On another kind of exceptionalism – Fintan O’Toole in NYRB:
‘Those who define themselves by the thing they are not eventually find themselves more and more like their imagined opposite. To be someone’s antithesis is also to be their alter ego.’
(…)
‘He may have sensed, too, that he had already delivered a knockout blow by luring Biden into his own swamp of malicious triviality and spiteful juvenility. For that crucial minute, Trump seemed vaguely presidential—and Biden, as he blundered on with the insults, seemed more than vaguely Trumpian.’
(…)
‘Ever since Biden announced that he was running again, it was always clear that this decision would allow Trump to set the terms for the election. At a campaign event in Boston last December, Biden admitted that “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.” It is not that Biden does not have a story of his own to tell. The successes of his administration are real and tangible: reflating a devastated economy, making the first serious attempt in the US to address the climate crisis, improving access to medicines and childcare, reversing the long-term neglect of America’s infrastructure. It is that Biden does not have the vigor, the articulacy, or the charisma to embody that story.’
(…)
‘The great problem, and the one that now threatens to engulf American democracy, is that Biden began to think of himself as indeed a savior figure. There was, of course, a certain immediate and literal truth to this: Biden not only saved the US from a second Trump term but also saw off an attempted coup. Yet Biden’s mindset is also deeply religious, and specifically Christian. In his inaugural address, delivered just two weeks after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, he offered to stake both his earthly body and his immortal soul on the defense of democracy. He repeated Abraham Lincoln’s words at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863: “My whole soul is in it.” Biden echoed this commitment: “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this.” This is not rhetoric for Biden—it is prayer.’
(…)
‘This in turn gave Biden a second chance at achieving something worthy of his eternal soul. He had saved America from Trump once—now he could do it again. He could banish Trump, and Trumpism, not for now but forever. If thoughts of eternity gather round the aging Catholic believer, this is Biden’s political equivalent of an undying achievement. In his inaugural address, he evoked the struggle of light against darkness. He sees the delivery of a final, fatal blow to Trump as the ultimate vanquishing of the American darkness.
This is noble. The difficulty is that it also endorses a kind of personal exceptionalism.’
(…)
‘Those who want to stick with Biden whatever happens are engaged not in rational politics but in magical thinking, the belief that Biden’s victory in 2020 has imbued him with powers that only he can wield. But this fantasy is becoming a horror story in which the dark shadow of America’s democracy threatens to usurp its life.’
Read the article here.
After American exceptionalism personal exceptionalism.
Political rhetoric has always been close to prayers and utterances of healers and shamans, even more so in the US where the religious feelings walk shamelessly hand in hand with political emotions. Europe has embraced the death of God, at least this death became part of the European identity. Children of the Light after the Death of God. The US is still: Children of the Light before the Death of God. If Biden is God then probably we will soon see another era in the US.