True American “exceptionalism” is measured not by privilege, but by the courage to stand in solidarity with the oppressed across the world. Ordinary Americans must connect struggles and harness collective action for justice.
Dear Americans,
Growing up, the United States held a strange allure for many of us in the global south. Your leviathan of a nation lies continents and oceans apart. Yet it still manages to arouse no less intrigue worldwide than the mythical island civilisation of Atlantis does in self-styled historians and tireless conspiracy theorists. We grew up learning that the United States is a world unto itself. Its historical trajectory is purportedly unlike that of any other nation, continually rising and scaling new heights of success.
The doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” insists that the United States will evade the laws of history — i.e., unlike all past empires, it will never meet its demise. Despite developing the most advanced capitalist system, you have proved Marxists wrong. You have made it nigh impossible for a class-based social revolution to take root. Proletarian sentiments have no significant purchase in your political landscape.
You have set in motion this juggernaut of an individualistic entrepreneurial spirit that has trampled over all collectivist endeavours. For good measure, you point out that your liberal democracy and triumphant market economy stand in stark contrast to collectivist economies with their thistledown democratic foundations and otiose economic accomplishments.
In the history books, we come across John Winthrop (1588–1649), a Puritan lawyer and later the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who delivered the famous speech ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ aboard the flagship Arbella. In his speech, Winthrop put forward the idea of the future United States being “a city upon a hill”.
Winthrop insisted that the emerging nation must mould itself into an exemplar. Not only should it guide the world, but it must also serve as a model nation for others to emulate. This idea later found expression in the rhetoric and practices of your political leaders in the centuries to come, though not necessarily always grounded in the original Puritan worldview.
Over the past few centuries, and particularly after the disintegration of European empires, the United States has emerged as the preeminent economic and military power. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, your country has consolidated its position as the only global superpower.
Flexing your superior economic and military muscles across the globe, you have toppled despots and democratically elected alike. Your military has invaded other nations in the name of carrying out the spadework of installing democracy and free market capitalism. Successive American Presidents have insisted that this is necessary to keep at bay such scourges as Communism and Islamism.
If your leaders had once championed self-determination for Europe’s colonial subjects, they persist in voicing support for the colonial subjugation of Palestinians. Being successors to Abraham Lincoln, they have made strange bedfellows with the pro-Apartheid government of South Africa. If they celebrated MLK, they also once called Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
If hypocrisy is the oil that lubricates your governmental affairs, then the recent policies adopted by the Trump administration are hardly an aberration. Under a different guise, they serve the same old purpose of enriching the rich by exploiting the working class.
Trump’s mercantilist trade policies, ostensibly aimed at making America a manufacturing powerhouse again, are matched by even more odious austerity measures on the domestic front. Currently being implemented, they will eviscerate the already threadbare social safety net that a sizeable number of vulnerable Americans depend upon.
Among these unfortunates are many of you who hold full-time jobs, work extra hours, or juggle multiple jobs, yet still rely on food stamps to make ends meet. Meanwhile, millions of workers in the global south await an uncertain future as the tariffs bite into export numbers. The working class stands to lose out again, within and without the US borders.
To rise above self-absorption, to recognise the plight of others, and to weave your struggles together with theirs into a shared fabric of resistance: that is the true meaning of being “exceptional”.
Trump’s detractors among both Democrats and Republicans are no less responsible for today’s crisis. The stage was set when they enabled US companies to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without taking any meaningful steps to improve the skills or living standards of millions of working-class Americans.
What’s noteworthy is that the twinned evils of half-baked mercantilism — where tariff rates fluctuate daily according to Trump’s whims — and stringent austerity measures will only widen the already yawning inequality gap between the rich and the poor at a dizzying speed.
While his predecessors and political opponents employ such catch-all terms as globalisation, multilateralism, and cosmopolitanism to serve the rich and powerful and hoodwink the poor, Trump does so by exploiting age-old nativist fears with his xenophobic and racist vernacular.
Resisting Trumpian politics thus requires not being fooled again into pinning hopes on faux cosmopolitans. They have led you to many false dawns in the past. Because neither the privileged lives they lead nor the Panglossian rhetoric they deploy conform to the lived realities of ordinary Americans.
Political power in America today is concentrated in the hands of a few elites. With income and wealth disparities between the privileged and the not-so-privileged reaching historically high proportions, any attempt to revive juste milieu politics — better known today as Centrism — will backfire, still less deliver equity. For politics is not separate from economics. Those who claim otherwise cannot be trusted.
Consider the state of free speech in America. In recent days, the Trump administration’s attacks on freedom of speech have become a cause célèbre. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a popular late-night show was suspended for allegedly celebrating the death of this right-wing martyr. Many ordinary Americans were fired from their jobs for committing the same crime. Some of these merely quoted Kirk’s own racist and xenophobic words. A sinister crackdown campaign was spearheaded by the Vice President himself. Predictably, Trump’s political opponents and liberal media have cried foul about media censorship, about attacks on free speech.
However, for people who struggle to put food on the table, the right to free speech sounds like an exorbitantly priced delicacy they can’t afford. Free speech, after all, is a finite resource — its impact dictated by the privilege and influence one can command.
