The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism PDF Download

Author: Jason A. Edwards
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786486813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The American experience has been defined, in part, by the rhetoric of exceptionalism. This book of 11 critical essays explores the notion as it is manifested across a range of contexts, including the presidency, foreign policy, religion, economics, American history, television news and sports. The idea of exceptionalism is explored through the words of its champions and its challengers, past and present. By studying how the principles of American exceptionalism have been used, adapted, challenged, and even rejected, this volume demonstrates the continued importance of exceptionalism to the mythology, sense of place, direction and identity of the United States, within and outside of the realm of politics. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Author: Patricia L. Dunmire
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197658253
Category : National characteristics, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Great Nation of Futurity examines the rhetoric of American exceptionalism--the idea that the United States is an exemplary nation with a unique, divinely sanctioned role--within Cold War foreign policy discourse. Taking a discourse analytic approach, Patricia L. Dunmire focuses specifically on how images and visions of the future within exceptionalist rhetoric are used to promote and endorse the nation's foreign policy during the Cold War.

Author: Jonathan D. Redding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481315807
Category : Apocalyptic literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Examines the influence of Billy Graham's interpretations of Daniel and Revelation in connection with the inclusion of "under God" in the USA's Pledge of Allegiance, a move that continues to affect contemporary laws and legislation"--

Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826888
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
With the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the most controversial question in world politics fast became whether the United States stands within the order of international law or outside it. Does America still play by the rules it helped create? American Exceptionalism and Human Rights addresses this question as it applies to U.S. behavior in relation to international human rights. With essays by eleven leading experts in such fields as international relations and international law, it seeks to show and explain how America's approach to human rights differs from that of most other Western nations. In his introduction, Michael Ignatieff identifies three main types of exceptionalism: exemptionalism (supporting treaties as long as Americans are exempt from them); double standards (criticizing "others for not heeding the findings of international human rights bodies, but ignoring what these bodies say of the United States); and legal isolationism (the tendency of American judges to ignore other jurisdictions). The contributors use Ignatieff's essay as a jumping-off point to discuss specific types of exceptionalism--America's approach to capital punishment and to free speech, for example--or to explore the social, cultural, and institutional roots of exceptionalism. These essays--most of which appear in print here for the first time, and all of which have been revised or updated since being presented in a year-long lecture series on American exceptionalism at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government--are by Stanley Hoffmann, Paul Kahn, Harold Koh, Frank Michelman, Andrew Moravcsik, John Ruggie, Frederick Schauer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Carol Steiker, and Cass Sunstein.

Author: Trevor McCrisken
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403948178
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam examines the influence of the belief in American exceptionalism on the history of U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Trevor B. McCrisken analyzes attempts by each post-Vietnam U.S. administration to revive the popular belief in exceptionalism both rhetorically and by pursuing foreign policy supposedly grounded in traditional American principles. He argues that exceptionalism consistently provided the framework for foreign policy discourse but that the conduct of foreign affairs was limited by the Vietnam syndrome.

Author: Hilde Eliassen Restad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135048592
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
How does American exceptionalism shape American foreign policy? Conventional wisdom states that American exceptionalism comes in two variations – the exemplary version and the missionary version. Being exceptional, experts in U.S. foreign policy argue, means that you either withdraw from the world like an isolated but inspiring "city upon a hill," or that you are called upon to actively lead the rest of the world to a better future. In her book, Hilde Eliassen Restad challenges this assumption, arguing that U.S. history has displayed a remarkably constant foreign policy tradition, which she labels unilateral internationalism. The United States, Restad argues, has not vacillated between an "exemplary" and a "missionary" identity. Instead, the United States developed an exceptionalist identity that, while idealizing the United States as an exemplary "city upon a hill," more often than not errs on the side of the missionary crusade in its foreign policy. Utilizing the latest historiography in the study of U.S. foreign relations, the book updates political science scholarship and sheds new light on the role American exceptionalism has played – and continues to play – in shaping America’s role in the world. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, security studies, and American politics.

