On his voyage across the Atlantic in 1630, John Winthrop, one of Massachusetts’s founders, wrote a sermon in which he described the colony they were establishing as “a city upon a hill.” He was quoting the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus likened his followers to a lamp on a hill that gives light to others.
Nearly four centuries later, President Reagan stressed that element of light by adding the word “shining” to Winthrop’s “city.” We commonly overlook, though, Winthrop’s warning that, as a city on a hill, “the eyes of all people” were on their example. Their prospering was conditioned on their faithfulness to God and their founding principles. Otherwise, they would “surely perish out of the good land” they’d been granted.
“American exceptionalism” is a related notion. You can hear it in Mr. Lincoln’s conviction that our free republic is “the last best hope of Earth.” You can hear a similar chord today in President Biden’s familiar assertion that we’re the United States and “there’s nothing we can’t do if we do it together.”
Some politicians and patriots who invoke our exceptionalism may think they’re invoking Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th-century praise for our “exceptional” democracy. Ironically, they’re actually quoting Joseph Stalin, whose point back in 1929 was that the United States wasn’t unique and would inevitably fall to Marxism.
I’m enough a child of my country that I’m inclined to agree with Mr. de Tocqueville that the United States has proven itself exceptional in putting the enlightenment into practice. Our founders turned abstract principles like liberty, equality and unalienable rights into a functioning nation. The evidence of our exceptionalism can be seen in our meteoric rise from a rude, 18th-century novice country to 20th-century world preeminence. It can be seen in the huddled masses yearning to breathe free who still flock to our borders and shores, and in the hope that other nations have placed in us in perilous times.
Of course, along the way, Americans also owned slaves, subjugated native peoples, threw our weight around, and more than once overestimated our international powers to add or detract. The caution to take from our history is that even an exceptional people can be wrong and do wrong.
This is the view of our exceptionalism I teach my students. I also ask them to draw a conclusion from our remarkable growth and development. If we could rise from a coastal, agricultural backwater to a transcontinental nation and the world’s leading industrial power in barely more than a century, what lesson does that teach about our possible future? It doesn’t take most students long to recognize our fall could be just as stunning and precipitous.
It is happening while we watch.
Jan. 6 was Donald Trump’s premeditated attempt to overturn the lawful results of a free and fair election that he lost.
Refusing to accept the result of an election, let alone actively plotting to alter the result, constitutes a coup. That’s what we call it when it happens anywhere else in the world. That’s what we should call it when it happens here. The attack on Congress as it met to certify the election results was an act of sedition and an assault on our democracy.
That day’s violence — from the armed militias and mayhem in the Capitol, to the gallows on the Mall and the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” — was the creature of months of deliberate lies told by Donald Trump and abetted by the concerted malfeasance of his political allies and the passive complicity of Republican politicians, would-be great men and women, driven by ambition and cowardice, who crave petty power, comfort and applause more than they love their country.
The only election fraud remains Trump’s repeated lie that the election was rigged, including his recent declaration that the allegedly stolen election was the “real insurrection.”
As with Hitler’s rants against the “lying press” that criticized him, the only deliberate lies issue from Trump’s mouth and from his chorus of propagandists.
The evidence mounts every day. Trump’s deceit persists. So do Republican cowardice and complicity. Last weekend at an Iowa rally, Trump harangued his faithful with lies about the stolen election while the crowd chanted, “Trump won!” Iowa’s Republican Governor Reynolds and Senator Grassley stood by Trump while he lied and lavished him with praise. Grassley lauded him as a “great President.”
As a consequence of the widespread deceit broadcast by Trumpists and left unchallenged by too many Republican politicians who know better, a majority of Republican voters and a quarter of Americans wrongly believe President Biden’s election victory was “rigged” and illegitimate.
Elected officials are the targets of death threats. American government is so crippled, and the madness so infectious and intense, that fights break out at school board meetings. Citizens who clearly know nothing about Dachau and Auschwitz liken mask mandates to living in concentration camps. Trumpists threaten their neighbors, “I know where you live.” Anti-mask and anti-vaccination MAGA partisans risk their children’s lives rather than yield a political point.
The rule of law staggers. Trump directs his stooges and allies to ignore subpoenas. Except plotting to overthrow the government isn’t covered by executive privilege.
Through rallies that spew vile rhetoric and hate, cleverly restrictive, Republican-crafted election laws and voting regulations, and repeated lies about the nonexistent “election fraud of 2020,” Trumpists are already scripting the next insurrection. They know the key to undermining a republic is undermining its people’s faith in their elections.
Our city is under assault from within, just as the founders foretold.
I hope you’ll heed this compatriot warning. If you don’t, just know this. Your children won’t grow up in the United States you knew. You’ll have traded Washington and Lincoln for Trump and whatever tyrannical scoundrel comes after him.
We may have once been an exceptional nation. There may still be flickers of glory and traces of greatness about us. But exceptionalism doesn’t convey impunity. No nation is so exceptional that it can escape the natural consequences of its own corruption, lunacy and lawlessness.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.