What do Politicians Mean by American Exceptionalism?

U.S. politicians have manufactured a new supra-nationalistic tag line: American Exceptionalism. 

Mr. Garrison Keillor says in closing his NPR radio, Prairie Home Companion episodes, that his Lake Woebegone community is "where all the men are strong, all the women are good-looking, and all the children are above average."   How’s American Exceptionalism any different?

For one thing, American Exceptionalism didn’t start in America.  Rewind history 500 years.  The impact of the Protestant Reformation left an undeniable impact in the history of Great Britain.  A variety of historical circumstances--arguably, essentially Calvinist, puritan value-patterns became institutionalized within the internal situation there. 

The outcome was that Puritan radicalism was reflected in further religious radicalism, in the poetry of John Milton, in the English Civil War (1642-51) and culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

That radical wing of English Puritan revolutionists produced the early seventeenth century colonial America settler’s ideals about individuality, egalitarianism, skepticism toward state power and the zeal of the religious calling.  These settlers established something unique in the world based upon religious fervor and a puritan system.

A new kind of nation was born, the character of which became clear by the time of the American Revolution and in the American constitution of 1787.  This 18^th century self-righteousness morphed into a 21^st century political precept whereby a religious movement was re-invented (read twisted) and now preached from public pulpits as the notion of American Exceptionalism.  Maybe with the same level of self-righteousness, but certainly with different meaning from its beginnings…

Although America has changed in its social composition since 1787, it preserves, arguably, that basic revolutionary, puritan tenet.  What has further evolved, however, is a pluralist and highly individualized America with its profuse, network-oriented, civil society.  These characteristics are of crucial importance for America's success, as they have provided the United States with its historical lead in industrialization processes.

This course has continued to place the United States in a leading position in the world, but as a historical experience and not because it was in "the nature of being an American," as our politicians imply.  In other words, the highly special feature of our modern U.S. society is dependent on the peculiar circumstances of its history and not the universal result of its social quality as a whole.  Now we can appreciate the pride and perspective Mr. Keillor had in his Lake Woebegone community more fully.