Author: David P. Forsythe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317352378
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Is the US really exceptional in terms of its willingness to take universal human rights seriously? According to the rhetoric of American political leaders, the United States has a unique and lasting commitment to human rights principles and to a liberal world order centered on rule of law and human dignity. But when push comes to shove—most recently in Libya and Syria--the United States failed to stop atrocities and dithered as disorder spread in both places. This book takes on the myths surrounding US foreign policy and the future of world order. Weighing impulses toward parochial nationalism against the ideal of cosmopolitan internationalism, the authors posit that what may be emerging is a new brand of American globalism, or a foreign policy that gives primacy to national self-interest but does so with considerable interest in and genuine attention to universal human rights and a willingness to suffer and pay for those outside its borders—at least on occasion. The occasions of exception—such as Libya and Syria—provide case studies for critical analysis and allow the authors to look to emerging dominant powers, especially China, for indicators of new challenges to the commitment to universal human rights and humanitarian affairs in the context of the ongoing clash between liberalism and realism. The book is guided by four central questions: 1) What is the relationship between cosmopolitan international standards and narrow national self-interest in US policy on human rights and humanitarian affairs? 2) What is the role of American public opinion and does it play any significant role in shaping US policy in this dialectical clash? 3) Beyond public opinion, what other factors account for the shifting interplay of liberal and realist inclinations in Washington policy making? 4) In the 21st century and as global power shifts, what are the current views and policies of other countries when it comes to the application of human rights and humanitarian affairs?

Author: Justin S. Vaughn
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623491215
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Campaign rhetoric helps candidates to get elected, but its effects last well beyond the counting of the ballots; this was perhaps never truer than in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Did Obama create such high expectations that they actually hindered his ability to enact his agenda? Should we judge his performance by the scale of the expectations his rhetoric generated, or against some other standard? The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency grapples with these and other important questions. Barack Obama’s election seemed to many to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “long arc of the moral universe . . . bending toward justice.” And after the terrorism, war, and economic downturn of the previous decade, candidate Obama’s rhetoric cast broad visions of a change in the direction of American life. In these and other ways, the election of 2008 presented an especially strong example of creating expectations that would shape the public’s views of the incoming administration. The public’s high expectations, in turn, become a part of any president’s burden upon assuming office. The interdisciplinary scholars who have contributed to this volume focus their analysis upon three kinds of presidential burdens: institutional burdens (specific to the office of the presidency); contextual burdens (specific to the historical moment within which the president assumes office); and personal burdens (specific to the individual who becomes president).

Author: Deborah L. Madsen
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
American Exceptionalism provides an accessible yet comprehensive historical account of one of the most important concepts underlying modern theories of American cultural identity. Deborah Madsen charts the contribution of exceptionalism to the evolution of the United States as an ideological and geographical entity from 1620 to the present day. She explains how this sense of spiritual and political destiny has shaped American culture and how it has promoted exciting counter arguments from Native American and Chicano perspectives and in the contemporary writings of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison.

Author: Jason Gilmore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755626974
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Donald Trump has forged a unique relationship with American exceptionalism, parting ways with how American politicians have long communicated this idea to the American public. Through systematic comparative analyses, this book details the various ways that Trump strategically altered and exploited the discourse of American exceptionalism to elevate not the nation, but himself personally, professionally, and politically. Jason Gilmore and Charles Rowling call this Trump's Exceptional Me Strategy and they document how it made Trump different from every president in modern American history. Beginning with the 2016 election, the authors show how Trump broke with tradition and instead of championing American exceptionalism, he actively portrayed the nation as an un-exceptional mess in need of a saviour. Placing blame at the feet of politicians-both Democrats and Republicans-for America's decline, Trump set himself up to be seen as the one person who could “Make America Exceptional Again.” The authors then document how throughout his presidency and the 2020 presidential election Trump sought to convince Americans that he was the exceptional president, making the case at every turn how American exceptionalism had returned under his presidency and that he, and he alone, was to thank for it. Gilmore and Rowling illustrate how from the outset Trump's conception of American exceptionalism had almost nothing to do with the country's institutions, ideals, or its people.