or space, even a cursory discussion of Israel, where the willingness of citizens (again, in a Western European sense) to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation remains unabated to this day—just try throwing stones over the border—and far outstrips, say, US citizens’ willingness to sacrifice themselves in defending the border with Mexico. (Ok, in Arizona, I agree, there are some folks who may feel this way, but even big-chested Rick Perry in Texas has more or less admitted, to the dismay of the Tea Party, that he will not lay down his life to defend El Paso from Mexicans.)

When Kahn writes about the exceptional and unique nature of Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, even in extra-legal circumstances, for the nation, and then traces this willingness back to the unique nature of the US’ political constitution, I cannot avoid thinking of the great Viennese scholar Otto Brunner, perhaps the most important follower of Schmitt, völkisch thinker, and Nazi-identified historian of the Third Reich. Brunner’s summa is (in English) called Land and Lordship: Fundamental Questions on the Territorial Constitutional History of Southeast Germany in the Middle Ages. Like Kahn, Brunner accepted Schmitt’s definition of the political as the opposition of friend and foe; like Kahn, he accepted the irreducibility of political theology in the liberal state, that is, the state defined by the opposition of state and society. Like Kahn, he believed that the unique political constitution (both conceptual and legal) of a particular people (in this case, the Germans) was completely unsuited to the dominant liberal nation-state juridical and political order of Europe, an order based (just as Kahn himself puts it) on the idea that the rule of law and the state’s consequent monopoly on violence (only the state’s violence is permitted, and it is only permitted when it is lawful—no exceptions) is the essence of justice. And like Kahn, Brunner argued that one people, and only one people—the Germans—were constitutionally incapable of following the rule of such a European order of nation-states, and hence needed to reclaim a sense of freedom in the extra-legal use of violence, such as could be found in feuds and clan retribution, in the sense of the sacred that binds them organically to the soil and to one another, and most of all, in the sacrificial loyalties of the medieval Austrian Reich. When Kahn writes, late in his book, that “political authenticity, as it emerges in a study of political theology, is that experience of the unity of being and meaning that marks the presence of the sacred,” Brunner would have agreed wholeheartedly. And Brunner would also have agreed with Kahn that, alas, such an “experience” could not be found among the liberal nation-states of Europe, though he certainly hoped, in 1939, that Germany would soon show Europe how it might be achieved.

Kahn surely shares little of Brunner’s rabid, expansionist, and anti-Semitic nationalism. But his critique of the modern liberal nation-state from the vantage point of political theology is of a piece with much that has appeared recently, a fair amount of it deriving from both Schmitt and Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which rejects both the earlier natural law tradition and the positive law of the nation-state. From the work of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the inevitable denouement of the nation-state is totalitarian Nazism, to the “Red Tory” revanchist theology of John Milbank, and the delirious Christian Stalinism of Salvoj Zizek, a certain strain of academic theory has emphasized that the nation-state after Hobbes rests on an absolutist basis—a monopoly on violence—that its own constitutional presumptions must constantly disavow under the guise of “lawfulness.”  Ironically, Brunner’s own deeply conservative, National Socialist thinking is in complete agreement with such indictments. Yet what Brunner demonstrates at the same time, albeit unintentionally, is that the attempt to find a final solution to the aporia of the liberal state’s political theology—its seemingly endless and irresolvable process of secularization—may be far worse than the aporia itself.

Schmitt’s basic idea, in the Theology, is that any normal constitutional order of “sovereignty” presupposes the abnormal, the exception, and the right to decide when that condition exists. Beyond the norm and the normal, then, there is no super-norm that informs all the others; there is only the lurking decision about the exception of existential emergency. That “space” becomes the overdeterminant of sovereignty. What makes this “theological” in a hidden way is that (i) actual historical developments turned Christian/religious notions into secularized concepts of the state; and (ii) those concepts, by analogy, include the premise of the miracle, here turned into the “exception.” Deism and liberalism eventually banished both God and the miracle from the proceedings, creating an agreeable façade of order, normality, rationality, science, legitimacy, and civilized conversation amongst those of requisite, recognized competence. The transcendent power is bracketed, the immanent will of the people or nation becomes constitutive.

Kahn’s riff on this is, strictly speaking, not a gloss; he has not set out to expand the contended body of Schmittiana. He wants instead to argue the case for Schmitt’s decisional exception and political theology in a contemporary U.S. liberal frame—a tall order. Moreover, he insists that such a Schmittian Ansatz inevitably serves to reveal “the sacred” element in the political. Rewriting the individual chapters of Political Theology in a dialogical (the “we”), and sometimes digressive, way, he makes many other points that I shall have to leave aside, such as his fascinating claims (to my amateur eye) about law and Hans Kelsen.

Nonetheless, I was surprised at the direction of Kahn’s argument. I had expected a reflection on the problem of sovereignty as such in the United States, viz. where it might reside. Schmitt himself invokes the well-known passages from Tocqueville to the effect that “the people” assumes the character of God, the beginning and end of all. Tocqueville, however, considered that religious element an optical trace of a moment that had, in world-historical terms, passed, whilst Kahn maintains the postulate of popular sovereignty (the premise, in a way, of the whole exercise), and thus the case for a political theology to account for it, that is, for the continued relevance of the very problem of sovereignty.

Yet this is where the U.S. itself (or, before the Civil War, themselves) famously becomes the “exception.” Who decides? “The people” is variously embodied in the United States, a purposely decentered system whose only nationally elected person/office is that of the president. It has never been obvious where the unity of the union actually lies. Massive violence in the form of a civil war, during which the great emancipator himself took the decision to suspend habeas corpus, decided the matter (if only partly). Still, the state is one thing, sovereignty another. The quasi-monarchical presidency is indeed the closest authority to embodied decision. Symptomatically, it is an authority conceived explicitly in the space of foreign relations. “We the people,” in the form of the president, have in fact decided on the exception—following from exigencies real and imagined—on many occasions, often with astonishing license and arbitrariness. This, quite clearly, is in line with the European model that forms the historical reference point for Schmitt: the advent of territorialized state sovereignties whose existential being is determined chiefly, not by domestic dangers, but by foreign ones. Let us call it the geopolitical imperative.

One might then grasp the trajectory of the United States as a jagged line of increasing “sovereign-presidential” power, a process whose very uneveness was conditioned, up to a point, by remarkable security, or the relative absence of the geopolitical imperative. A combined, dual “abnormality,” then, marks the normality of the United States, with some punctuating exceptions, all the way up until the 1940s: a relative “lack” of geopolitically charged institutions, along with the domestic state apparatuses that usually (meaning in the European context) go with them. Most states, well into the twentieth century, are, after all, all about war or the preparation for war. Inescapable invocations of Hegel to the contrary, the kind of state (as opposed to sovereignty) that did emerge in this case was actually effective, with law, mostly as autopoetic process, serving as state. Exceptional moments were typically occasioned either by the few events, sometimes artificially created, of foreign crisis (1798, 1812, 1846 [?], 1898, 1917-20), or by the domestic incapacity to deal with states’ rights and/or slavery (e.g., the nullification crisis of 1831, the Civil War).

World War II changes everything, creating the opening for what will become, after 1947, the national security state, based on the notion of a permanent exception in the name of global cold war, a peace that is no peace but no overt war either. In a word: the imperial presidency, we-the-people as articulated sovereignty in a battle of life and death. I myself think that this was objectively over (in an abstract, Schmittian sense) by 1963, but not many agree, choosing instead to parrot endlessly the conventional formula that “the end of the Cold War” is the same as the end of the Soviet Union, in 1989-1991. We-the-people, in any case, is up for grabs because of Vietnam and the cock-ups in the sovereign name of exception perpetrated by the Nixon regime. Whatever one’s periodization, however, it is obvious that the permanent “emergency” begins to fade structurally, what with regularized great-power management and the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (which Kahn takes, to the contrary, to be the very essence of the Cold War). Two attempts at abnormality, which I sometimes imagine as irrevocably postmodern, have thence been made to regenerate the exception: Reagan’s second Cold War, in the early 1980s, and W. Bush’s “War on Terror/ism.”

The former was really pastiche, but the latter offered up some novelty from our present viewpoint. For what, seemingly, could be more Schmittian than George W. Bush’s claim to global supremacy? We, the United States (meaning “I”), have the right to decide on the exception, the state of global emergency, and what can and must be done above and beyond the existing norm: that is about as straightforward a claim to sovereignty on a global scale as one can imagine. (Schmitt has indeed been accused, anachronistically, for having provided a frame for the neocons of recent times, though his name, of course, was never invoked.) Obama’s explicit pragmatism can then be seen as a return to “normality”—the judicious weighing of pros and cons in a spirit of multilateralism—if not to the financialized normality of Clinton’s globalism.

I think this is right up to a point but ultimately wrong: Obama’s pragmatism is a departure from exceptionalism (not a term I like, but that’s another story) in that the United States appears as a product of contingent historical circumstances having nothing inherently to do with any transcendent designs or predestined functions; but, at the same time, and by the same token, it is what it is, namely, the indispensable nation, the guarantor of order in the last instance, and so on. The end result is in some ways a more interesting Schmittian condition than the posture of George W. Bush: the last instance never comes, but it still exists; it is not dominant but still overdeterminant; the exception and the right to decide on it still hover above the proceedings of pragmatic bureaucracy.

All of which is both arguable and (at least to me) of the greatest interest. Kahn, however, is only intermittently concerned with the geopolitical imperative, because his central endeavor and argument is about Schmitt and the liberal political community, the existence and existential phenomenology of “the people,” and, above all, the character of “popular sovereignty.” Schmitt is famously anti-liberal, so Kahn recasts sovereignty specifically as “popular sovereignty.” His whole effort is grounded in the thesis that this kind of sovereignty still exists (in the United States), and that, contrary to received opinion, this condition is in turn not accountable for in simple terms of reason, contract theory, or interest group politics: the kind of “normal” perspectives that find rules, norms, law, adjudication, and interests at the heart of politics but leave no space for sovereignty or the exception. Kahn thinks the popular sovereign entails an irreducibly mystical element that has to do with faith rather than reason. The state (the nation-state, in fact) can demand in the last instance that its citizens sacrifice themselves on its behalf, that one be called upon to kill and to risk death in its name. Normative communities such as churches, Wall Street firms, and what not can do no such thing: “The state remains a site of life and death; its territory remains sacred ground; its history is a narrative of the self-revelation of the popular sovereign.” Hence, theoretically and methodologically, we need a political theology rather than mere political science of the purely secular kind. The state, incomprehensible in a solely secular frame, should be approached in two conceptual ways: genealogically and analogically. The first refers to the historical “translation” of religious (chiefly Christian, in effect) categories into secular ones (viz. God/the People), while the second locates atemporal, structural identities such as that between miracle and exception. (Kahn does not use the terms, but one might see this as a combination of the diachronic and the synchronic.)

