 you bet we're back on a given Monday at noon with John David and of Hawaii Pacific University he's a history professor there we can never understand the present or the future for that matter without understanding history and so yesterday yesterday we had a we had a one hour recitation by the president and included American exceptionalism so we thought we studied that a little bit because John and I have talked about that before it's ingrained into American history and and and Trump was was really going hard on that this is the greatest country on earth and the question is uh is that true is that a true statement was it ever a true statement John David and HPU history professor what do you think okay thanks Jake thanks for having me on so it's an interesting question I think it's uh you know on the surface you could say no we're not an exceptional nation and the Trump presidency is proving this the truth but what was it what is it and the best of times when the term came into use what was the idea yes well that's the evolution of the term that's another very interesting topic but so when we talk about exceptionalism what we're talking about is two things we're talking about the idea that the United States is a unique exceptional a unique place among all the nations of the world and then so that's the first thing you this idea of uniqueness and then the second thing is this idea that United States is also what's the second thing Jake we're unique and we're also the best the best right superior to everyone else so so uh so this is now the basis for this is very old uh we go all the way back to uh the John Witzrup sermon that he gave on the Arbella which was which was a ship uh sailing across the Atlantic and landed in the new world landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1619 so we go all the way back to John Witzrup in his sermon when he talked about uh you know the the idea that that this new place could be a city on a hill which was essentially what he was talking about was a model for the rest of the world and you know this is very steeped in religion at that point and it's also steeped in the idea that there's a lot of pressure on this community to succeed these Puritans to succeed and if they don't succeed then you know it will play very badly in some sense the whole covenant with God is in play with these Puritans because they're sick and tired of what's been having to them in England they're being persecuted in England and then they come back to the they come to Massachusetts Bay and the pressure's on them to make it work and so that's that's really where the term exceptional that's where we pulled it from now John Witzrup didn't use the term exceptionalism the first use of this term i think it's quite recent actually i think it's probably mid 20 cent mid 20th century maybe then after world war two the actual term is being used so but but it's become strangely okay this is and again this is a very complicated issue but strangely in the time in which the term has come into use and become more and more a kind of litmus test for presidents we talked about this before jay but of course president obama was asked do you believe in american exceptionalism the republicans thought they could kind of hook him you know get him into trouble on this and he gave an academic answer and he said yes but all nations believe that they're exceptional in some ways so so he in a way he foiled them by giving the most honest and kind of smart nuanced answer you can give and that's quite true right this is this is a breadbook to study israeli exceptionalism british exceptionalism the japanese had exceptionalism so it's it's a very common thing for modern nations to have this idea that somehow they're special and they're superior so that's not just the united states that is not even exceptional in its own idea that that is exceptional so but de facto de facto john i mean there was a time maybe as you say after world war two when you know we were the leader of the free world that we were charitable and generous and kind and moral and um you know a leader making the world a better place for democracy and every or all american ideals and we and you could say in that period of time we really were exceptional that nobody rose to the level of the united states in so many ways including military power but but you wouldn't say that today would you say that today the same definition no no no no i don't think so i don't think we were exceptional okay you know look uh we practiced jim crow segregationism in the south world war two changed you know that the the military itself was segregated african-american troops were attacked by white troops in the war when they came home from the war they were race riots because these african-american troops these veterans wanted the same rights as whites you know it was uh no i don't think so i mean there is uh you know i i just don't think so i think that's uh i'll be honest with you i think that's a fairytale that uh donald trump would like to tell us that there was this time when we were exceptional and now we're moving back to that time you know his slogan in in 2016 was make you know make the united states make america great again right so referring back to a time when we were in fact greater than we are now so it played upon people's nostalgia for that time so no i don't think so um certainly you can you can argue that there are instances throughout american history where united support where citizens and even non-citizens rose up and said hey we got to change the system and it's not american exceptionalism it's actually an idea that you can improve what you've already got uh and uh you know certainly certainly there are there are uh threads let's call them threads you you have constitutional threads you have the threads from the declaration of independence you have these threads that go through american history and people grab onto those threads and say hey this is what makes the united states uh you know a wonderful place to live in um and they use those threads to try to push us towards a greater good you know kind of we the people forming you know a more perfect union i like that now