In other words, someone in a privileged position can amplify their voice in a way that an average American simply cannot. Which is why Jimmy Kimmel can bring his programme back on air, but those lesser-known Americans who lost their jobs cannot win them back. Ergo, applying the transitivity principle here yields a false equivalence: the ordinary critics of Charlie Kirk who lost their jobs may share a common tormentor with Jimmy Kimmel, but that doesn’t necessarily make him their ally.
Contrast this situation with that involving the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. Hailing from a humble background, how did Khalil manage to gain recognition? He did so thanks to his phenomenal organisational skills, which enabled him to bring people from different ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds together to fight for a common cause: the liberation of Palestinians.
What’s crucial here is not that Khalil exercised his right to free speech, but that he and his fellow activists at Columbia University succeeded in actualising the potential inherent in the freedom to associate and organise, something often overlooked by others. Unlike freedom of speech — so often a plaything of the rich and powerful — the freedom to associate remains an inexhaustible resource. It can be wielded by almost anyone and everyone, regardless of social position, in countless ways to build bridges across communal divides and challenge the very logic of identity politics.
The elite and the government they control are not fearful of us exercising our free speech. For they already control the media and can, on a whim, craft a narrative they favour and disseminate it so widely and potently as to manufacture a public consensus.
But when people organise by championing a common cause, this creates an altogether different dynamic. What spooked Republicans the most since Trump assumed power is not the record-setting speech made by House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, but the anti-ICE and No Kings Protests attended by hundreds of thousands of people nationwide.
We also notice media personalities and soi-disant champions of free speech clamouring to censor Zohran Mamdani, to strip him of his citizenship. He, too, has shown the audacity to break barriers in multi-ethnic, multicultural New York City and to rally support for his political vision.
Another advantage of the freedom to organise is that a thousand voices cannot be muzzled as easily as one. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States. Khalil may languish in detention, but the movement he played a leading role in continues to thrive. Governments cannot incarcerate everyone, least of all in the United States, where prisons are already bursting at the seams. If free speech is the venom the powerful bite us with, then our ability to organise a unified resistance is its most potent antidote.
My appeal to ordinary and disadvantaged Americans is this: Next time a media pundit mourns the decline of America’s standing in the world while glorifying past presidencies, the next time Barack Obama delivers another inspirational tweet endorsing the same old political candidates from privileged backgrounds as the saviours of vulnerable Americans, the next time elite universities like Harvard complain about governmental interference, while censoring the free expression of students — hold them suspect and hold them accountable.
Because when push comes to shove — when ICE agents, the Police, the National Guard and the military, armed with weapons of warfare, move into media houses, into affluent neighbourhoods — your favourite liberal media pundit will turn up on prime-time FOX News in a heartbeat. Obama will fly to Oslo to receive another Nobel Peace Prize for his “inspiring” and “life-changing” tweets. And what about your alma mater? It will fire its last liberal arts academic for violating the “compact” code of conduct set down by the Trump administration to place higher education under federal control.
By contrast, come hell or high water, unlike your privileged compatriots armed with a solid escape plan, you have no choice but to persevere with making America a better place for you and for the sake of your children. Who should you then turn to instead?
The key, I believe, is to find people with whom you can build lifelong solidarity — those who won’t abandon you at the first whiff of inconvenience. By standing in solidarity with people from distant lands whose circumstances mirror your own, by advancing their causes at the very heart of America, you will find that their struggles are not only theirs — they are yours too.
For you will come to see — as many of you have already — that US involvement often perpetuates the very injustices these people endure, and that the tactics of oppression used against them usually bear striking resemblance to those employed against you.
What’s fantastic about the United States is that People from all around the world have made it their home, including those who are underprivileged, those who have fled persecution, and those who have encountered authoritarianism and fascism in their homelands. This means that there is readily available expertise to be learned and exchanged, alliances to be formed, and resistances to be mounted, domestically and internationally.
While engaging with Palestinian-Americans and refugees, Black youth exposed to constant police harassment should be able to see themselves in Palestinian children resisting Israeli tanks with stones. Incarcerated Americans and their loved ones can recognise the plight of Latinos and Caribbeans fleeing notorious South American prisons.
Similarly, to harness international solidarity, Amazon warehouse workers should find common cause with Bangladeshi garment workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Homeless Americans can relate to Sudanese and Rohingya refugees living in tents. And American women fighting for abortion rights should stand shoulder to shoulder with Afghan women resisting the Taliban’s theocratic despotism.
To rise above self-absorption, to recognise the plight of others, and to weave your struggles together with theirs into a shared fabric of resistance: that is the true meaning of being “exceptional”.
I believe that, as a miniature version of the world, the United States is capable of accomplishing this Herculean task: of being “exceptional” and leading the world. But to do so, Americans must first change how their country is governed — from one that serves the powerful few to one that stands with the powerless many — and channel such solidarity in their interaction with the wider world. Only then can solidarity become a way of life rather than a mere slogan.
In Solidarity,
Siddhartha Dhar
Image Credit: “Occupy Wall Street Poster” by Seth Cochran, released into the public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons
