Anders W Edwardsson Radical Betrayal: How Liberals & Neoconservatives are Wrecking American Exceptionalism

Meet Anders Edwardsson

Q: As debut authors, we often have preconceived ideas of what the publishing process will be like. What did you expect being a published author would be like?

Anders W Edwardsson Radical Betrayal: How Liberals & Neoconservatives are Wrecking American Exceptionalism
Anders W Edwardsson Radical Betrayal: How Liberals & Neoconservatives are Wrecking American Exceptionalism

A: Well, since this was “only” my first book in English (I had published two earlier, in my native language of Swedish), I knew roughly what the process meant and what was coming.

Q: Was it what you expected? Please explain why or why not?

A: What I didn’t really grasp until I was in the middle of the process was the enormous size of the American book market. Or, more precisely, because of that, how hard it is (compared to Sweden) to get noticed, earn reviews, get media appearances, etc. But you learn to swim or drown…

Q: If you could help an aspiring author set realistic expectations of the process of getting published, what would you tell them?

A: Set realistic sales goals. It’s better to exceed your expectations than be beaten by them…

Q: Did you start promoting your book before or after your book release?

A: Before. I used Facebook and LinkedIn to spread knowledge that my book was coming.

Q: Would you do it differently next time?

A: Yes. After three months, I managed to hire a professional media booker for two weeks. It cost me an arm and a leg but was worth every penny. Next time, I will save money to hire one for at least a full month from the get-go.

Q: What are some of the things you’ve done to promote your book?

A: I have been active on social media and contacted political and other organizations that could be interested in me giving book presentations. Unfortunately, 2024 being an election year, people have been focused on primaries, etc., and have not had much time for such.

Q: What methods do you recommend new authors use to start promoting their books?

A: When it comes to history books like mine, try to reach niche experts and ditto markets to get initial attention; I guess it’s different for novels.

Q: What was your experience like going through book production with Defiance Press & Publishing?

A: Overall, it is a very smooth and professional process.

Q: What made you choose a hybrid publisher like Defiance rather than self-publishing?

Self-publishing doesn’t really matter for factual books. They need to have been approved by a publisher; otherwise, people will not take them seriously.

Q: Are you a member of any writers’ groups? If so, what are they and are they helpful?

A: No, I haven’t had time to even investigate that…

Q: What advice do you have for first time authors who are just starting their journey with Defiance Press & Publishing?

A: Take your time and get it right from the start. A later publishing date is better than a half-assed product…

Q: What is the title of your next book?

A: I haven’t decided. But I would love to write a book on the political influence of human biology.

Q: What is your website address and the best way for fans to contact you?

www.radicalbetrayal.com and www.edwardsson.biz and [email protected]

Read the First Chapter of Radical Betrayal

Radical Betrayal

By Anders Edwardsson

Chapter 1 – “Once Upon a Time”

“The eyes of all people are upon us.” John Winthrop | 1630

Since the dawn of time, people have told stories about who they are, where they come from, and what sets them apart. Such tales give meaning to life and offer goals for our existence. Even in small tribes of hunter-gatherers, stories about forefathers’ adventures are popular, and on the next step up in societal order—clans, which include hundreds or thousands of people dispersed over large areas—they become vital. Specifically, on the clan level, group narratives help people to decide if strangers they meet should be treated as friends or foes, explain the potentially devious nature of other clans, and more. And as diverse populations are merged into even larger collectives—states ruled by kings that most people will never meet or even see in person—even more elaborate (hi)stories are needed. These need to be powerful enough to bridge ethnic, social, economic, and other divides and explain complex circumstances like why different people live under one ruler, why men can be called out to fight faraway enemies, why everyone must pay taxes, and why people must accept the authority of royal minions like nobles, priests, and bureaucrats. Hence, by defining and discriminating between “us” and “them” and explaining conditions such as why a few are in charge and the rest must follow, nationalist narratives prop up political and bureaucratic structures and help hold larger bodies of people together. In the U.S., this political folklore is called Americanism, and it has until recently been one of the world’s most powerful nationalist “glues.”

