One of the aspects of the United States that I find most annoying and arrogant and at times down right dangerous is the myth of American exceptionalism and a refusal to learn from the experiences of other countries, many of which have existed for centuries longer than America (e.g., the Romanov family ruled Russia for 60 years longer than America has existed; the Byzantine Empire lasted over 1000 years). Sadly, both political parties cite this myth, but it is most popular on the right where Europe - which now has more upward social mobility than in America - is derided and the mindset is that American do everything better and has nothing to learn from others. Time and time again, factual reality proves this myth wrong and now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, if anything, America is showing that it is exceptional in its bungling of its response to the pandemic. A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's continued refusal to learn from other countries, often to its own detriment. Here are article highlights:
Americans have long considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people … upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. Now those eyes are riveted on the United States for all the wrong reasons. The country is consumed by the worst COVID-19 outbreak on the planet, and the beacons of light are popping up elsewhere in the world.
R. Daniel Kelemen, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has studied what the United States could learn from European public policies, told me that those who subscribe to the ideology of American exceptionalism, or as he described it, “the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations,” have traditionally resisted seeking out lessons from other countries’ experiences. At the very least, “this view leads many to think that the U.S. is simply so different that policies that might work in other countries could simply never work here,” he wrote in an email.
American exceptionalism has been pronounced dead numerous times, from the Vietnam War through the global War on Terror, and nevertheless managed to stick around through those difficult periods. But the coronavirus crisis may pose the greatest threat yet to the belief that America has little to learn from the rest of the world.
American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad. Most U.S. public-policy debates, on matters including education reform and social mobility, occur in a bizarre vacuum, as if the encounters (good and bad) of the large majority of humankind with these same challenges yield no useful insights for the United States. On the rare occasions that politicians do invoke the policies of other governments, they often wield them as political props during highly polarized debates over issues such as health care and gun control.
And many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.
This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College (and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic), told me by email.
Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.
“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.
Instead, the United States squandered that advantage on many fronts. The Obama administration had developed a playbook for pandemic response that drew in part on lessons from other countries’ experiences, but the Trump administration disregarded it. When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.” By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.
Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country, despite Donald Trump’s assertions since March that anybody who wants a test can get one. It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.
Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. . . . . He has stated, referring to America’s coronavirus response, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and “so many” other world leaders, “almost all of them—I would say all of them; not everybody would want to admit it—but they all view us as the world leader, and they're following us.” Even after he has asked the South Korean government to send tests and medical equipment to the United States to help combat the coronavirus, Trump is insisting that the country cough up much more money for the privilege of stationing U.S. troops there. It’s a measure of traditional American hard power that seems obsolete these days, relative to South Korea’s newfound clout as a world leader in addressing COVID-19. My colleague Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump’s proposal in April that people inject themselves with disinfectant, to the horror of scientists and laughter of people at home and abroad, marked an “acceleration point” for a “post-American, post-coronavirus world … in which American opinions will count less.”
A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.
In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton critiqued Bernie Sanders’s proclivity to look to other countries for policy insights and innovations (“We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America,” Clinton said), but many of Sanders’s fellow candidates during the 2020 Democratic primary echoed his admiration for other countries’ achievements. “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.
The United States, of course, still has tremendous capacity to teach. But it also may need to emerge from this crisis recognizing that it has equal capacity to learn. To learn is to admit room for improvement, and thus to improve, especially in dealing with modern-day threats such as pandemics, which America doesn’t have much experience contending with as a superpower. The United States could, for example, easily seize on the momentum among many of its allies to pool lessons learned and coordinate policies to combat the virus and reopen economies.
I will not hold my breath waiting for Americans - especially those who support the GOP and its growing embrace of ignorance and white nationalism to learn from others anytime soon. Meanwhile, people will literally dies because of the belief in American exceptionalism.
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