AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD AS WHITE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liveright, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Fitz investigates the period between 1776 and 1826 anew, tracing shifting U.S. attitudes toward anticolonial revolts south of the border. At first, U.S. onlookers were elated by the exhilarating spread of republicanism in Latin America. . . . But as slavery became a bitterly divisive issue in the United States, so goodwill toward these revolutionaries--whose battles were often anticolonial and antislavery--waned. By the nation's fiftieth anniversary, Latin American independence efforts became a platform upon which many in the United Sates erected new ideological borders that would come to haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations." From the text: "Ironically, what finally ignited the nationwide soul-searching about North American slavery and South American abolition was a group of legislators--the southern wing of the rising Democratic Party--who proudly asserted that the United States was the lone success story in a hemisphere of radicals, the white republic in an America endangered by black and mulatto ones. What made the United States special and superior, southern opposition members suggested, was that it enslaved its black people rather than enfranchising them." Id. at 198. "[T]he move toward radicalized exceptionalism remained gradual and partial, a subtle shift rather than an immediate transformation . . . .  Id. at 233. Yet, that assertion of White American Exceptionalism, accompanied by attempts to disenfranchise people(s) of color (mainly African Americans and Latino Americans, remains strong today embodied in the Republican Party, Donald Trump (e.g., "make America great again!', 'build a wall to keep out those rapists and criminals', 'deport Muslims,' etc.) Evangelical Christians, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, White Separatists., etc.).

COLONIZING NEW ENGLAND . . . AND A BIT OF SLAVErY TO BOOT

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, rendered into Modern English and with an Introduction by Harold Paget (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006).

Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016) ("The work of colonization had proceeded thus: Indians and Africans had replaced each other in ways orchestrated by settler colonists, for the purposes of profit and expansion. The Atlantic slave trade was a process, consisting of a series of moments in which people of diverse nations and cultures (African elites, European merchants, Indian adversaries) all agreed, at various times in different places, to capture and commodify other people. If enough had said no, the system might have faltered. But people predictably, tragically, said yes, in Europe, in Africa, in the West Indies, and in New England, and their individual moments of agreement helped facilitate, in the seventeenth century, a global trade. The eventual decision made by other people to say no, more than a century and half later, would create a continental rupture." Id. at 113. Also see Christopher L. Brown, "Puritan Guilt," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/3/2016.).

GREAT COMMENT REGARDING RUTH BADER GINSBURG'S TRUMP REMARK

From the NYT:

Gail Stern, Old Orchard Beach, Maine

"Thank you to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Citizenship first! The horror of the idea of a Trump presidency calls for all Americans to stand up, speak out, or do anything possible to protect our nation from electing someone who would inevitably make us ask in retrospect, "How could we have done this; how could we have brought such harm and destruction upon ourselves?" Justice Ginsburg has done exactly what should be done to help shake us into the reality that Americans don't need any more things to regret or ways to suffer."

CLAUDIUS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY ALL IN ONE

Robert Graves, Claudius the God and his wife Messalina: The Troublesome Reign of Tiberius Claudius Caesar, Emperor of the Romans (Born 10 B.C., Died A.D. 54), as Described by Himself; Also his Murder at the Hands of the Notorious Agrippa (Mother of the Emperor Nero) and His Subsequent Deification, as Described by Others (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1989).

Robert Graves, I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1989).

IS 'CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS' WHAT MAKES US MODERN? IF SO, WHAT OF ITS ABSENCE?

Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Harvard Political Studies)(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 1970) ("This books deals with political ideas and practices in late medieval and early modern England. Its major preoccupation is an effort to discern and evaluate the lines of continuity and change in the relation between medieval and early modern political perspectives and styles, especially as these bear on the development of constitutional politics. Its offers a political interpretation of a body of evidence which has been treated primarily in legalistic terms. The stress therefore is on the world 'political.' This springs from two convictions which the reader is entitled to know about: that legal ideas are not and cannot be radically removed from political ideas and interests, and that political behavior embodies and is affected by political and legal ideas, as well as affecting them. In short, conviction and act are much too closely related to be dealt with fruitfully in isolation. But it is a fact that the political side of medieval and early modern thought has too often been frozen and interred in the abstract and timeless categories of legal historicism" Id. at vi. "All would agree that the difference between the modern world and the medieval are may and profound, but there is little enough agreement on the content of the contrast or when it may be said to have appeared. The main argument of this book is that in the realm of politics the most meaningful line of division lies in the seventeenth century, and that the essential mark of the transition to modern political perspectives was the appearance of what maybe called civic consciousness and loyalty. The essence of that alternative is simplicity itself: the development, or better, perhaps, the recovery of consciousness of a uniquely public dimension in social life--public in the sense of general or common to the social order as a whole. The idea of civic consciousness refers to the elementary perception that there is a public order, that the social order is in part a network of shared problems and purposes, and to the installation of that recognition at the center of political ideas and conduct. [T]he achievement of this civic focus constituted a radical alteration in political vision. It involved not only the recognition of a novel framework, but a fundamental restructuring of assumptions concerning the nature and purpose of political authority, a wholesale redefinition of the rights and duties of citizens, and a critical shift in the primary focus of loyalties and interests. Moreover, once the centrality of civic consciousness and loyalty is appreciated, it is clear that it was the necessary precondition to the achievement of constitutional government. For constitutionalized politics rests in the last resort on self-conscious and sustain purpose at the public level. " Id. at 1-2. "In the seventeen century the medieval subject became a citizen. His relationship to political authority was no longer that of an individual occupying a rank somewhere in the universal hierarchy and a role preordained by his parentage. This hierarchical idea of an order, graded universe, in which the really vital levels of authority are personal and immediate, while the government of the kingdom is the remote apex of an ascending scale, was overturned by the widespread adoption of alternative approaches to the problems raised by reflection on politics. Id. at 27. "Constitutional government made its first appearance on the stage of European history in seventeenth century England. The essential precondition of that achievement was the development of public consciousness and civic loyalty, as contrasted with the fragmented and local preoccupations and personal loyalties of the traditional political order of the Middle Ages. The formation of a civic focus in politics was accompanied by a drastic alteration in the fundamental assumptions of political thought. For the consciously nontraditional values of contract theory--individual liberty and equality--were employed to combat the ideas of status, hierarchy, and degree which ha satisfied and justified the medieval social order, and thus they provided a systematic and permanent alternative to the status values of a landed aristocracy. It is this dramatic transformation of the premises of political thought which has attracted the attention of modern observers, and there is obviously good reason for this. On the other hand, it is less important to appreciate these doctrinal changes, significant as they are, than to recognize that both old and new ideas were revolutionized by the perception of the public scope of politics. This meant that the focus of both practice and idea came to be channeled to the public level rather than deflected to questions of proper local and personal apportionment of governmental rights and duties." Id. at 336. Query: In the context of policies of policing African Americans and other peoples of color, and the essence of the saying, "Black Lives Matter," perhaps the point is that peoples of color are treated as "subject" rather than as "citizens." That is, they are politically perceived and treated as being outside modernity (and citizenship) and relegated to the medieval (subject-ship). Or, to put it another way, the civic consciousness of the majority does not extend to certain minorities, namely, the poor and peoples of color. If 'civic consciousness' is what makes one 'modern,' perhaps there is telling evidence that twenty-first-century America is something less than completely, or truly, modern.).

THE CHOICE OF PURITANISM, PERHAPS NOT SO DISTURBING AND STRANGE

Michael Walzer, The Revolution of The Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 1965) ("I began this book hoping to write sympathetically about a human choice which I thought strange and disturbing: the decision to be a Puritan, to repress oneself and others, to act out a conception of holiness at once abstract and urgent. Calvinist saintliness, after all, has scarred us all, leaving its mark if not on our conscious then on our clandestine minds, and it is always worthwhile to go back and puzzle over the wounds. But in the course of my work, I decided that the choice of Puritanism is not really so different from other, later choices which I find neither strange nor disturbing. The Calvinist saint seems to me now the first of those self-disciplined agents of social and political reconstruction who have eared so frequently in modern history. He is the destroyer of an old order for which there is no need to feel nostalgic. He is the builder of a repressive system which may well have to be endured before it can be escaped or transcended. He is, above all, an extraordinarily bold, inventive, and ruthless politician, as a man should be who has 'great works' to perform, as a man, perhaps, must be for 'great works have great enemies." Id at vii. "The revival of Stoicism among the Catholic nobility at the same time that Protestantism was spreading rapidly through France suggests that the need for some new ideological brace was widely felt. Both Stoicism and Calvinism, it may be argued, were world views admirably suited to educated young aristocrats in the process becoming local officeholders, lawyers, and administrators." Id. at 61. "The myth of the good-days-gone-by is probably the most naive form of social criticism . . ." Id. at 205. This book is, I think, a lost gem.).

LET"S NOT FORGET DATES AND EVENTS SUCH AS JEDWABNE, POLAND, JULY 10, 1941

Anna Bikont, The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jednabne (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) (From the bookjacket: July 10, 1941: "On that summer day in 1941, residents of the Polish town of Jedwabne herded local Jews in to a barn and set it on fire. According to the historian Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, sixteen hundred men, women, and children perished in the blaze. But the massacre was a secret that was suppressed for so long that many of the details remained obscure and others were vehemently denied. Determined to excavate the truth of what happened in Jedwabne, the acclaimed Polish journalist Anna Bikont began reporting on the town. Despite warnings and threats from residents who insisted what she stay away, she combed sensitive archives and interviewed townspeople who lived through the turbulent period when the Nazis took control of Jedwabne. She discovered a community steeped in fear, residual guilt, and lies.").