Early Nationalism

Modern nationalism did not appear until the late eighteenth century, and America, followed by France, became one of the first countries to develop a full-scale modern national narrative. Yet, like many human phenomena, a primitive form of nationalism emerged when people in the Middle East some ten thousand years ago began forming agricultural societies. As hamlets grew into towns and cities with tens or even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, the area became a political laboratory filled with competing city-states and small kingdoms. Sargon of Akkad became the first to merge numerous mini-states into an empire. Around 2300 BC, he united Mesopotamia with a mix of violence and bureaucrats, and to hold his realm together, he spun stories about himself as a guarantor of internal harmony and external peace. He also gave his reign a divine purpose by portraying himself as a favorite of the goddess Inanna, the patron of war, sex, justice, and political power. However, since the stories Sargon and his heirs told centered on themselves, not the people they ruled, a more profound feeling of national unity never developed. So, when facing internal problems and potent neighbors, the empire collapsed. And so did all early states except for Egypt, which was held together by its unique geography of a narrow river valley surrounded by deserts. Hence, ancient people usually did not have time to form common identities. And with a Game of Thrones-like political-military drama storming around them, they continued to identify as members of smaller groups centered on shared ancestry and common gods. The prime example of this is the Jews. Their homeland never grew much larger than Massachusetts, but they developed such a strong identity that they have survived for over three millennia of hardship and harassment. Another example is the Greeks, who contributed to extending racial into a more ethnocultural form of nationalism. Briefly, they shared strong ethnic, linguistic, and religious bonds but were divided into city-states such as Athens and Sparta, which regularly fought each other. One event that did get them to cooperate was an invasion by the Persian Empire in the 490s BC, but as soon as that threat vanished, they started scuffling again. Then, the Peloponnesian War 431-404 BC became so exhausting that the Macedonians, a rough bunch of cousins to the Greeks from the north, could subdue the whole area around 350 BC. Their King Philip II forced them to join a confederacy under his rule by arguing that they should be united since they all spoke the same language and prayed to the same gods. Building upon his deeds, Philip’s son Alexander the Great became the first European to create a full-scale empire. In the 330s BC, he conquered most of the known world from Greece to India. And to hold this enormous realm together, he had to offer something more than just a royal house and threats of violence. By fostering economic and intellectual interchange by erasing borders and forcing people from different areas to work together, he formed Hellenism; a mix of local customs, Greek language, religion, philosophy, and architecture that came to dominate the eastern Mediterranean basin. And even if this only became an elite culture, it became a crust strong enough to hold larger states together. Indeed, when Alexander died in 323 BC, his empire split, but only between his leading generals who became rulers over a handful of mid-sized kingdoms held together by—and further developing—Hellenism. With this, the idea of using culture to forge large states was in the air, and it was picked up by the Romans, who improved its use. While empires from Sargon’s Akkad to Alexander’s Greeks had often been created in haste and fallen as soon as weak leaders came around, the Romans took centuries to turn their city-state into an empire. This slow process allowed conquered people to assimilate and made Latin the lingua franca of the Western Mediterranean. Moreover, because Rome was a republic, the Romans saw their state as rooted in the people and themselves as citizens, not simple subjects to power. Also, as their dominion grew, they gradually extended citizenship to conquered peoples. And since this came with certain rights, like voting in local assemblies and going to court, millions of outsiders, in time, got a vested interest in a state that, at its height, stretched from the British Isles to the Persian Gulf. Moreover, after Rome in 27 BC turned into a monarchy, its emperors became worldly sovereigns and pontifex maximums, the highest spiritual leaders in the land. Thus, they got a significant influence not only over people’s bodies but also over their minds. The emperor’s spiritual role in the fourth century AD grew further when Christianity was made the state religion. However, by then, the Roman Empire had been split in two. This division was first meant for administrative purposes only. Still, since the Greek-Hellenistic half was more prosperous, its history took its own route and survived for another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire. By contrast, in the West, after Germanic barbarians sacked Rome in AD 476, no new emperors were named, and during the following Dark Ages, the area broke up into a mosaic of warrior states whose people started to grow their own national identities. For example, the Franks, a tribe living west of the Lower Rhine who had picked up Latin culture and language, became forefathers to the French, while Teutonic tribes further east—that the Romans had never formally conquered and therefore spoke Germanic languages—became ancestors of today’s Germans.

Still, memories of Rome meaning peace and prosperity survived, e.g.,in art, literature, and the Catholic Church, and from the eighth century, European history became a line of efforts to reunite the continent. First, in AD 800, the Pope crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor of a “Holy Roman Empire” extending from the Baltic Sea to northern Italy. But, after his death, the empire soon split, and Europe through the Middle Ages remained a cluster of mostly small-to-midsized kingdoms, principalities, duchies, prince-bishoprics, free cities, and other semiindependent areas. Then, from around 1500, the Austrian royal house of Habsburgs gained prominence before in order Spain, Sweden, France, Germany, and Russia/Soviet Union also tried to establish their European empires. Moreover, after the fall of communism in 1989, all Western and Central European countries except Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and a few Balkan nations have joined the European Union; an entity whose leaders, like their monarchical and dictatorial forerunners, define themselves as natural wardens of European peace, wealth, and splendor. Significantly, the only country (so far) to leave the E.U. is the U.K. After centuries of Roman rule, Britain first looked much like the rest of Europe. However, its history soon began to differ so much that it essentially became a non-European country. In short, the British Isles were, in turn, invaded by Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Friesians, Danes, and Norwegians before William the Conqueror finally triumphed in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. His victory allowed for the political scene to settle and for the idea of England as one state to take root. Moreover, in 1215, King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta; a kind of constitutional document, e.g., dividing political power between the king, parliament, and courts and giving rights to people as individuals rather than as members of groups like the aristocracy. As a result, England began to develop a society marked by widespread political influence, power-sharing, and an early form of modern individualism. Also, after losing the Hundred-Year War against France in 1453, England began to redraw from continental affairs to build an island empire including Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.

Roots of Americanism

The English started flexing their muscles after blocking Spain’s bid for European supremacy by sinking its Armada in 1588. But as a nation of seafarers, they looked beyond Europe and started founding colonies across the Atlantic. What’s more, for a long time, the settlers living along North America’s eastern seashore continued to see England as their home country and themselves as full-worthy Englishmen. However, because of the distance, the colonies weren’t politically incorporated with England, and their inhabitants never gained access to the Parliament. So, when royal governors began to squeeze the colonists’ rights in the 1700s, they could only complain. The 1776 Declaration of Independence thus became a catalog of complaints about the king and Parliament’s un-English behavior and the American Revolution a forced act aimed to protect the colonist’s rights as “free Englishmen.” Given this, it would not have been strange if the Founding Fathers had created a European-like country with a king, nobility, and state church. However, instead, they created an entirely new political system they hoped would be a model for freedom-seeking people worldwide. Three things are vital to grasp the impact of this episode. First, the colonies’ culture had been transformed for over a century by, among other things, access to free land, local self-rule, and the free-spiritedness coming from living far away from kings, dukes, and other nobles. Thus, Americans had become more individualistic, more free market, and more wary about the abuse of political power than the people back home. In a word, they were distilled Englishmen. Second, the Pilgrims had brought themes and ideas that swayed them to view North America as a new Promised Land and themselves as “new Israelites” living in a land blessed by God and meant for higher purposes; stories in turn going back to a mix of Biblical themes, a twelfth-century tale about Roman Britain as the place where Joseph of Arimathea hid the Holy Grail, and Tudor Era rhetoric about England being God’s “elect nation.” Third, the Founders mixed ancient Greek and Roman wisdom with Christian beliefs, English practices, and Enlightenment thinking. For instance, the Declaration’s elevating of certain rights to self-evident truth reflects Enlightenment idealism; the Constitution’s limits upon the power of government echo the English political tradition, and the ethics deemed necessary for a well-functioning republic were Christian. Furthermore, persuading people at home and abroad that the U.S. had the right to revolt against the English required a strong supporting narrative. Consequently, Americans became the first people to develop a full-scale civil religion. This term means the set of beliefs buttressing a modern state where people no longer primarily believe in religious reasons for their political regime (as Medieval Europeans had believed kings to rule by divine right). Instead, a civil religion gives citizens historical, philosophical, ideological, and other worldly reasons to love their country. For example, in more contemporary times, Soviets were told they lived in the world’s first classless society and had to abide by the party guiding them toward a communist Utopia; Germans that their fate was to dominate Europe; and Swedes that they should work hard and pay high taxes because their country is looked upon as an avantgarde welfare state. And in America, the story became that the nation had to play a role in History as a model of freedom. However, since the U.S. lacked a history and people were intensely religious, American civil religion became a halfway house between secular and traditional beliefs. In fact, nearly all nationalist themes have Christian models. Among other things, they include tales about an Exodus (people leaving for a promised land); a Genesis (the American Revolution); a Moseslike founder (George Washington); prophets (Thomas Paine); a Jesus figure (Abraham Lincoln); apostles (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin); martyrs (John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.); a Devil (Benedict Arnold); sacred spaces (Gettysburg, Arlington Cemetery); places for pilgrimage (Mount Vernon, Mount Rushmore); sanctified holidays (July 4, Memorial Day); holy scriptures (the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, both displayed on altar-like displays in the National Archives); and sacred hymns (Star-Sprangled Band, America the Beautiful). Washington, D.C., can also be seen as a Jerusalem with “political temples” such as the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court, plus minor shrines for national heroes like Jefferson and Lincoln. Still, secular ideas also strongly contributed to American culture. For example, the U.S. inherited institutions and principles like the Common Law system, political power-sharing, and the view that elites should have few legal privileges directly from England. Central to the exceptionalist matrix also naturally became the English “freedom tradition” at large. To get a correct perspective on this last issue, we should recall that the English Civil War of 1642–1651 took place parallel with the formative years of the early English colonies in North America. It taught the colonists things like standing up against recognized governments and the pros and cons of the republican government of Oliver Cromwell. In addition, when the Parliament a few decades later limited the king’s power through the Glorious Revolution, the 1689 English Bill of Rights not only revived the spirit of the Magna Carta. By drawing attention to whether political authority originates from above, Heaven, or from below, the People, it also stirred democratic debate in England and the colonies.

To boot, philosopher John Locke enhanced many themes of the Glorious Revolution. His rebuke of the old, medieval order of divine authority, absolute monarchy, and a pyramid-like socioeconomic organization would later fascinate, amongst others, Thomas Jefferson. He merged Locke’s ideas about a modern society with economist Adam Smith’s free market thinking into a vision of the U.S. as a group of semi-independent agrarian states. As we will see, this vision would have enormous consequences and helped make freedom and equality the founding principles of the Union. However, it should be noted that Locke can be read in different ways. Above all, his views of liberty, private property, citizenship, and the ties between them can be seen as arguments for small governments, low taxes, and few regulations or for government reallocating resources between people. In turn, these readings lead to two views of equality: equality of opportunity, which accepts the differences in wealth and other fallouts freedom produces, and equality of outcomes, which demands taxation, entitlements, and regulations to confiscate and reallocate private resources. Both readings have also existed parallel throughout U.S. history, but the first, minimalistic government-equality of opportunity view continued to dominate political and other discourses well into the twentieth century. However, from the end of the 1800s, the second view did start to become ever more important. But we are not there yet. Furthermore, since the American Revolution took place in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinking had at least three impacts on U.S. civil religion. First, the view that logic and science can be used to “decode” Reality and make everything possible merged with the Puritan striving for perfection and the idea that America, its people, and society must be flawless before the Second Coming of Christ can happen. This created a belief that the Declaration and the Constitution are both ideal documents ordering a perfect society; a sureness so rigid that already Jefferson, who believed that laws and political institutions must evolve with human progress, grumbled, “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.”2 Perfectionism has since also marked American’s Christian beliefs as well as political movements from Abolitionism, Prohibition, and Progressivism to the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution, and the War on Terrorism, whose ambitions all have known—or at least respected— few boundaries. Also, the perfectionist meme renders everything unAmerican as potentially faulty or even devious by nature. Because as one historian writes about Americans: “If moral fervor stirs our better angels, moral fever spurs our demons.”3 Second, the individualistic spirit of the Enlightenment changed the meaning of “freedom.” Europeans, including Early Americans, had for millennia held a traditional Christian view of this notion in the sense that a man should be free to “willingly surrender to the will of the Lord.” Hence, freedom had been seen as the right to join a church or other community and live up to its ideals (think the freedom to join an Amish society and agreeing to give up modern comforts to live according to its rules). The Enlightenment nurtured a more modern, individualistic view of freedom: the right to live according to your will if it does not interfere with others. However, because of Americans’ deep religious and strong communitarian (valuing the good of the community over individualism in politics and society) bents, this development became so slow that it is still partially incomplete. Nevertheless, this shift makes U.S. history a tale of how Americans first turned from a traditional to an individual to an atomistic view of freedom, of which the latter has become so extreme that it today threatens the unity of U.S. society by making people ignorant or even hostile to cultural, religious, and other communal duties and sentiments. Third, Enlightenment thinking permeated the term “We the People.” It is Roman in that the legitimacy of political power in the U.S. derives from its citizens. But, even if the Founders talked about the people as “the homogeneous bedrock of America,” the majority of them still wanted the best, brightest, and most virtuous to rule. Jefferson penned to John Adams: “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”4 And in Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote: “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Hence, the Founders were elitists, not democrats. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many would over time come to disagree with this view. In fact, Americans instantly developed a fear that the country’s new elites risked betraying them and the republic just as the old British one had done. Two significant upshots of this became an inclination for conspiracy thinking and that the people, in the end, turned away from the Founders’ view of the president as an apolitical, first-among-equals figure above politics toward him being a “man of the people” and a guardian against elites. What is more, the Founders’ flexible worldview and the unprecedented move to declare independence allowed them to conduct two grand political experiments. The first was to create a government without an executive. It was carried out in the 1781 Articles of Confederation. However, this experiment failed and led to the creation of the presidency in the 1789 U.S. Constitution. The practical reason for this was the need for one man to lead and defend the nation. Another more esoteric but still important motive was that Americans also wanted a leader above party politics. This urge is best explained by placing it in a sociological context. It’s an impulse, like the one compelling Russians to call their Tzar “little