Obama Lets Make America Great Again
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Did you ever wonder why Donald Trump's "Brand America Bully Again" slogan took such root among the Republican base? Did it symbolize a return to an age when wages were higher and jobs more secure? Or was it coded racial language designed to betoken a rollback to a time when people of colour (and women) knew their identify? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats afterward Hillary Clinton's defeat, both theories have their champions.
But a closer look at conservative rhetoric in contempo years reveals that "Make America Great Once more" was not Trump'due south invention. It evolved from a phrase that became fundamental to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: "American exceptionalism." People ofttimes equate the expression with the notion that God made America "a city upon a loma," in the words of the Puritan colonist John Winthrop. However, equally Academy of California-Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel noted in a 2011 article, this usage only came into vogue after Barack Obama became president. Previously information technology was mainly used by academics to mean that America is an exception compared with other Western democracies, for amend or worse, as illustrated by its top-notch universities or its bare-bones gun control.
Prior to 2008, "American exceptionalism" appeared in news articles a scattering of times a yr, but afterwards Obama was elected the references skyrocketed, largely because of a drumbeat from Republicans. Once the tea party wave made John Boehner speaker of the Business firm in 2010, for case, he summarized the growing consensus amongst Republicans: Obama had turned his dorsum on the Founding Fathers to the point where he "refused to talk most American exceptionalism." (In fact, in 2009 the president had stated, "I believe in American exceptionalism.") The phrase's popularity in GOP talking points—ofttimes in attacks on Obama'south "socialist" policies—paralleled the spread of conspiracy theories nearly his citizenship and supposed jihadi sympathies.
Defending "American exceptionalism" was a theme of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign; he blasted Obama for supposedly thinking that "America'due south just another nation" destined to become "a European-style entitlement order." Romney's entrada co-chair John Sununu added that Obama should "learn how to be an American." (He later on apologized.)
The 2016 Republican presidential candidates and their surrogates sang the same melody. When Fox News pundit Sean Hannity asked Jeb Bush for his thoughts on exceptionalism, Bush replied, "I practise believe in American exceptionalism," different Obama, who "is disrespecting our history and the boggling nature of our land." Rudy Giuliani was more explicit. "I do not believe that the president loves America," he asserted, suggesting Obama did not think "we're the most exceptional country in the world." During a spoken language a month later in Selma, Alabama, the president pointed out that the ongoing fight for civil rights is a cornerstone of what makes America exceptional.
To get more of a quantitative sense of the phrase'due south evolution, I analyzed the Republican Party platform. All party platforms typically emphasize organized religion in American greatness, but between 1856 and 2008, the GOP never used the expression "American exceptionalism" or even the describing word "infrequent" to describe the country. Past dissimilarity, the final section of the 2012 Republican platform lambasting the Obama presidency was titled "American exceptionalism." The 2016 platform put the phrase into the kickoff line of its preamble: "We believe in American exceptionalism." The development of "American exceptionalism" into an anti-Obama rallying cry with nativist overtones evoked earlier appeals to "states' rights" to rouse whites resenting the end of segregation.
In his book Time to Get Tough: Making America #i Once more, Trump, too, framed his agenda as a defense of "American exceptionalism." "Maybe my biggest beefiness with Obama is his view that there's zip special or infrequent about America—that we're no dissimilar than any other state." Trump later adopted a catchier slogan, "Make America Great Again," but information technology retained the nativist overtones and racial domestic dog whistles of the first. Paired with Trump'south open up conspiracy-mongering about Obama's forged nascence document and supposed Muslim faith, it amplified and dramatized the Republican establishment's slyer assertions nigh Obama'due south un-American values.
Trump would somewhen abandon dog whistles in favor of blunter race-baiting. What remains to be seen is whether he and the Republican establishment will go along flashing the "exceptionalism" indicate in the mail-Obama years—to paint new opponents as un-American—or whether that language was uniquely deployed to delegitimize the nation'south commencement black president. At the very least, information technology provided fertile footing for Trumpism.
Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/american-exceptionalism-maga-trump-obama/
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