it's the word perfect has some problems too but uh i like that that the constitution starts with we the people and it starts with uh you know our goal of forming a more perfect union i like that i think that's perfectly fine and it doesn't have to argue that somehow we're more perfect than the british or the israelis or the japanese or that were you know that were actually going to become perfect that's where i don't really like to work because i don't think there's any way we're going to be perfect but uh you talk about threads john you talk about threads one of the threads was uh for a long time slavery and slavery as i mentioned before the show in my view slavery was avarice in other words you wanted to make your money and lots of it on the on the back of someone else and uh screw that screw that person and you and you come out ahead and in fact most of the millionaires in the united states up until the end of the civil war were in the south because they got rich and they're trying to hold on to it yeah and so and so uh avarice plays a role and there's always this tension between you know let's let me protect my own stash and uh let me do the common good and i think sometimes the common good words more important sometimes it wasn't jay that's fantastic man you get an a there that was great i love that seriously there this is a very good point this it's always been intentioned so let's let's let's talk about the 19th century some more because you brought it up and so detochville let's take the great alexis detochville who was this french philosopher who came to the united states and wrote a book about the united states and detochville described americans in a way that suggests that by the 1830s when he came to the united states and toured the united states and then wrote this book that the united states was already developing an identity which maybe was focused on what you were talking about on avarice because detochville described the united states as a nation of small holders small farmers he wouldn't have described it as avarice but maybe maybe maybe that's going too far to describe it as avarice but but detochville described this nation of small holders and he thought that the genius of the nation because we were largely a farming nation at that point the genius of the nation was that we had these independent farmers who owned their own land controlled their own destinies were highly independent said that already independent how independent very independent actually they were also linked into a commercial market but so they were they were ambitious they were a self-supporting and in kind of a jeffersonian terms they were not capable of corruption they could support the republic by their own efforts so yeah so detochville argued that the material circumstances of the united states were shaping an identity an identity in which profits and and material well-being was a big part of this equation but but detochville actually i think also associated this with with a political system that would be made uh virtuous on the basis of these small holders so well you know we've shared an article in the salon website salon.com yeah about what what trump said and whether the country really is exceptional um and one of the interesting comments there goes to this point you're making about individualism rugged individualism and uh right or wrong what what the author of that article said was that rugged individual is not really consistent with working for the common good uh and so you know you have a tension there you have a tension between i'm i'm going to do individualistic things i'm going to be strong and self-reliant and independent and i don't really care about my neighbor this is a tension that is also of great concern right no that's right no and both good points so yeah so um so it's a tricky question so you've got exceptionalism on one side is the united states an exceptional nation but what you have on the other side i think is still uh the survival and the development of what i'll call civic virtue so i don't necessarily agree with detochville's analysis i'm not sure that he was right in that way and so um i tend to what okay here's the here's what i'm doing i'm actually writing a book called the dissenters guide to american history and in that book what i'm doing is i'm selecting out examples of civic virtue and uh you know it's dissent of course it's opposition to the ruling power but i defined dissent pretty broadly and so i picked out i picked people out of in the revolutionary period and look at them then what i'm trying to do is create a positive narrative of the american past that can inform us today in our uh in our thinking about our relationship to the polity to politics in this country and you know and political activism and and you know again what i call civic virtue very important very important but so what's the title of the book john what's the title what's the title yeah it's called the dissenters guide to american history okay and when's it coming out well i don't know i mean uh um it's several publishers are looking at it um it's uh under review but i suspect the whole coveted issue is going to slow that down but you know i'd like to think i would get a contract by the end of summer but i think coveted might change that it might be the end of the year i'm not gonna change everything um so here's trump yesterday and he's using exceptionalism you know right through that one hour diatribe um where i think the message to takeaway if you want to call it a takeaway is that i'm rich i have but i have given a lot to this country you should appreciate me you should love me for what i have done for this country i've done a great job the government has done a great job including especially with with uh you know coronavirus and by the way uh what's his name pouchy rouchy rouch was not rouch was not there uh the the uh the fellow who really we we do believe and uh yeah yeah yeah he followed you yeah yeah and he was not there and which which means i think that trump took him off the stage because he was uh he was not on trump's team um anyway so point the point though is he used exceptionalism okay as a way to gain public support for his own political position and ultimately you know his election is the campaign uh in november in the election and and what's interesting though is he says the greatest country on earth we are doing a great job we are capable of doing the most marvelous things on and on like that and i as your president i'm a war president now this is we have to come together so he used the notion of exceptionalism to ask people to come together behind him and i thought that was very interesting because i you know again i question whether we are exceptional i question whether he's exceptional he he is exceptional but in ways that you might not compliment him for well yeah he's exceptionally bad he's the worst president we've ever had yeah uh he's an exceptional liar he's the biggest liar we've ever had so he's exceptional in that in those ways yeah totally agree and so the problem is you've got people out there who would rather rather than help their neighbor rather than help the polity they would like to buy ammunition uh and that's mentioned in the salon article um so i'm just wondering this is a degradation of deterioration an emasculation of the notion of exceptionalism right so yeah so um so so the book itself you know the the dissenters got of course i could talk all day about that but but to your question i think the question really is that and i think i've thought about this for a long time um because uh you know my advisor david novel actually was a great man by the way you know i love david he died recently but uh really really benefited from his tutelage and really miss him so but david wrote a lot about american exceptions he wrote a actually a book about american exceptionalism in the time period up to world war two and what david was arguing is that uh uh there were the scholars were trying to find various ways of fitting in their own ideas to the notion that the united states was exceptional and it became increasingly difficult in the time period of world war two to argue that the united states was exceptional because the united states had spread its army worldwide it was now engaged in a system uh that was global actually and it was very difficult it's kind of difficult to maintain one distance uh from the contagion from the contagion of the the evil of the rest of the world uh and so but where i picked this up is after world war two i've done just a little bit of research on uh the the attempt to redevelop an idea a truly kind of powerful idea dollars of american exceptionalism in the post world war two period and this is in the 1950s and the 1960s when scholars began to argue that there was such a thing called an american civilization and uh you know and and there were textbooks about this so the scholars were trying to get this into the classrooms and there were other scholarly arguments that referred to this american civilization and so um i you know so so there was this argument and yet by the 1970s i don't think anybody's talking about an american civilization and certainly nobody is talking about it now right nobody is talking about it now so this idea did not have enough power to move into the political discourse and to be something that that uh americans kind of truly gravitated towards instead of course what happened was the civil rights movement and the uh and uh you know the vietnam war and uh you know things kind of blew up in a very interesting way in the 1960s uh but i i think that the notion that the united states was an exceptional place really took a hit in the 1960s with the vietnam war and then with the revealing it wasn't the civil rights movement itself but it was the revelation that to the rest of the world even that segregation existed at you know at very high levels in the south and that uh that african-americans were being denied their civil rights uh in very significant ways which you know begs the question of how we could claim exceptionalism or an american civilization if we were doing these things to our own citizens so um so i think that i think there's this kind of dual track that happens in the 1960s where you have uh we have this new kind of cynicism about american government a well-deserved cynicism cynicism after the vietnam debacle and after the you know as i said the revelations about american racism uh and then at the same time you have the development of a very strong of what i'll call rights consciousness in starting in the 1960s and then going into the 70s the 80s and so it's african-americans gained civil rights and then women want more rights and then Hispanics want more civil rights and then disabled people get more civil rights and and so on and so on and so this idea of liberation and liberty which is fundamental to what we would call the modern project this idea of liberation actually gets encapsulated in this country at least in these individualistic uh individual liberty ways of thinking about it and this doesn't i i'm just not sure this helps the uh the idea of civic virtue the idea that we can claim that we're somehow exceptional maybe we can claim we're exceptional in giving up you know in in repairing the civil rights of the country maybe we we can claim that as exceptionalism but i'm not sure that it that it helps our framework of of you know how we think about no how can it you know the ultimate test the ultimate test of any country or society or civilization if you want to put at that level is is whether you know whether the people are engaged with the government whether they they uh they know about the government they support the government they participate in the government and when the government is listening and engaging with the people so the more you know the more collaborative engagement there is between the people in the government the better the more optimistic you can be about the future about the sustainability of this this polity yeah so and we and we had all divisiveness for you know growing divisiveness i would say since uh since vietnam uh and then and then what accelerated it is the failure of the draft in the early 70s where we gave up the the connection between the military and the civilian worlds and so that was a parting of