The United States, against this background, appears in sharp contrast to Europe—more precisely, to ‘‘the European Union,” which so often arrogates the continental name to itself. Whereas the popular sovereign survives in the United States, the EU has become, or was always conceived to be, a normative compound of law, regulations, and ideology without any ultimate sovereign. No one will die for the EU. It is not sacred. The United States is sacred. One reason is that, unforgettably, it was created in and by Revolution, the ultimate exception. It is a nation-state under law created by the kind of faith, decision, and sacrifice that are expressed in Revolution (the experience of creation ex nihilo, as well as destruction). Decision of this order is thus not extralegal but intrinsic to the whole operation.

Kahn, then, wants to recover, or perhaps construct anew, a particular notion of the popular sovereign by using a political-theological frame without the anti-liberal politics—a Schmittian way of doing political theory but not a Schmittian politics to go with it. Hence, he departs most explicitly from the script once he reaches Schmitt’s arch-reactionary fourth chapter. The argument has now turned to Faith and Freedom, not to mention Choice. Faith precedes doctrine and theory; faith involves decisions and the exceptional; faith therefore involves freedom, which is what Kahn—rightly, in his own terms—assumes liberalism to be about.  Sovereignty in a Schmittian frame, then, becomes a way of reconstituting the liberal community of citizens, the authoritative voice of the people, choosing in freedom amidst the ultimate, sacred commitment to, and necessity of, sacrifice. But, to use Kahn’s operative notion of rhetoric, how persuasive is this?

There is, initially, a combined archaeological and conceptual objection, or, at least, a question mark. Schmitt’s thinking is more genealogical than analogical. He wants to know how it is that liberal modernity ends up with such an anodyne theory of politics. He wants to know what it is about the translation of Christian frames and categories into putatively secular ones that renders the normative approach so pleasing and agreeable. So it is a two-pronged attack: demonstrating, procedurally, the antinomies of proceduralism (the decision on the exception is occluded, but it is nevertheless constitutive of the norm and the normal), and demonstrating, historically, how this occlusion came to be. Schmitt’s delineation of sovereignty is a polemic, most immediately against the bourgeois legalism of Kelsen and the neo-Kantians, against their timeless normativity and proceduralism. Like Hegel and Marx, he insists, against Kant, on the historical (or genealogical) as opposed to the timeless. Unlike them, however, he does so not by introducing the social, which inevitably cuts across formalism by injecting substance and actual content, but by revealing the theological origins and translations, the historical analogies, of current political concepts. The limitation of this approach is also its virtue: the relentless stringency of its peculiarly anti-sociological “sociology” of concepts. What it reveals is the typically depoliticizing and “normalizing” nature of bourgeois politics. I myself find that demasking operation useful from a socialist standpoint; but Schmitt can be useful from any number of standpoints, because his account does not take, or presuppose, a normative or ideological stand as such. Thus, while in the Theology he invokes, in the different idiom of original sin, de Maistre and Donoso Cortes, this is only one possible response—and not a necessary one—to his own genealogical diagnosis.

Notably, that response does not center on sacrifice and the sacred. In fact, this problem is not Schmitt’s. His opus contains no elaboration of it. Kahn thinks, by contrast, and almost by slippage, that all political theology presupposes the sacred. (His overlapping interlocutor here is Giorgio Agamben, whose take, however, goes in other directions; René Girard, meanwhile, is oddly absent, as, incidentally, are Hardt and Negri.) The obviousness of this connection strikes me as dubious. Natural law in the Thomasian tradition certainly presupposes sacred authority; but is the sacred/sacrifice its constitutive feature? In any case, Kahn’s account is less genealogical and more analogical: his political theology is one of contemporary identity, synchrony, its rhetorical aim being to assert the contemporary relevance of sovereignty and the sacred nature of politics. The focus on sacrifice and the sacred fits his phenomenological and existentialist orientation (ultimately with Kahn, we are in the realm of “experience”). A different kind of political theology, that of original sin or Hobbesian dastardly deeds, makes no sense to Kahn in the contemporary world, at least in the context of popular sovereignty. This dismissal may well be a little hasty, what with a Commander-in-Chief who likes to invoke Reinhold Niebuhr (not mentioned in Kahn) and the inevitable moral ambiguities of politics. The enabling uses of “ambiguity” and notions of ever-present “shortcomings” in moral fortitude and epistemological command have been well-known since the heyday of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Our current “pragmatics” are, from that angle, eminently theological in a Niebuhrian sense, though the rubric “Christian Realism” has predictably gone out of fashion.

One is confronted, then, by the liberal Kahn exalting the sacred nation/community as popular sovereignty, while the reactionary Schmitt says nothing at all about it. Schmitt’s preoccupation, seemingly a perfectly coherent Catholic one, is in fact not the nation, whether in its conservative, organic form or its liberal, popular one; it is the nature of the political and the sovereign, wherever. Arguably, part of the exercise of bringing sovereignty to the fore is precisely to unsettle notions of “the people” in any shape or form, and especially the kind that Kahn advocates. Kahn then complicates the picture. He recognizes that the postmodern condition—what he also refers to in quotation marks as a “post-epochal age”—militates against any Grand Analogy. Nevertheless, he insists, as he must, on the last instance of the sacrifice and the sacred, a last instance that actually comes or might very well come: the exception, our popular-sovereign decision to put our lives on the line.

I am sympathetic, in a way, to that argumentative impulse, but life (or “experience”) in the United States has gone in a very different direction since the 1960s. The ever-present notion of sacred territory corresponds inversely, one might say, to the willingness to sacrifice on its behalf. Ritualistic evocations of “America” (where else would politicians of all ilks end their perorations with the equivalent of “God bless America”?) and the deep-seated sense that somehow the United States is sacrosanct space—war, by definition, taking place elsewhere—are ways of being toward the world that mask an overwhelming desire, sometimes ferocious, to avoid all sacrifices: professionalized (class-based) military, ridiculously low taxes (especially for high earners), lax popular engagement, minimal obligations, a dislike for central authority bordering on hatred. The “exception” was extended into the 1950s by means of the Cold War (which was in fact the intention), but the last time the sacrifice was generally accepted was indeed the last: Vietnam. From then on, the geopolitical imperative has looked different. Accepting the globalism of the U.S. in one form or another is one thing; sacrificing for it is an altogether different one. Sovereignty, the right to decide on the exception, has thus typically resided in the geopolitical imperative, and it has been experienced on the outside. Few foreigners make any mistake about the importance of U.S. geopolitics and the “right” that it seems to embody.

Kahn is right not to see political theology as an attempt to read politics as a theologian (along the lines of Schmitt’s favorite reactionary, Donoso Cortes) but to insist on its analytical place in any account of the U.S. as a political entity. It is impossible to grasp the United States without a (genealogical) account of its secularized Christian frame. The United States is radical Protestantism writ large. To me, however, destinarianism, chosenness, messianism, covenantalism (to name but a few of the most obvious tropes) seem more pertinent than sacrifice and the sacred. I also agree with Kahn about the conceptual myopia of “the normative metaphysics of liberal political theory” as regards the non-secular. Permit me a personal anecdote, about a seminar talk on “European integration,” a perennial model-building topic of political science. A senior scholar in the field told us why his particular model explained it and others failed. Eventually, trying to be historical, I made bold and asked whether the model could account for the fact that the founders of what would become the EU were Catholics with a pronounced, postwar devotion to the civilizational and integrational precepts of a neo-Carolingian “west.” Nervous laughter ensued, intimating that this irrelevant comment was nothing less than a breach of etiquette.

Political theology, that being said, is never the whole. And Kahn recognizes this. When it comes to the whole, however, I must ultimately place myself, contra both Schmitt and Kahn’s own Rousseauian sovereignty, in line with the Hegelian-Marxist insistence on the centrality and determinacy of class and capitalism.

And yet, while Lofton is very skillful at contextualizing, she rightly refuses to reduce Oprah to a mere fetish, a mere epiphenomenal expression of social realities. The causal arrows do not point in a single direction, from base to superstructure, as the geological model of society that modernist social scientists persistently use when dealing with religion. As Lofton writes, “Oprah encompasses more than a therapist’s couch, or a woman’s purse, or the revival preacher’s bench.” If there is anything that names the surplus that Oprah’s “flexodoxy” entails, it is the intra-activity between the materiality of the spirit and the spirituality of materiality in late, thoroughly-mediatized capitalism. Through her careful product recommendations or her selection of particular books for her reading club, Oprah spiritualizes materiality, saving us from drowning in the seemingly inexhaustible profane sea of commodities and images that assault us virtually 24-7. In Lofton’s words, “[i]n the loneliness of daily disconnection and the paralysis of abundance, Oprah pervades with selective, incorporated, reliable, ritual regularity. She soothes and she sifts.” The purchase and consumption of these products, in turn, allow for the materialization of spirituality, whether in the achievement of financial success or a good sex life, as befit a fully realized self.  This is precisely what Lofton aptly calls a “spiritual capitalism.”

Here Lofton takes us beyond Weber and his notions of disenchantment and elective affinity that are still predicated on a dualistic understanding of spirit and matter, religion and society, and the sacred and the secular. Again, Lofton puts it well: “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstrably exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances. Is it a religious culture? A mass consumer culture?  Simmering beneath the particulars of this study is the proposition that to force a difference between the two is to compel a false distillation from a quagmire of commingling processes.” Or, more dramatically, “I have found that whatever distinguishing marks we make between commodities and religion, they are, for all practical purposes, arbitrary.”