father” and Swedes to see their king as a public ally against aristocrats, tax collectors, and other herrar. And if we allow ourselves to theorize, this identical tendency amongst politically, socially, religiously, and culturally diverse scores of peoples point to the fact that the urge has a genetic root in humans’ attraction to strong father figures. Anyhow, the U.S. president was made both head of state and commander-in-chief and given a role much like an (elected) monarch. Already Washington introduced royal ways like taking a “coronation tour” across the country, forming a cabinet, delivering a yearly state of the nation address, giving dinners for dignitaries, tea parties for commoners, and more. This “monarchical presidency” got another boost from the Founder’s second experiment, which was to create a nation without a state church or even an officially declared religion. It not only inflated the U.S. civil religion to fill the same political-psychological role state churches and religions played in Europe. It also gave the president a dual role as the nation’s political and spiritual leader. Hence, his function became similar to the Roman emperor’s position as pontifex maximus. And because presidents, unlike European monarchs, do not have an archbishop, a pope, or any other force constricting their (civil) religious views, their influence upon Americans’ imagination regarding their country’s nature, historical goal, and international role became technically unbound. In addition, they have come to serve as raw models for what should be considered good public behavior and private morality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Americans would for long tend—again like Europeans their monarchs—to see the president almost as a demigod figure. And needless to say, this is a political power tool few presidents have been able not to (ab)use and the main reason why they still today have such paradigmatic roles. As a working example, George Washington had just been sworn in when he was forced to answer the question about how America’s mission to change the world could be fulfilled. Or, more precisely, should the U.S. actively spread its system and ideals, or should it only function as a model? The specific reason for this was that when the French, in June 1789, staged their revolution, many Americans felt a moral and ideological duty to support them. But Washington said no. One motive was that he judged a total upending of the French’s over thousand-year-old societal order destined to fail, another was that he felt that the U.S., still lacking natural borders and a standing army, couldn’t afford foreign adventures. And his decision set a vital precedent. Later, in his 1796 Farewell Address, Washington laid down a “great rule of conduct,” meaning that America should strive for solid economic relations but have “as little political connection as possible”5 with other countries. And Jefferson—who initially supported the French Revolution but changed his mind in due course— made this policy bipartisan by including it in his 1801 Inaugural Address. Washington’s and later John Adams’s economic policy became a similar yardstick. And just as with foreign policy, grim realities more than grand principles came to decide the details. Principally, all Founders ascribed to what we today call a free market economy. However, since national independence relied on economic self-sufficiency, Washington’s political isolationism was complemented by his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s economic mercantilist view that the U.S. should be one market but that domestic production—at least for the foreseeable future—needed to be protected from foreign competition. And as the U.S. grew into a continental-scaled economy where states and regions specialized and competed, trade barriers worked in most Americans’ favor for a long time. Hence, with isolationism keeping the country out of world (military) affairs and protectionism shielding its economy, the socalled American System formed that, with some deviations, was to be kept in place until World War II. Another “founder effect” that must be noted is that North America’s vastness and natural riches combined with early American Christian traditions, English heritage, and Enlightenment thinking created an optimistic, vigilant, and vibrant culture focused on exploration, experimentation, and risk-taking. This not only preserved and rejuvenated old Puritan traits like a high work ethic and an outstanding level of industriousness but long conserved a strong focus on marriage, family, honesty, and community— including things such as taking care of most things locally, giving generously to charities, and socializing sin (because society is supposed to be defamed by individuals’ mistakes). A corresponding effect was that public and private discourses became marked by—and to this day retain—a bombastic tone. For example, politics, business, sports, and everyday talk are in America characterized by an unusually colorful language jammed with highbrow and emotional code words like “glorious,’ “huge,” “awesome,” and “amazing.” Because of all this and more, American society and culture from the start became (or was at least viewed as) genuinely exceptional. Its largescale thinking, unbound optimism, and ethos about hard work, diligence, and good spirit are also indeed unique and have for nearly three centuries made possible unprecedented individual successes as well as both private and public massive projects such as the Eire Canal, transcontinental railroads, and the Moon Programs. Because, as President Theodore Roosevelt would say, “We Americans love big things!”6 Already when traveling the land in the 1830s to compare the U.S. with Europe, French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville concluded:

The position of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional and it is quite possible that no democratic people will ever be similarly placed. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which appears to divert their minds from the study of science, literature, and the arts, the nearness of Europe which allows them to neglect such pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand such reasons, of which I have only been able to signal only the main ones, must have focused [sic!] the American mind, in this unusual manner, upon purely practical objects. Everything—his passions, needs, education, circumstances—seems to unite in inclining the native of the United States earthward. Only religion persuades him to raise an occasional and absent-minded glance to heaven.7

Please note that this quote does not—as some have tried to imply—offer an early identification of Americanism and American Exceptionalism per se. Instead, it is a harsh judgment of intellectual affairs in the U.S. Yet, Tocqueville’s words prove how different America was viewed already back then. In addition, his mentioning of religion as Americans’ only “higher” interest is of specific interest since the religious side of U.S. nationalism clearly showed when Americanism—or, more specifically, some of its exceptionalist features—fused with a European philosophy at that time.

Manifest Destiny

A vital source of the American think-big mentality is that the sluggish farm-by-farm westward expansion of the East Coast colonies since the 1600s after independence turned into a geopolitical process marked by quantum leaps like the Louisiana Purchase (1803). This for almost a century left the U.S. with a surplus of land that had profound intellectual and ideological effects. First and foremost, the abundance of land convinced Jefferson—and what later became the Democratic Party—that geographic expansion was the way to build and sustain long-term what he called an “Empire of Liberty.” This idea was consistent with the market-oriented but still agriculture-focused thinking of the French so-called physiocrats and was as simple as it was elegant. Concisely, continued expansion would keep America a loose union of semi-independent agrarian republics free from modern perils such as big cities, “commerce,” and industrialization. Hence, Jefferson’s vision of America’s future was not what we today call capitalist but a small-scale bourgeoisie society; an image that to this day lives on—not just through movies and TV shows but also right-wing political rhetoric—in many people’s romantic view of rural and smalltown America. However, since territorial conquest was traditionally associated with European monarchy and militarism, expanding the country demanded good-sounding justifications. On this issue, some turned to John Locke, who had argued that since American Indians did not mix soil with labor as farmers, the land was free for the taking. However, the spirit of the times offered a more simple and gracious case than this theoretical argument. When the French Enlightenment around 1800 combined with German Romanticism and transformed medieval feudal state ideology into civil religions/modern nationalism, a joint spiritual and worldly assertion for Europe’s ongoing colonization of Asia and Africa was born. Exactly, since the West, through rows of geographical, historical, religious, and other circumstances, had soared far ahead in technological, military, and other aspects, seizing control over underdeveloped areas was portrayed not as conquest but as a moral duty meant for “civilizing” less advanced people for their own good. And this argument sounded so good that Americans picked it up to defend their redeeming of “the Wild West.” In 1845, journalist John L. O’Sullivan dubbed the western expansion of the U.S. Manifest Destiny. However, the sentiment dated back to the early 1800s, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Lewis and Clark expedition when Jefferson wrote that the U.S. one day would “cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.”8 Such “continentalism” was later also preached by John Adams’ son and future president himself John Quincy Adams: “North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.”9 But, Quincy Adams’ vision, stemming from a more moderate mind than Jefferson’s frivolous imagination, was limited to North America. In 1821, he gave a July Fourth oration approving of George Washington’s isolationist line, saying that the U.S. “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He also warned about the effects of an aggressive foreign policy:

[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.10

Ironically, it was Quincy Adams who two years later, as Secretary of State, wrote the Monroe Doctrine. This policy declared that since Latin America had gained independence from Spain and Portugal, European intervention in the New World would now be seen as potentially hostile acts against the U.S. And even if this claiming of a big brother role in the Western hemisphere was first a show of support for other people’s independence, it did open the door for U.S. meddling in the Caribbean that later would spell the end of George Washington’s foreign policy. President Andrew Jackson continued to use continentalism in the next decade. He was a passionate expansionist, and the effects of his presidency, in many ways, became massive. Four things need to be mentioned. First, through populist rhetoric, Jackson made Jefferson’s yeoman farmer of the interior, rather than the “natural aristocracy” along the East Coast, the political backbone of the country. That he happened to be in office when many states changed their voting regulations to include all white men, at the same time as the right to vote was still dependent on owning land (or other property), also pinned a democratic badge on expansion to new areas where Americans could acquire such property. In addition, the need to open space for white settlers allowed Jackson, with his Indian Removal Act of 1830, to start expelling American Indians from their homes east of the Mississippi (and prepared the land for the latter half of the Indian Wars, whose effects would be felt into the first quarter of the twentieth century). Thus, the “Trail of Tears” of some sixty thousand natives between 1830 and 1850 out West was conducted in the name of democracy, making them early victims of an active form of exceptionalist thinking. Second, mass democracy replaced the intricacies of republicanism with straightforward “democratism” as an American quality ready for export. Indeed, the widening of U.S. democracy triggered a movement led by the English Reform Act of 1832, which, by citing the expansion of suffrage in America, commenced a century-long extension of voting rights across Europe (which in turn boosted a more activist view of America’s global mission at home). Beforementioned John L. O’Sullivan, for instance, called the geographic expansion of the U.S. a step in “America’s inevitable upward march to first-rate status.”11 He also fused democratism with Christianity by arguing that since “democratic principles [are] the animating force of Christianity,” it must be the end goal of History. Like contemporary European thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, he too furthered this destiny-bound view by dividing human history into phases stretching from barbarism, through theocracy, statism, and aristocracy, to democracy—a grand progress no one could be allowed to stand in the way of. Third, being the first president to define himself as an anti-elitist, Jackson once and for all began to alter Americans’ view of the president from the Founders’ august “first among equals” figure into a “man of the people” who should act as an agent for the average citizens’ needs and wishes. Indeed, this change would take a good century or more. Nevertheless, the vision of America as a “folksy” country—rather than a politically and philosophically sophisticated Enlightenment experiment—with this became a political, cultural force and opened a vertical battlefield between elitists and populists that, in time, became a central feature of U.S. politics. As we will see, from around 1900, the number of self-proclaimed plebeian candidates for—and victors of—the U.S. presidency has also increased dramatically. Fourth, because the West, during the 1800s, experienced the rise of “scientific” racism, Jacksonianism and Manifest Destiny came to suggest Anglo-Saxon superiority. However, on this issue, exceptionalist thinking cut both ways. On the one hand, racist views regarding American Indians were, besides defending their mistreatment at home, used as an alibi for the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Because, while Mexicans earlier had been seen and treated as at least semi-Europeans, racist reasoning now made their “brownness” an obstacle to successfully governing themselves—and adding the Southwest to the U.S. a caring deed. On the other hand, the exceptionalist view of America as a land of freedom embedded in Manifest Destiny did contribute to ending slavery. This is because Abraham Lincoln was convinced that exceptional qualities defined America, and as a politician, military leader, and theorist of U.S. nationalism, he profoundly changed people’s views of America during the Civil War. Specifically, describing the U.S. as humanity’s “last best hope of earth,”12 his most critical deed was to declare that the Declaration’s words “all men are created equal” included all, not just white, men. By doing so, he initiated a long-term shift of political focus from freedom to equality that would have massive consequences far beyond the slavery

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