the ways there and and that enhanced the right wing but but let me let me ask you this though you know if we are into sustainability we need we need to sustain ourselves physically and technologically we need to avoid having epidemics and pandemics because at the end of the day um you know the the philosophical end of things is going to be overtaken by the physical and medical end of things if your country cannot survive if your country is in shambles the way our country was at such great risk in the 30s in the depression um you know then we're really not sustainable so uh would you agree with me that um you know the the notion of exceptionalism is and when it where it's false where it's not focused on the reality it's a very dangerous business for the sustainability of the country yeah but i would argue it's not exceptionalism at all i i i think exceptionalism uh is kind of a tool of propaganda in this day and age okay we are so not close to but but i would like to argue that we would push for survival and what you're talking about sustainability right resilience uh and in that regard we need a kind of a a renaissance of civic concern and maybe something like uh COVID-19 gives us some of that this idea that neighbors should take care of neighbors that community should come together and cooperate when the government asks them to uh so and and and the thought is that you're you're thinking about uh yourself but you're thinking about your relationship to one another and to your community and to the government and to politics so you can't force yourself from that idea but you actually have to think about yourself in that context and it's quite important uh you know and we've lost that quite frankly in the in the last again i i mean i don't know i mean again what i would say is that uh we need more study of this we need we need an academic study we need a book on American exceptionalism and civic duty in the post world war two period and i suppose i'll have to write it at some point but i guess you will try one more one point is is exceptionalism you know the whole notion of federalism is coming into play because uh when you know Trump or others use the term these days however accurate or inaccurate it is they're talking about the country in general um and and they and they're willing to take credit for any success and they're willing to you know blame somebody else for any failure that's perfectly corporate of him um but you know i hate to use the word perfect these days but but you know what what strikes me is that what we see coming out at this this uh this this long press conference yesterday and other remarks he has made is uh i'm not going to do this myself you guys and i'm not going to take credit i'm not going to even tell you i know about it i want someone else to do it i want the states to do it it's kind of a bizarre federalism you know all you fix it i can't help you i'm not going to help you uh and i'm gonna i'm only gonna maybe facilitate some things and i'll i'll say well but i don't take responsibility you have to take responsibility that troubles me on a really high profound level of course but you know i mean uh you know trump is uh pat you know when when there's trouble trump is the first one to run and pass the buck i mean you know this is i don't think there's any surprise in this you know when when he when his company went almost went into bankruptcy what did he do he he went to his to his creditors and said hey it's your fault you need to you need to bail me out right so this is you know we can't count on civic virtue from donald trump but i think we need to think beyond donald trump and not get too fixated on him uh and i think to repair this this notion of of being of having civic virtue caring about the community i i think uh you know like i said i think covet can help that but i really do think we need to re-energize the notion my contribution to this would be at least right now the dissenters guide in which i point out that hey what we have in history is tremendous effort towards civic duty and towards the polity towards improving the polity towards reducing injustice towards uh making it a better country for the people who the citizens who live in this country and so we've got some great examples in our past of this and uh you know i i think it's uh i i think i think we don't have to say look things are really terrible and we can't recover what we can say is hey we've got a we've got a past that we can be proud of in some ways we don't have to be quite so negative and cynical about how our government has worked in the past in some ways this is a different kind of vietnam syndrome in that a vietnam invited uh conscientious citizens to go oh my gosh this you know this is a terrible terrible thing that the government has done they kept secrets from us they they sent our our sons into battle to die for no good reason uh so so i think in some ways we need to get over that vietnam syndrome and we can do that by looking in other places for for a usable past that allows us to think about our relationship to our the threads the the declaration the constitution we can strengthen those threads reanimate those threads and bring those forward into our polity today and then start thinking about the country again through those things and then we'll go wow we need to take control of things we need to repair the damage that's been done this may force us to be more introspective it is forcing us to be more active and proactive on a state level even a county level but maybe maybe it will connect us better uh through those uh new connections with states and counties and through recognition the federal government cannot solve all our problems and that we have to solve our problems ourselves as as a unified people i i hope that comes true i but i really regret the all the suffering the pain and and the fatalities that will they're live before us before of course yeah yeah yeah right well thank you john i agree you're welcome david david and the history professor who helps us understand the past the present and the future from a white pacific university here on history left thank you so much all right okay take care