This insight into the intense and extensive contemporary intra-activity of materiality and spirituality is a powerful explanatory tool. For example, it helps explain the explosive growth of global Neo-Pentecostal networks and cultures, which operate through mass media and popular culture to spread a gospel of health and wealth based on the notion that spiritual salvation, economic success, and physical well-being are mutually implicative. In my work on Brazilian transnational Neo-Pentecostal churches, which—along with Nigerian and Ghanaian churches—are spearheading the growth of the gospel of health and wealth, I have referred to this spirit-matter nexus as “pneumatic materialism.” It is a non-reductive materialism that has emerged through an intense cross-fertilization of non-dualistic autochthonous traditions and a global postmodern re-enchantment of the world, most dramatically expressed by the challenge to the “metaphysics of presence” posed by rapid changes in communications and transportation technologies.  I use the term pneumatic, which comes from the Greek word pneuma, meaning literally “breath,” the spiritual force that animates matter, not only to characterize forms of Christianity that make the Holy Spirit central to the experience of the sacred, but also a diversity of global religions, ranging from Spiritism and Santería to Neo-Shamanism and Neo-Animism, which deal with a variety of seen and unseen agents that are not reducible to narrow parameters of rational naturalism.

Latin American and African Pentecostalisms are not only pneumatic but thoroughly materialist, in the sense that they reject the European (Cartesian) dichotomy between soul and body and its denigration of the latter. Drawing from indigenous traditions that link natural forces with the spirits of ancestors, these Pentecostalisms see the world in non-dualistic terms: the “supernatural” realm of the spirits is not other-worldly; it does not stand separate from or above the natural world. Rather, spirit and flesh are constitutively intertwined, as are transcendence and immanence. For these non-dualistic vernacular Pentecostalisms, individual salvation operates through a personal relation with God and is manifested in this-worldly health and wealth. Conversion entails a new, highly malleable “spirit-matter” nexus, a holistic re-articulation of the self and its surroundings. This new pneumatic materialism is able to bridge, in multiple contexts, the tension between the seen and the unseen, among the personal, the local, the transnational, and the cosmic. This accounts for the great portability of Latin American and African Pentecostalisms.

The notion of pneumatic materialism has obvious connections with Lofton’s spiritual capitalism. Both terms seek to express complex, fluid, power-laden-yet-open-ended relations that constitute practices and discourses that have come to be constructed as religious and/or spiritual in our present age. But what does it mean that Brazilian or Nigerian Neo-Pentecostalism share a common epistemology and modus operandi with Oprah and Harpo Inc.?  While Oprah provides a particularly striking example of the spiritualization of materiality and the materialization of spirituality, she is but one expression of a global polymorphous hyper-animism that is emerging out of the ruins of Western modernity, particularly out of the crisis of overproduction and overconsumption in contemporary “casino capitalism,” as Jean and John Comaroff term it.

I would thus argue for the need to de-provincialize the U.S., to rephrase Dipesh Chakrabarty. We need to resist the trap of American exceptionalism that has dominated the study of American religious history. Lofton takes an important step in this direction with a perceptive chapter on Oprah’s missionary forays into Africa. Lofton is mindful that Harpo Inc. is a global player, “superseding the provincial borders of Winfrey’s native nation-state, foisting the O brand as a circulating object of the new international economy.” This is surely a good starting point, but it is not enough. In order to understand the specificity of Oprah’s iconicity, it is necessary to place her within global religioscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, and financescapes (to draw from Arjun Appadurai), alongside other pneumatically materialistic phenomena. Otherwise, we risk replaying the old provincial narrative of “only in America,” a narrative that, with the rise of alternative poles of economic, cultural, and religious production, such as Brazil, India, China, and Nigeria, has become increasingly myopic. The great virtue of Lofton’s book is to give us tools and insights to study the intra-activity of religion, popular culture, media, entertainment, and economics, not only in the U.S., but in this new polycentric cartography.

Credit: Sheila Vemmer/Army Times

In the historic presidential election of 2008, then candidate Barack Obama distinguished himself from the other candidates in the Democratic primaries in part on the basis of his record of having publicly opposed the war in Iraq. After winning the election, President Obama, though attempting to make good on a campaign promise to withdraw American troops and hand over control of the military campaign to the Iraqi government, has escalated the American global war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, in a mid-term election season marked largely by its rancorous tone, it is sobering to note that opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to have diminishing traction in the American imaginary. In this light, the following dialogue with Andrew Bacevich appears especially timely. Author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism, and, most recently, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, Bacevich is a celebrated veteran as well as a fierce and indefatigable critic of American militarism and imperial policies. A self-described “Catholic conservative” and an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., Bacevich is a social critic of note as much for his independence of thought as for his insistence on grounding his public remarks with a clear sense of moral principles and purpose.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: This is David Kim from the Social Science Research Council, and I am at Boston University, on April 2nd, 2010—Good Friday—for a conversation with Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations, for the next installation of Rites and Responsibilities. Professor Bacevich—may I call you Andrew?

AB: Please, yes.

DKK: As I mentioned in my invitation to you to participate in Rites and Responsibilities, the series is about questions of sovereignty, accountability, authority, and religion. In reading your remarks from various forums, including TomDispatch, among others, and given the array of your interests, I thought you were someone we very much needed in this discussion.

AB: I’m very pleased to participate.

DKK: I appreciate it. As a way to get us started, and to think a little bit about these different issues of sovereignty, religion, accountability, and authority, could you tell me a little bit about yourself? I know you grew up in the Midwest.

AB: Right.

DKK: And you’re from a military family?

AB: Well, no, I’m not. I mean, only in the sense that my parents both served in World War II. They served for the duration, as it were, but they were not career military people. My dad was actually briefly in the Army again during the Korean War, but that was simply because he had finished medical school in Chicago and he needed someplace to do an internship that would help put food on the table. And so he became a First Lieutenant Army doctor, but, again, just for one year. So, by no means am I from a military family, if that implies career military service. There’s nobody I know of in my background who fits that definition.

DKK: You have had several phases in your own career, but would you consider yourself someone who is, or was, a professional soldier?

AB: I would say that I was a professional soldier, though I don’t think I’m a professional soldier any longer, and I’ve tried to set aside that identity and go on to other things. I mean, from time to time I get referred to or introduced as “Colonel Bacevich,” and I don’t correct people, I’m not going to make a fuss about it, but I don’t call myself “Colonel Bacevich.” I used to be that, some time ago now. You know, I left the Army in 1992. I think that I’m now “Professor Bacevich,” and, frankly, I’m very happy to be Professor Bacevich.

DKK: Tell me a little bit about that transition from being “Colonel Bacevich” to becoming “Professor Bacevich.” I’ve read several profiles of you in which you talk about going to West Point, serving in Vietnam, and then remaining in the military. None of these phases of your life and career appeared to be particularly comfortable for you, at least in the portrayals that I’ve read.

AB: Well, I probably wasn’t entirely comfortable with the life that I was living. Although I would want to emphasize that a soldier’s life does provide many satisfactions: comradeship, a sense of purpose, and it can be a very stimulating environment. But the truth, I think, is that I was never really cut out for that life. And, in retrospect, I would say that the reason I lived that life for as long as I did—I was a serving officer for 23 years—quite frankly, I don’t think I had the courage to cut the umbilical cord and venture out into the big, wide world. I remember when I got to the fifth anniversary of my commissioning, which was the time when my initial obligation had ended, and I could have gotten out of the Army. At that time, my wife and I had had our first child, the economy was doing badly . . .

DKK: Now, what year is this?

AB: This is 1974.

DKK: Okay.

AB: Post-Vietnam. And the Army said, “Would you like to go to graduate school for two years, and we’ll foot the bill?”

DKK: Right.

AB: And it seemed like a great opportunity, so we basically kicked the can down the road. We got to the ten-year mark of service, and I actually went through the entire State Department Foreign Service Officer recruiting process, and the State Department said, “We’ll hire you.” This is roughly 1980, by which time we had three children, and they were going to hire me, but I would have had to take a pay cut! So my wife basically said, “We’re not gonna do that!” And by then we’re sort of marching our way up to twenty years of service, and at least some small pension as a consequence of that. But, in retrospect, I wish I’d had more guts to say, “This is not for me. I can do other things.” But I didn’t.

DKK: But backtrack a little bit. I’m thinking of you as a young man at West Point. The folks I know who’ve gone to West Point did so for a variety of reasons: sometimes out of family obligations . . .

AB: Yeah.

DKK: . . . many out of a sense of genuine service and obligation and duty. But there is a particular culture of character formation . . .

AB: Yes.

DKK: . . . that is prevalent at West Point.

AB: Yes, it’s a very strong process of socialization that I think really is the principle driver of the West Point experience. Its purpose is really not a particular “education”—that’s sort of ancillary, I think—but it is, rather, to force you into a mold.

DKK: Right. An education of a certain sort, in that sense.

AB: Yes, but it’s an education that really leans more towards training than real education. I mean, it’s not really about “free inquiry.” It’s not really about exploration. It’s about exposure to a body of knowledge, with the expectation that you will achieve, not mastery, but familiarity. And that body of knowledge, in my day, though I think it’s different today, was quite broad, but also leaned heavily towards math and science, as opposed to the liberal arts.

DKK: Can you talk a bit about the culture of the military? In terms, not just of the mastery of math and science, as you say, but also in regard, as I’m hearing you, to the policies of the American military and to the way it’s run. There appears to be, to use your language, a lack of critical reflection in the military. There is, as you say, a command structure there. Did you feel discomfort with that early on? Or is this something that, in the context of a process of deep socialization, was determinant of who you were as a young man?

AB: I’m not sure that I know, even at this point. One thing that I would say about my personal makeup—and I’ve only really come to appreciate this later in life—is that I value order, and that I am uncomfortable with disorder and uncertainty. And this can be manifest in very simple ways—you know, an orderly home, though I know you would not say that, looking at my office!

DKK: It looks quite tidy compared to my own!

AB: But one of the things that military life offered me, and that I think kept me in it, despite the fact that I wasn’t a good fit in many respects, was that it offered order and predictability and security—again, not to be dismissed when you’re a young guy with a growing family. And, so, all of those aspects of military life, I think, helped to draw me to it, or at least to keep me in it for a period of time. That said, from this distance, I would say that there are many other important aspects of what makes life within the officer corps what it is, and I would never want to imply that the values of duty, honor, and country are absent from that life, because they are there and they are important. But less positive, I think, is an implicit definition of success, or of personal fulfillment, which is tied to upward mobility.

DKK: Right.

AB: Again, I only say this in retrospect, and I know that many of the people I served with, I think, would probably disagree with me, but it became apparent to me over time that even when the officer corps spoke the language, and sincerely spoke the language, of duty, honor, and country, that, at the same time, it placed even greater value on the competition to get ahead—that to be a good soldier, to be seen to be a good soldier, was, in many respects, to be seen to be somebody who was going somewhere . . .

DKK: Right.

AB: . . . somebody who was making the promotion list, who was getting the plum assignment, who was getting opportunities, who was receiving awards and recognition. In that sense, it’s not really all that different, I think, from many other hierarchical organizations. But I think that within the officer corps, at least in my time, and maybe just in my part of the officer corps, the part in which I served, there was a great emphasis on that. And I think I conformed to that ethic in ways that I would say today that I regret, because it’s pernicious, and it’s not conducive to honesty. It’s actually conducive to dishonesty, because in many respects the way you get ahead is to be sensitive to which way the winds are blowing and to conform. And in that sense, it is an environment that is not at all conducive to critical thought and, I think, self-understanding. I’ll give you a specific example right now, which is one of the things that I’ve been writing a little bit about, and thinking about, and that is—I don’t want to make this sound too much like inside baseball here . . .

DKK: That’s okay.

AB: There has been an underappreciated, radical transformation in American military thought over the past four years, roughly. The implications of this change are monumental, and it is the very fact that there’s this tendency towards conformity within the officer corps, and an absence of critical thought, that I think creates barriers that prevent us from understanding the significance of what has happened.

Now, what has happened? Well, what has happened is that the officer corps in which I served, the officer corps that grew out of the Vietnam experience, and whose collective mindset was very much shaped in a negative way by Vietnam, determined after Vietnam that it would embrace rather fiercely a conception of warfare that would prevent us from ever getting stuck in another Vietnam. And that conception of warfare was one that insisted that the United States would fight short wars, producing decisive outcomes and preventing the alienation of the officer corps from the affections of the American people. In other words, no more counterinsurgency! That’s the Army in which I served in the 1970s—or, excuse me, in the 1980s and 1990s, for the most part—and that’s the Army that invaded Iraq in 2003. And in Iraq, of course, these expectations of short, decisive, economical wars were demolished. Indeed, the expectation was based on a false conception of what war is all about. But what was the reaction of the officer corps to that failure? The reaction was to rediscover counterinsurgency, and to make counterinsurgency the new American way of war, now ostensibly applied successfully in Iraq and at the moment being applied by General McChrystal in Afghanistan. And to somebody of my generation and my perspective, this was an astonishing development, because in essence we now have an officer corps that really doesn’t believe that war works.

If you listen to people like General Petraeus and General McChrystal, they say that there is no such thing as a military victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, that what we need to do in places like Iraq and Afghanistan really amounts to a project of armed nation-building, and that armed nation-building is now really the American way of war. That is the military response, as it were, to the problem posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. Well, let’s think about this a second: if indeed counter-insurgency, or armed nation-building, is the new American way of war, and if we are engaged in what the Pentagon calls a “long war” in order to deal with the problem of jihadism—well, how many other counterinsurgencies are we going to be required to undertake after Afghanistan? Where to next? Pakistan? Iran? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? I mean, it is a preposterous notion that this new American way of war—counterinsurgency or armed nation-building—can possibly offer a coherent response to the problem we’re facing. And yet, there’s this general acceptance that the idea is a good one, the implications of which condemn us, if we continue down this path, to permanent war!

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

There is an embarrassing giddiness in the religious studies world today. With our new mantra in hand—the new “salience” of religion—we, both scholars of religion and other self-appointed spokespersons for religion, feel licensed to instruct the world on the importance of religion. We are suddenly relevant again. Or so we think.

If there is an opportunity for religious studies today, and my own view is increasingly that this is an opportunity more for listening than for speaking, the Chicago Report suggests the likelihood that this opportunity will be misunderstood and misused. Religion today is an immensely complex phenomenon. And there are many who speak in its name. It is far from clear that there is any sense in which generalizing about religion is useful as a political matter—or, for that matter, that the United States government should be spearheading a new reformation.

The Chicago Report reflects both a particularly American take on religion, descriptively and normatively, and a particularly American style of imperialism. In service of the new “imperative”—the new “salience” of religion—the Task Force proclaims a usable history and account of religion that is often just plainly wrong, and sometimes grotesquely so.

The Report announces that: “Religion is now playing an increasingly influential role—both positive and negative—in the public sphere”; that “Extremist groups also use religion”; and that we should support “those doing good, while isolating those that invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion.”  It recommends that the National Security Council initiate a new strategy in American foreign policy. The goal of this new strategy would be to promote American interests through engagement with constructive religious actors, engagement that would distinguish good people of faith from bad ones and deliberately marginalize religious extremists, all in the name of American security. The Report knows what is constructive and it knows how to divide the good guys from the bad guys—that is, vital, autonomous, authentic, credible, and legitimate religion, and genuine religious freedom, from that which is extreme, destructive, and not accepting of “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.”

The record is not very good in this respect. Religion is powerful, when it is, because it embraces the full spectrum of human activity. Distinguishing the good from the bad has often divided religious insiders, as well as outsiders. Furthermore, the United States government has long dealt with “religious actors” at home and abroad who do not embrace “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.” American governments have been active sponsors of proselytization in the name of civilization in the case, for example, of Native Americans and Mormons, as well as supporters of both regimes and rebels who are motivated by religious ideologies that do not support “pluralism, freedom, and democracy,” as, for example, Israel, or the mujahideen who resisted Soviet rule in Afghanistan. There is no reason to think that it will get better. Nor do we have any reason to believe that the ambitious and utopian program for the reform of religion proposed by the Chicago Report, and expressed in this astonishing prediction—“Over time, as religious communities play even greater roles in the positive transformation of their societies, the importance of vital and autonomous religious agency will become more visible, pronounced, and politically consequential”—can, or even should, be accomplished, or that the National Security Council is the man for the job.

Most importantly, perhaps, for a report about religion, there is not much religion in this report. One searches in vain for anything new about religion, beyond a now familiar post-9/11 account of religion being a force for good and ill, an account that is supported by examples that are so hackneyed as to be not much more than scapegoating. For example, in discussing the best and worst of religion—obviously seeking a non-Islamic example—the Report uses Haiti as an instance of  the “best and worst of faith-based efforts”:

A classic example of the wonders and ills was the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. Eighty-one U.S. charities, including faith-based organizations, raised or pledged $611 million for relief efforts within three weeks of the devastating quake, while legions of development personnel worked in the midst of great suffering to provide food, medicine, and shelter. Meanwhile, a Baptist group was implicated in the kidnapping of children, which raised local suspicions and tainted the immense, positive contribution of the faith-based development effort.

This is the best and worst of faith-based efforts in the world? Nowhere in the report is the massive sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church mentioned. Surely, that scandal reflects the worst far more than the misguided but well-intentioned efforts of a few would-be rescuers of children. But in this report, the Catholic Church is one of the good guys. As for women’s rights, they are deliberately relegated to second place.

This report is also oddly inconsistent about whether religion is an individual matter or a collective matter. At times, the word religion seems to refer to the familiar, modernist, progressive, American, protestant form that is now widely documented and described as the religion of the first amendment. But, curiously, a footnote defines religion for the purposes of the report in a quite un-American way:

We define religion as an established system of belief, practice, and ritual based in a collective affirmation of a transcendent or otherworldly reality that encompasses and gives ultimate meaning to earthly existence . . . we are particularly focused on multigenerational, transnational religions organized around institutions, leaders, and disciples or followers—adherents who normally number in the millions worldwide, but who are supremely local in their influence and impact.

It seems that disestablishment is good policy at home, but that establishment will be the policy abroad, because “an established system” of “multigenerational” institutions with “leaders” and “followers” is the way to control people and the NSC needs formal actors to engage with.

Interestingly, the question of established religion reveals a division among the Report’s authors. One of the major recommendations in the Report is the following:

Clarify the Applicability of the Establishment Clause. The Task Force calls upon the president of the United States, advised by executive offices and agencies who have studied the problem, to clarify that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not bar the United States from engaging religious communities abroad in the conduct of foreign policy, though it does impose constraints on the means that the United States may choose to pursue this engagement. Such clarification would serve as a major “next step” in the president’s post-Cairo follow-up.

A footnote to this recommendation refers the reader to a dissent and a response to the dissent appended to the report. The dissenters, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Farr, William Inboden, David Neff, and Timothy Samuel Shah, announce that they “believe that in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary (evidence which, as the report demonstrates, does not now exist), no administration should impose constraints on American foreign policy that are imagined to derive from the Establishment Clause.”

The responders, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Kent Greenawalt, Abner Mikva, George Rupp, and David Saperstein, while embracing the definition of religion in footnote 7, but perhaps concerned about the broader implications of any suggestion that the Constitution has no authority beyond the territorial borders of the U.S., apparently also felt constrained to announce categorically that “It is beyond question that all branches of the U.S. government must act in accordance with the Constitution when conducting American foreign policy,” and, further, that “There is no reason to believe that the Establishment Clause is an exception to this requirement.”

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Since 1947, the Supreme Court has understood the Amendment to have been incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause, so that it is now applicable to state governments as well as to the federal government. It is broadly understood today to prohibit the privileging by the governments of the U.S. of one religion over another, and to prohibit government funding of religious worship and proselytization. As the report mentions, the U.S. Supreme Court has not expressly ruled on the applicability of the establishment clause to foreign policy. One could speculate on what this Court might do if asked, particularly after its decision in Hein v. FFRF; but when combined with the definition of religion announced in footnote 7, the view of the dissenters seems to be that those prohibitions should not guide American policy abroad. American policy abroad should discriminate among religions, and should fund and promote the religious activity that it finds good and in the best interests of the U.S.

While periodic, and not altogether successful, efforts at disestablishment have produced a distinctively American style of religious governance—one that is not widely shared throughout the world—it is difficult not to see the adoption of an explicitly establishmentarian position by American foreign policy makers as opportunistic and naïve. Established religion is, by definition, not accepting of “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.” The sacred and the secular are deployed in the report with a startling slipperiness. As Beth Hurd says in her companion piece [forthcoming at The Immanent Frame], a peculiarly toxic form of “American exceptionalism, and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power, are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report, lending ‘a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions.’”

At the same time, “secular’ policies of the U.S. are exempt from responsibility for the creation of violence. With Beth Hurd, and with Rami Khouri, at The Daily Star, I believe this Report says more about “us” than it does about “them.” Khouri writes:

The Chicago report is an important sign of how sensible Americans continue to seek a more complete understanding of the world they live in, and try to forge better policies to navigate that world. But the process reflects the weaknesses in American government policies as a whole in that it exaggerates the role of religion as a distinct independent actor or force, and does not factor into the resurgence of religiosity the stimulus provided by American policies in the Arab-Asian region (and Israeli policies in the Middle East).

This report simply dresses up American political realism in a religious garb. It both misses the real story and shamelessly exploits the politics of fear to support American interests.

It is unquestionably the case that religion seems suddenly to be in everyone’s mouths. There are a number of causes for this, in my view, both historical and epistemological. In part, religion as the other of the enlightenment returns in philosophical circles as good to think. Religion returns as a useful label for a range of practices that exceed the individual—to describe communal and cultural ways of being in the world, as well as material and incarnational accounts of human life. Politically, too, religion is a useful catchall for resistance to various oppressive regimes, the state, the west, the market, science, globalization…. But these issues are beyond the scope of this piece—and beyond the imagination of the report.

In making this claim, I am looking for a way to open a space for a disposition and an outlook that I believe can help mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. Let me be clear: I do not think that the myth of American exceptionalism has gone away quietly in the twilight of the Bush administration. In my estimation, the disenchantment of giving up the myth of American exceptionalism will involve experiencing the lived effects of the catastrophic, of coming to terms with cultural nihilism, and even with worldly collapse. It will involve relinquishing the comforts—metaphysical and otherwise—of being an imperial power.

With these severe conditions in mind, let me refine the idea of adopting a poetic disposition in the face of crisis, and propose that an effective and important response to cultural nihilism and worldly collapse will require the cultivation and adoption of what I call an elegiac temperament. The moral psychology of enduring and surviving the catastrophic—which is to say, the conditions that motivate the self, that allow the self to enact agency—requires considerable maturity and courage.  It beckons an acknowledgment of what is lost, as well as a vision for making the move from one way of life to another, from one world to another; or, to use Jonathan Lear’s phrase about surviving cultural devastation, surviving the catastrophic requires “radical hope.”

So why call for the cultivation of an elegiac temperament for our times? A simple answer is that the catastrophes and crises of our times demand strategies to make sense of the cataclysms unfolding before us: namely, moral crises of war, of ecological disaster, of economic meltdowns, and the like. More specifically, the catastrophic also has the potential to set in motion a re-evaluation of political and moral commitments, whether those follow the conventions of civil religion (e.g., piety about constitutionalism) or those attending the ethos of American exceptionalism. In other words, the elegiac temperament evokes an attitude and disposition of humility and lament—one that spurs efforts to rethink the present in light of a revised view of the past and future. One finds expression of the elegiac temperament—though not quite elegy itself—in W. E. B. DuBois’s lament in “The Passing of the First Born” from The Souls of Black Folk, when he writes of “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.” More specific to the condition of the exhaustion of American exceptionalism, the elegiac temperament registers in the concluding passages of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, where he writes of his ambivalent “love” of America:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty?

And later:

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

The elegiac temperament, as well as the modern elegy itself, begins and ends in thoroughgoing skepticism about conventions and received practices, and does so in counterpoint with the travails of the late modern self. In other words, the late-modern mourning and memory work of the elegiac temperament—akin, really, to a register of melancholia—works with and against the late modern self’s struggle for freedom, agency, authority, and identity.

So let me pose my vexing question once again: how do we effectively mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism?

There is a paradox here: on the one hand, there appears to be increasing popular recognition among Americans that America is an empire. This, in turn, comes with the further recognition that the animating ethos of the American imperial project—namely, American exceptionalism—has exhausted itself. This is a situation akin, as I suggested above, to worldly collapse. On the other hand, this world (here, the world of American exceptionalism) collapses, and yet it goes on. Hence the paradox.

A fundamental challenge becomes how to evaluate and judge the best means of working with the remnants of a tradition—here, the tradition of American exceptionalism and perhaps that of civil religion—after the catastrophic has done its work. In the case of mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism, the analysis is twofold.  First, of course, is the need for acknowledging that the myth has indeed been exhausted, if not altogether “lost.” This is the strenuous work of reckoning with the catastrophic. I for one am relieved that the language of crisis and catastrophe has been re-introduced and reclaimed in American public and political discourse. Bursting bubbles, rising tides, bearish markets, homes foreclosed, dreams deferred, and abounding terrorism are just a few of the markers of our dark times, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase.

The second move is the tougher one—namely, the task of finding a language, a means of intelligibility, or of making sense in a way that will help to brace the spirit through crisis, through the catastrophic.

I should also note that I am invoking the double meaning of “exhaustion” here in regard to the myth of American exceptionalism. On the one hand, I am referring to the exhaustion of the idea and the ethos of American exceptionalism, in the sense that it has played itself out and has been used up. On the other hand, I also mean exhaustion as depletion, as draining, and as extreme mental and physical fatigue.

I am dispatching the call to cultivate an elegiac temperament in response to an acknowledgment that the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism comes at a price—call it pride, call it a sense of public dignity—and knowing, also, that the stakes are quite high given that empires tend not to relinquish pride and dignity gracefully, but will often resist their own imperial decline with lethal brutality.

In regard to the elegiac temperament and to civil religious traditions, let me cite the example of one robust tradition and myth of American exceptionalism—namely, the ambiguous legacy of Emerson.

So, what, if anything, survives of this tradition/myth of American exceptionalism? Perhaps the most obvious and telling example of the enduring power of what I would call a debased-Emersonian strand of American exceptionalism, finds its most prominent, and arguably most articulate, proponent in the person of President Barack Obama.

Obama is fond of invoking the language of debased Emersonianism. Its simple version finds expression in the use of Emerson’s language of self-reliance and self-determination as bromides of American distinctiveness—indeed, exceptionalism. It is an ethic that is of a piece with the providential view of America as a nation of destiny. There have been deeply problematic and widespread effects on American foreign policy and American self-conception that have yielded and been guided by the ego-ideal of debased Emersonianism. America has been a nation guided by the arrogance characteristic of empires. We are now at a moment in which the fractures and tensile relations rendered by the long war on terrorism and other catastrophes have ostensibly revealed that the myth of American exceptionalism can no longer bear the weight of the American imperial enterprise.

Obama consistently appeals to the ethic of self-reliance, often couched as a charge for “self-responsibility.” The overwhelming evidence of Obama’s electoral victory last year, and the broad resonance of his campaign, should be sufficient proof of the durability of this aspect of the Emersonian legacy. What I want to argue, though, is that it is a legacy of ambiguous expression, at least as it is articulated by Obama and reiterated by the American populace—both of whom seem to yearn for the reinvigoration of the singularity, and presumably of the supremacist qualities of American exceptionalism. Consider Obama’s election night declaration: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you.” Now couple this with the legacy of American supremacy, and it should be evident that we have before us a troubling brew. This is not to say that I think we shouldn’t be fighting terrorism. Of course we should. Nonetheless, I have deep concerns about the ways in which Obama could end up, not turning America away from imperialism, but instead enabling the transformation of America into a more efficient and, frankly, a “friendlier” empire.

Now, given what I have identified in terms of American imperial practices and attitudes as promoting the myth of American exceptionalism as their horizon of meaning, it is fair and right to ask: “why would we want to mourn that world view?” After all, isn’t it a good thing, one might ask, that this imperial ethos is dead or dying? Isn’t this a cause for celebration rather than mourning?  I am certainly one to argue that we as a nation not only should but must comport ourselves in the world in fundamentally different ways. And it is my hope that someone like Obama will help to render that a reality. Having said that, history teaches that the U.S. is a nation that has enormous trouble resisting the urge to act with arrogance, rather than humility. Even in his speeches, Obama incants the ringing tones of songs of American exceptionalism: “Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes […] from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

Let me put it more forcefully: I am trying to engage and join a project that recuperates these values of democracy, freedom, and hope. Nonetheless, I think that such recuperation can only take place through a reckoning with American complicity with evil in the world and with the acknowledgment that it will be difficult to be different from what we have been––as a nation, as a people––for the last two-plus centuries. Again, I worry that America is a nation that is too prone to arrogance, to over-confidence, to the indulgence of self-interest. And I also worry that once we realize as a people—the social imaginary of “the American people”—that we are in fact living through a catastrophic age, the relinquishing of the myth of American exceptionalism will leave us prone to reactionary forces rather than to moral and ethical ones.

So, how do we recoup a constructive Emersonian ethos from the legacy of its debased version? My strong sense is that if we are to avoid repeating the arrogance of the American exceptionalist project, it will require somehow revealing and uncovering values and virtues of redemption in the Emersonian ethos after the catastrophic. This work can begin by asking: To what remnants of this tradition does the elegiac temperament attune us? What resources can we bring to bear to render the elegiac temperament effective and generative? In contrast to what I was earlier calling “debased Emersonianism,” consider Stanley Cavell’s project of Emersonian perfectionism—in my view, one of the most effective and most fecund transpositions of the tradition. This is a legacy of Emerson that seeks deep democratic expression, rather than radical individuation and triumphalism. It finds genius in ordinary people and in the everyday. There is a hermeneutics of humility at work in this version of the Emersonian legacy, and it is one saturated with what I am calling the elegiac temperament. It finds expression in Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionist ethic and aspiration, which demands the commitment to becoming intelligible to oneself (and, collectively, to ourselves) through an active refusal of presiding norms of conformity and authority, such as an unflinching piety toward the providential view of American exceptionalism.

I am arguing for sober reflection and consideration of the debilitating, yet constitutive ethos of American exceptionalism on the parts of political liberals and conservatives alike. The challenge is finding a way to lift up the version of Emersonianism that I want to claim—call it Emersonian perfectionism, strenuous Emersonianism, or even Emersonian attunement—as a remainder worth retrieving and distinguishing from the debased Emersonianism that has served as a core of the myth of American exceptionalism. In this sense, the elegiac temperament can clarify what is often a confused (and confusing) practice of discerning honor and integrity amongst competing moral genealogies of American values and virtues.

Cultivating the elegiac temperament of the future perfect possibilities of lives not yet lived, and the sobering absorption of the past conditional of memories hard won constitute a set of pre-conditions for mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. It may be that we will only be able to mourn as we live through the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism if we are able to self-elegize ourselves against this myth; that is if we can engage in the Socratic practice of self-knowledge—in the spirit of Cavell’s ideal of aspiring to become intelligible to oneself—and subsequently come to realize an elegiac temperament that reflects a candor about each of our commitments and beliefs that will reveal, through psychic interrogation, contradictions that reside within each of us. Certainly, we all find contradictions within ourselves, as well as with the people that we love. I certainly know how hard it is to reconcile who I say I am, for example, and what it is that I love, with the ability and willingness to act on these claims about myself. To adopt an elegiac temperament is to embrace an ethic of aspiration, as well as the commitment to self-cultivation and attunement. It is, finally, also to acknowledge that one has to die a little in order to live fully, freely. This is an elegiac move because it requires acknowledging that with change there is loss, especially a loss of love. It requires sacrifice.  And it requires courage, conviction, and the willingness to leave one world behind in order to lay claim to another world, and, further, to leave a love behind by claiming a new love.  Disenthralling ourselves from American imperial ideology may mean that we will make a world with heavy hearts, but hearts that have turned, converted, shifted to a world worth dying for and living for.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

American exceptionalism has been dealt a body-blow. I want to suggest, however, that the variant of exceptionalism that was upset by the Bush era was only a vertical model, and that a horizontal image has not only survived, but is flourishing—perhaps, in fact, finding ultimate expression in the personage of Barack Obama as the official representation of the body politic.

Traditionally, there have been two distinct, coexistent images of American exceptionalism—one vertical, and one horizontal. The vertical model envisions America as the pinnacle of a global hierarchy, the privileged “city upon a hill” over an otherwise flat or downward-sloping world. The horizontal model pictures America as being, instead, a consummation, the “melting pot” where the peoples of the world meet, intermingle, and are ennobled by virtue of constituting collective humanity within morally important national borders. In the first picture, America is separate from the world of nations, and in the second, America has subsumed the world of peoples.

The tropes coexist and are mutually constitutive. Indeed, the vertical picture relies on the notion of a national tradition of Judeo-Christianity, and on the idol of the Revolution as a moment of rupture with world history which marks the beginning of a teleology of justice. But also, in part, it relies on the horizontal picture itself, just as the horizontal image invests importance in the national borders in part on the premises of the vertical model. They are, in complex ways, interdependent, but their sources of confirmation are separate. The vertical model, a hierarchical image, is confirmed in the world of nations, by the maintenance of an image of America in a position of dominance. The horizontal model is confirmed in the world of peoples, where still-particularized Others are pitted against notionally de-particularized, democratically humanistic Americans. That is: where the vertical model finds confirmation in, say, American-led “coalitions of the willing” (as long as they are American-led) the horizontal model is confirmed by the very idea of (ethnically marked) Islamic fundamentalism.

So, while many have claimed that the Bush era has ushered in a decline of American exceptionalism, I want to suggest that it is only the vertical model which has been upset. The sure sense of dominance in a global hierarchy was interrupted by the terrorists attacks of 9/11, reasserted through entrance into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but continually shaken thereafter as foreign policy outcomes, as well as images of America being reflected back from without, made America’s position as transcendent “top dog” increasingly implausible. The political culture that allowed America to be judged by the standards of other nations—and found lacking—was one which severely damaged the vertical picture of exceptionalism.

And that vertical diminishment, iterated in, for example, Dick Morris’s claim that Obama “repealed the Declaration of Independence” during his European tour (a conviction doubled when he bowed to the leader of another state), is now deeply felt—if one can gauge by the number of times it seems to have been repeated across cable news and (particularly right-wing) online media.

Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric has frequently confirmed the view that his administration is deliberately dismantling the vertical model; he seems to aim for a stance which (either in fact or appearance) is one of pragmatic world-engagement. For example, his campaign speech last summer in Berlin was riddled with gestures that move away from a position insisting on American preeminence, such as his claim that “there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world.” And though his speech on the subject of globalization and global problems has often been more tempered at home, the general direction, I think, is the same. Vertical exceptionalism has been dealt a body-blow; sooner expect Obama to speak of a world with many “cities upon hills” (to which, perhaps, “torches of liberty” have been passed) than the American nation as a lordly, lonely city upon one.

The horizontal image, however, has not only survived, but flourishes—perhaps, in fact, finding ultimate expression in the personage of Barack Obama as the official representation of the body politic. Horizontal exceptionalism, after all, is about the consummation of cultures. It is, in short, the exceptionalism by which Americanization is synonymous with universalization. And it was given new wings in Obama’s Inaugural Address:

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

If what I’m calling “vertical exceptionalism” posited an America that was a shining city upon a hill against a world of assumedly un-American darkness, can this new horizontal version, now shorn of some of its vertical underpinnings, instead both recognize and engage with a world which has, partly through the workings of all the variants of exceptionalism, actually become increasingly Americanized? And—this is the real question, as America enters what appears to be a new era of engagement—can it do so without repeating the mistake of the past: assuming that, because Americanization is supposed to be merely a form of universalization, it is benign?

The above passage from the Inaugural Address implies an American role in “revealing” the world’s “common humanity;” I wonder whether the form of that revelation might yet be a violence against particularities, violence still rationalizable in the terms of horizontal exceptionalism because those particularities (Islam, Chinese-style mixed economic forms, racialized solidarities) obstruct American-style “universal” democratic humanism, and hence are particularities in which the cultures of people obstruct “our common humanity.” Barack Obama has named his tradition: a patchwork heritage, in which tribal lines dissolve, the subject of which was the mainstay of his recent address in Cairo.

Still, it’s too soon to say how Obama’s idea of heritage will convert to global destiny.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Back in the fall of 2008, I talked to alumni of Amherst College in San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and spoke about theories of the American presidencies, leaning a lot on the work of a Yale professor named Steven Skowronek. In The Politics Presidents Make, he argued that presidencies exist within two timeframes: a cyclical timeframe which adheres more or less to the scheme of critical elections, and what he calls “secular time.” The latter has to do with the historical development of the United States—a tiny, fragile, vulnerable country that, through the exploitation of slaves and immigrant labor, the destruction of Native Americans, and the great good luck of rich natural resources, as well as the hard work and genius of many good people, evolved into an imperial power during the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. This expansion occurred with an accompanying extraordinary growth of military, bureaucracy, and the centralization of power. The immense web of laws and regulations, the growth of the welfare state, and the recession of the European powers as a result of WWII enabled the United States to become the great global power of the twentieth century.

In the last part of that century we overextended ourselves in many ways, as all empires do. The intensified power of the great, organized interests—since the advent of neo-liberalism, the immense corporations—created a large permanent national government joined at the hip with private powers. Globalization has been the result of that neo-liberalism, and helped transform the United States into the debtor nation that it now is. This development, coupled with an increasingly polarized political climate that was in part brought about by that very growth, and that has been exacerbated by the emergence of new forms of electronic media, has increasingly diminished the ability of presidents over this secular time to fundamentally shift the direction of government. As Theodore Lowi, a teacher of both Skowronek and myself, argued in a book called The Personal President, presidents must act immediately to fulfill their campaign pledges while they have a window of opportunity, and that over the past century that window of opportunity has grown more and more narrow, so that what a president now does in the earliest days of his or her administration largely is all that he or she will be able to do.  Moreover, as things continue to get worse for the majority, during their campaigns presidents must promise more than they can deliver. They are helpless giants, in a sense, buffeted by forces beyond their control, unable to respond to an increasingly deep crisis brought about in part by the very success of the country in becoming what it is.

The question back in the fall, when we imagined Obama might be elected, was, how much time would he have to enact his agenda? That is, given the depth of our problems, what would he be able to do, how much patience would the American people have, and how much support would he be able to garner from the Congress? (This is of course a different question, because the gap between what the public wants and what the members of Congress want have rarely been larger than they are now.)

What does any of this have to do with the question of this symposium? When Obama said, “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.  These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,” he was of course evoking the idea of American exceptionalism, a claim that we are possessed of distinctive values that, in times of crisis, come to the fore, and then inspire us to save our sorry asses.

Presidents are compelled to use the language of exceptionalism in two important ways. If our presidents are to be believed, we are always doing something New and something Great. We have had, in the past eighty years, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the New Nixon, Morning in America, A Thousand Points of Light, a New Covenant, a Bridge to Tomorrow, and Compassionate Conservatism, and now we have a New Foundation. These slogans are made to do a lot of work, in that they suggest another word that became the brand of the Obama campaign last year: change. This rhetoric reflects an interesting fact: while it is common for us to claim that there is no real progressivism in the United States anymore, the truth is that both ruling parties for the past eighty years have had to envelop themselves in a rhetoric of progressive change or transformation in order to be credible with the American people, who are deeply addicted to Newness and Greatness.

At the same time, and indeed as a part of the rhetoric of exceptionalism, presidents constantly invoke the Constitution as the rock upon which this church of America is built. The Constitution, whether you believe it to be a living document (Justice Breyer) or a dead one (Justice Scalia), is the ultimate foundation upon which all renewal is supposed to take place. No one can question it, especially the core of it, though many are incredibly inventive in interpreting it.

Obama has thus far followed pretty much the same pattern as all modern presidents, though he is far more competent than his predecessor. In terms of the length of Lowi’s window of opportunity, Obama has been remarkably successful at enacting key parts of his agenda early on, while sustaining a continued high level of popularity with the American people. And his presidency effectively began early, given the collapse of the Bush administration in the interim between the election and the inauguration. But the enactment of the stimulus package, the successful extension of TARP monies, the credit reform, and the beginning of the health program have created a sense of momentum that has so far served Obama’s administration well. Moreover, most of Obama’s initiatives on foreign policy have been embraced, so far, at least, by the public. In part, all of this early success is due to the weakened condition of the GOP in Congress and nationally, but it is also a testimony to the political skills of Obama and his team of advisors.

But despite these advances, the language of his Inaugural Address demanded much more than Obama has been able to produce. Our crisis is not simply one of spirit: the United States is facing a decline, as is inevitable for imperial powers, and how that decline is to be addressed needs to be at the heart of this presidency. And in this regard, Obama is little different than George Bush in the two arenas of power that matter most: economic policy and national security policy.

Let me stipulate—I think the offenses against the Constitution in so many of the actions taken by the Bush administration were outrageous, and indeed, I would judge them to warrant criminal trials. But I also find it telling that President Obama is trying to prevent the serious investigation of these alleged crimes. And I find it equally telling that he is trying to figure out a way to evade the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus by suggesting that the indefinite detention of some of the Gitmo prisoners—some who cannot go on trial because the evidence was tainted as a result of torturous interrogation—may need to continue to be policy. Moreover, I have noticed that we now have members of the Obama administration suggesting that we may need to continue our occupation of Iraq for up to ten more years, and that we need to build a Green Zone-like American Embassy in Kabul. While couched in much softer rhetoric, and with more diplomatic approaches to the Arab world than his fundamentalist Christian predecessor, Obama has not separated himself from President Bush’s policy, especially Bush’s second term policy, when it became clearer that, as they say, the jig was up, and the cover-up of these policies had to be coupled with a dismantling of the worst abuses.

On the domestic side of the ledger, while the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court signals a mild willingness to begin to constrain corporate abuses of power, the larger frame again indicates as much continuity with the Bush administration as departure. Banks too big to fail, cooperation with health insurance giants, a TARP fund that gives to the rich and steals from the rest of us, no real relief for those who were victimized by subprime mortgages, none of these abuses of capitalism are being attacked for what they are.

Why is it that there are these key continuities in crucial areas of policy, some of which Obama vehemently opposed when he was running for president, and continues to oppose at the level of rhetoric? After all, he is supposedly constrained by the Constitution, compelled, if he is to obey the law himself, to dismantle these illegal security policies. And while the rape of the Treasury (I was fascinated to learn the term “moral hazard” during the free fall of last autumn) may not be unconstitutional, or even necessarily illegal, it does go hand in hand with the need to prop up a financial system that is almost completely beyond the control of a supposedly democratic state.

But here’s the thing. Since World War II, every president has violated the Constitution in matters consequential enough to result, if one were to be a stickler at all, in impeachment. Truman seized the steel mills, Eisenhower secretly threatened nuclear war against the Chinese, and JFK ordered assassinations. LBJ was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon for Watergate, and I suspect that a condition for Nixon stepping down was the pardon Ford issued. Reagan had the Iran-contra affair, and Clinton overstepped Congress in going to war in the Balkans. Bush—well, we’ve been there.

Notice that the serious offenses are all connected to foreign policy. But they are also connected with the politics of the Cold War, and then the politics of globalization. In all cases, presidents felt frustrated either by statutory constraints, or by the slowness of Congress to approve, or by the need to wave bloody flags in order to get Congress to move. What am I suggesting?

We believe in the Constitution, and we believe in the special fate of America. But we’ve not necessarily been well served by either belief during the past half-century. Obama, if he is to be the great president his ardent supporters want him to be, may well need to imitate another great leader from the past. We need to look for a leader who has managed the decline of an imperial power, without destroying the world. I am referring to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who spoke the truth and led the Russian people past a system of government that no longer could be imagined to serve them. Too expensive, too corrupt, falling from its own weight, bankrupt financially, foolishly nationalistic—that country was the most dangerous country in the world at the time, as much because of its delusions as because of its destructive power.

The United States, of course, is not the same as the Soviet Union was. Empires decline on their own timetables and in their own ways. American renewal in the Obama years may involve a new rhetoric of unity, may involve a vast rebuilding of our infrastructure in more environmentally sound ways, and may involve a renewed resolve to secure the United States against the terror that lurks in a way that doesn’t shame us. But, and this is a big but, if we do not learn to live more humble lives, in diminished circumstances, and replace our foolish dreams of a return to the American century past, we will suffer a lot more than we will if we finally face the truth about the damage we have done to ourselves, the obsolete character of our governing institutions, and the failure of democracy that we have suffered in order to acquire this strange empire we are now losing. As Obama also said in his speech, it is time to put away childish things.

Such a task calls for a great leader, one who will be willing to engage in the sort of sacrifice that Obama, for all his gifts, has not yet shown himself willing to make. Putting away childish things means growing up. Growing up means speaking first, sticking your neck out, saying what is true and just regardless of the consequences for yourself. Obama, I fear, has yet to grow up.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

A nation is not an indifferent condition for the happiness and social relatedness of its citizens, but serves as a kind of habitus for them, shaping and being shaped by discourse and practice. The following reflections propose that two key elements of the American project form rudimentary aspects of the national imaginary, the collective resource for the conception and practice of nationhood. These are exceptionalism and civil religion. The two are deeply interwoven. I propose to define them and to parse their relationship in the American case.

To begin with a familiar claim: at the heart of the American project is the bracing promise of starting anew and the conviction that doing so is possible, that citizens are able to clean the slate of old debts, bad ideas, and the burden of inherited injustices. It would be nice if matters were that simple, but of course they are not. In the first instance, full citizenship has never been universal. It began with white men and only slowly, fitfully, and violently has the circumference of the empowered been expanded. The circle is still not large enough. Each generation of Americans demonstrates this with renewed efforts at including both old and new citizens in the promises of liberty proclaimed by the Constitution and its many amendments’ reinvigoration of freedom. Yet the circle has expanded, and that is an achievement worth regarding as a portent of things to come.

It is tempting to continue with the bold assertion that we may discern in this primordial American yearning for the liberty of a fresh start a power that impels citizens in all their varieties. Deeper than their difference from one another is a root principle of nationhood: “Ours is an exception to the rule. You have heard that people seek only their private good; you have heard that the people are a mob incapable of the virtue of self-rule; you have heard that only might makes right; you have heard that kings must come from gods to govern the sheep (or wolves) of human kind. Not so with us.”

But where in this fable of exception do Americans recognize that this is an immigrant’s conception of a new world, and not the perception of native peoples or slaves? What promises the nation made to them, it took away or deferred. And promises it never made came only with struggle and the agony of long waiting. Still, that the Constitution’s guarantee of liberties can be afforded to those formerly deprived shows that freedom is not bound to its limited origin. Even the slow arrival of liberty, miserable to be sure, suggests that the exceptionalism that white male Americans originally conceived may have carried an idea larger than the race and gender and cultural boundaries that then constrained its present but not its future life.

If that is so, we may venture a more expansive definition. National exceptionalism is any nation’s compelling sense of purpose to recognize and promote human liberty. Liberty is the distinctively modern character of human purpose. The idea that we are each by nature free, in possession of the inalienable right and capacity to determine for ourselves the meaning of our lives and to realize this right while living amicably among other, equally free people—there is the very origin of exception. Indeed, the universally human exception. Why the polity of nationhood? Only because that is the modern form of the body politic, the prevailing social unit or body that persists in relation to other bodies of its kind as the level of organization best equipped to preserve the common and individual good of its members. The modern project of liberty is historically inseparable from the nation.

American exceptionalism comes in many forms, all of which unfold historically. None is final or essential; all convey the principal or archetypal exception, and do so for better or for worse. The idea that America is somehow better than “Old Europe” or any other government or nation is a jingoistic notion of exceptionalism. But that is not American exceptionalism tout court. Nor is the historical assertion of American Protestants that the nation was set aside by providence to perform a special millennial work. Nor is the claim of manifest destiny, clearing out or sequestering native peoples to make way for white settlement of the continent, or seizing territory from Mexico. Nor is the imperialist impulse to establish offshore colonies. Nor is the project of disseminating American capitalism abroad. Nor is the nationalistic enterprise of dominating the West and bullying those who do not conform to American interests. A better claim might be made for “making the world safe for democracy” or promoting economic justice at home and abroad or leading the charge against global warming or healing the catastrophic rift in the Middle East. Yet none of these captures the heart of exception, though each manifests its presence in American history.

Generally speaking, two broad views of America’s exception have dominated public thought and expression. Nationalism is the approach that stresses American superiority, separateness, and the need for protection against external and internal threat. Nationalism tends to prefer the nation-state’s norm of uniformity in key features of national life such as racial, religious, and linguistic characteristics. The prevailing perception of nationalists is that the sacred status of the nation will be preserved if change is resisted, indeed, if the nation returns to a cherished past, from which it has drifted owing to legislative jurisprudence, abandonment of the original intent of the Constitution, and loss of moral values and religious piety.

In contrast to nationalism’s exclusivist attitude (“America—love it or leave it”), another broad approach to democracy stresses civil liberties and the importance of dissent, and understands love of country not as an exclusivist drive to recoup a bygone uniformity, but as the preservation of liberty that results in a diverse nation whose task is an unfinished project of realizing the expansive career of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedoms. There is no pure American, only citizens putting liberty into practice. This approach embraces patriotism as love of liberty, the founding, animating principle of the nation.

The fault line separating nationalism and patriotism is especially visible when it manifests deep impulses that can only be described as sacred or religious. For example, where nationalists insist on the sacralization of the American flag, seeking to install a constitutional amendment banning its desecration, patriots will maintain that doing so confuses the flag with what is truly sacred—the ideal of liberty. Sacralizing the flag removes it from the contest of public discourse, where it may be used as a powerful symbol of dissent. When the state insisted on mandatory flag veneration in public schools, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) in favor of those who refused to participate on the view that doing so violated their freedom of religion.

But is American democracy destined to religious strife? Exceptionalism is especially present in the different tonalities of American civil religion. As religions go, it is rather vague. It is a religion that is essentially public and representational. If it follows its adherents into the privacy of the prayer chamber, we never see it. When its themes and symbols are taken up in homilies from the church pulpit, civil religion metamorphoses into the formal religion of the sects, whose gods easily claim the nation for themselves by catching it up in their webs of providence, revelation, and sacred history. Civil religion belongs in the open for that is where it performs its compelling cultural work.

Civil religion, generally speaking, is properly seen and heard in public as the patrimony of all citizens and the tool of no party. All Americans sing the national anthem (or pretend to), stand at attention, look respectfully upon flag or monument. In doing so, they are all Americans. The gathering of crowds along the parade route, in the stadium, in the park, becomes “the people,” e pluribus unum, pulled together into a singular public self-consciousness. It is a religion that exists principally in the brief duration of its ritual staging, then dissolves into crowds milling about, finding their way home. Civil religion is what citizens do in groups to become bodily moved as a nation and to have deposited in each one of them a felt-memory of that moment of unity that transformed each body into an encompassing social body. Civil religion is ritual experience that gestures to the unseen national whole. It is an embodied, impassioned imagination of national community. For a moment, strangers seem friendly, aligned by purpose, history, and common liberties.

What is it that calls Americans to national unity? A common purpose: the guarantee of liberty. And whence this guarantee? On this, their difference must prevail if liberty is to do so. Some will say god or gods, some will look to historical destiny, others will attribute the origin of national purpose to human reason and ingenuity. In every case, however, there is the role of exception to consider, an auspicious intervention with a portentous difference. God, history, or mind crafted a juncture whose favor the nation has exploited. Civil religion installs this intervention of favor in a ritual cultus bolstered with the blood of martyrs. Auspiciousness, ritual, cultus, and martyrs all suggest the evocation and configuration of feeling familiar to institutional religions. Yet civil religion operates differently. Sectarian religions conduct their corporate worship within the controlled environment of their private ritual spaces. They gather on Saturdays or Sundays for formal services; their liturgies do not infringe on the universal secular calendar of workdays. Civil religion is able to re-invoke the encompassing liturgical time of pre-modern religions, staging its ceremonies on national holidays that universally curb the secular time of labor. Yet civil religion is not so much a religion as a kind of meta-religion that binds the many to the common task of national sympathy or fellow-feeling, to the ritual evocation of foundational unity.

In this regard it is important not to confuse civil religion with national religion, whether established religion, theocracy or a dominant sectarian religion. Civil religion does not flatten all religions into one or replace them with the tyranny of one. It fits over them all like an apparatus that mimics their solemnity and ritual cohesion, emulates their themes of sacrifice, virtue, magnanimity, and devotional remembrance, but insists on dim theological tropes, the better to unify and to limn an overarching sublimity. Civil religion is a crafting of momentous occasions on which the whole of the nation draws together to perform a moving presence of common purpose. And that purpose is the visceral recognition and commemoration of exception. Liberty and liberty together. This is the core of the American compact, a national project that is fundamentally modern, secular, and sacred. Americans perceive their mission in the ritual body of their civil religion and draw from it the shared presentiment of national identity.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

There is a great deal of talk about what Obama stands for and many commentators claim it is hard to know.  He is placed along a continuum in which the words “center-left” and “center-right” often appear.  In fact in America we have never had a very clear left-right split; the very idea of one is rooted in European traditions we have not shared.  For all the talk about culture wars, what in America unites left and right, liberals and conservatives, is a fundamental individualism that is perhaps the strongest, though not the only, strand in our tradition.  It is rooted in the earliest and most pervasive religious culture in America, Protestantism, which has deeply influenced every other religious tradition that has entered our common life.  It does not divide Evangelicals from liberal Protestants—it is something they share.  We may argue about the value of the market or the state but the purpose of both to most Americans is to allow the maximum of individual freedom with the least encumbrance.

Some reviewers of Habits of the Heart believed the book affirmed a continuous decline of community and an increase of individualism throughout American history, whereas in fact the authors of Habits believed that we have had  cycles of individualism alternating with periods when social solidarity was emphasized.  Some historians even accused us of offering only another version of the old nostalgic “loss of community” narrative, applied to virtually every period in American history.  In our current situation, as Obama seems to be emphasizing that we are all in this together, the cyclical theory is resurfacing, especially in Michael Lind’s argument that there have been four republics in America—corresponding to the presidencies of Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and now Obama—when a period of radical individualism has been reversed and a new emphasis on the common good has followed.  Neither in Habits nor elsewhere have I ever argued for the long-term decline of community in our history, since I see individualism as powerful from the very beginning and social solidarity as always weak and vulnerable in American history, though stronger at some times than in others.  Our fundamental individualism was vividly represented by the seventeenth-century New England Puritans.  When the Church was no longer seen as the mediator of salvation but the exclusive club of the elect, whose members must experience conversion all by themselves before being admitted, we had a new emphasis on the solitary individual.  When the Word eclipses the Sacrament, then it is society that suffers.  Such an emphasis released enormous power, economically, culturally, and politically, but the price was high.

Efforts to restore a viable balance by reappropriating a sense of the common good and social solidarity have marked Western history for the last couple of centuries.  In Europe such efforts were spearheaded by Catholic social teaching and democratic socialism, whose political expression in Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties created the decent societies that have marked the recent history of Britain and Western Europe.  When the present Pope in his last year as Cardinal Ratzinger met with Jürgen Habermas, he expressed his sympathy with the tradition of social democracy and said that it was similar to Catholic social teachings.  In its fullness that is surely the case, but when American Catholic ideologues reduce Catholic ethics to an exclusive concern with abortion and gay marriage they take the social out of Catholic social teachings and become spokesmen not for the authentic Catholic tradition but for a narrow quasi-Protestant sect.

For the reasons I have just suggested, radical individualism is what I call the default mode of American culture.  It is where we go when things are relatively stable and we face no enormous challenge, or are denying that we do.  It is the power of this core tradition that has given rise to American exceptionalism, what makes us so different from most other advanced nations in the world, none of which share this strand to the same extent.

American exceptionalism is often interpreted to mean how exceptionally good we are.  In some respects this is warranted:  I can think of no other society that has so successfully integrated immigrants.  Race has been harder to overcome, but Obama is surely right that this is the only country where he could have achieved what he has.  But it is important to remember also how exceptionally bad we are in comparison with other advanced nations.  It is our radical individualistic culture that allows us to tolerate a level of poverty higher than any other advanced nation, a degree of income polarization that would be unacceptable in most advanced nations, a health system that leaves tens of millions without insurance, that is the most expensive in the world but leaves the health of our citizens only slightly above that of many third world nations, an environmental policy that has not only failed to lead the world to greater sustainability but actually stood in the way of the things which almost all the other advanced nations have tried to do, and these are only the most obvious of the many ways we have differed for the worse from most of the advanced world.

But when we are faced with challenges that we cannot deny, we do have other resources we can draw on, resources that we described in Habits of the Heart as Biblical and Civic Republican.  Neither of these traditions is without an element of individualism (see the new Introduction to the 1996 paperback edition of Habits), but both of them have the capacity to talk about the common good in a way that the core tradition of radical individualism cannot do.  Ruth Braunstein in her recent post has emphasized the centrality of the idea of the common good in Obama’s thought, drawing as he does from both the Biblical and Civic Republican traditions.   He has found in the Black church tradition, and even in the theologically somewhat vacuous UCC tradition, an emphasis on social justice and the plight of the poor that is at the core of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.  Although I have no evidence for it, I would be surprised if Obama has not also been influenced by Catholic social teaching with its focus on the common good, perhaps when he was a community organizer.

But our default individualist tradition finds the very idea of the common good incomprehensible.  This is well illustrated in an article by Simon Critchley in the November Harper’s entitled “The American Void,” where Critchley describes Obama’s talk of the common good as “an anti-political fantasy.”  Critchley seems to be unaware that the idea of the common good lies at the core of the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic traditions in Europe that have led to the creation of the most humanly viable societies, for all their imperfections, that this earth has yet seen.  He is also unaware of how profoundly political the idea of the common good is, how strongly it is resisted, and what power, in ideology, public opinion, and legislative votes, is required to implement it.

If you look at Obama’s specific policy concerns you will find the common good at the core of almost all of them.  Universal health care is an obvious example.  And why, except for our culture of radical individualism, don’t we already have it as every advanced society in the world has it?  Because in normal times common good arguments do not carry the day in America.  Obama’s jobs program, his environmental program, his foreign policy concerns are all examples of making the common good the focus of politics.  What all this leads to in my opinion is that Obama is not concerned with center-left or center-right but with making America into a country with a concern for all its citizens and not just the privileged few, a country like other advanced countries and less like a third world country.

There is another element in Obama’s thinking that needs comment:  his concern for America and its historical promise.  It has been hard for his opponents to call Obama unpatriotic when he speaks so glowingly of our nation and its heritage.  It is the eloquence with which he did that in his keynote address in 2004 that first told me that a remarkable new presence had arrived on the American scene.  But what Obama has stressed is the promise of America, one that is still unfulfilled.  It is our task as he has so often said to help create a more perfect union because this one is so imperfect.  Obama has rejected the idea that supporting the Iraq War is a measure of patriotism.  He has said, in effect, that the true patriot will oppose such a war.

Already in 2004 this reminded me of what I wrote in my most frequently reprinted article, “Civil Religion in America,” which was a call to see that the best of our tradition required opposition to the Vietnam War, not support of it.  Too many have read that article as describing American civil religion as “integrating,” or “Durkheimian,” in a way that doesn’t appreciate the radicalism of Durkheim.  Some friends who do understand what I had written in 1966 told me they thought Obama had read it.  I have no reason to think he has.  He doesn’t need me to see that the promise is the core we must celebrate, not the often desperately disappointing reality, which he notes when he promises to close Guantanamo and renounce torture as American policy.  That one can see America as a beacon of hope, even, in Lincoln’s words, as “the last best hope of earth,” while also recognizing that America has committed the gravest of crimes from the colonial period to the present, seems to escape critics from the left and the right.  Obama would never speak like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but he knows, as any serious American knows, that Jeremiah Wright was telling the truth, even if not the whole truth, and that denial of the terrible side of our history is no more healthy for us than it would be for Germany or Japan.

Late in the campaign, McCain and Palin began calling Obama a socialist, because he believes in a progressive income tax.  There is a deep irony here.  Every normal modern nation has been influenced by democratic socialism.  If that tradition has been weak in America, it, or something close to it (the New Deal and Social Security, which, like the progressive income tax, was also denounced as socialist), has never been entirely absent.  Universal health care would put it on the agenda again, leading possibly to reform in our deeply unjust educational system and other areas as well.  In the context of comparative modernity, democratic socialist equals normal.  For the first time in a long time the possibility that we too could become normal, that we could better realize our good exceptionalism and avoid more of our bad exceptionalism, seems to have arrived.  It will take a very grown up leader and massive public participation to make that happen.  But as Obama has said so often, “This is our moment, this is our time.”  I am glad to have lived long enough to see even such a possibility in this great but benighted nation.