• Get a peep into the American mind by understanding the concept of American Exceptionalism. It might help in understanding the present. 

Recently, former U.S. President and the 2024 running candidate for President, Donald Trump was shot at in a deeply divided nation. Shortly thereafter Trump went on to choose his Vice Presidential running mate JD Vance. This shows America in simultaneously two lights: Trump who has been hailed by Christian Nationalists in America as their messiah has now been anointed by God Himself to set Trump apart from all other candidates for becoming the 47^th President of the United States. This is the view of at least his supporters.

Trump’s supporters see his survival as God’s fiat that Trump lives to be the next President of the USA. His running mate, JD Vance advocates Christian neo-Nationalism and a strong white hilly billy culture. Vance has even authored a book on this rural white Christian culture. I was in touch with the Roman Catholic rural populace of Tulsa; they had welcomed Trump as their champion too. Trump has been able to galvanise Christians across the board and not only the evangelists. Read Trump supported 1976 Rath Yatra in New York

Nevertheless, we need to understand this conflict between the Republicans and the Democrats within the context of American Exceptionalism and the Turner thesis.

Long ago after bitter persecution some Christians had to flee from Christian majority England and the rest of Europe. These Christians who fled Europe for new lands west of their continent were called Puritans for they considered their own methods of Christian worship to be purer than the worship of the rest of their fellow Christians. They dreamt of a land full of milk and honey and they waited for their Promised Land. This land had been promised by YHWH (Yahweh) to them in the Bible. 

Thus, these pilgrims who later came to be known as the Pilgrim Fathers boarded ships with names like The Mayflower and sailed for the unknown. When they reached their new- found- land (Newfoundland in the US is a State now); they were welcomed by what they thought were red demons --- red Indians who are now called Native Americans. The Pilgrims thought that the red man was a demon and thus killed the red man; raped the red man’s wife, mother and daughter and grabbed the land of the Native American Indian. 

Richard Slotkin’s ‘Myth of the Frontier’ trilogy, especially, Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation and his magisterial work published just this year from Harvard University Press, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, should be consulted to study the violence inherent in the making of the American nation. That is contrary to how the U.S. tries to portray itself to the rest of the world today as a saviour.

The best fictional account of how the white man annihilated the red man remains the late Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or, The Evening Redness in the West. The enduring image of the all-American macho man is the one with a fast revolver; self-sufficient and singing songs riding the livelong day on a horse and trotting to the west. Forever to the wild West to win it for his fellow white American.

The American cowboy was the epitome of the friend of the white man, the hero to the white woman and the dread of all the indigenous women and men in the land of milk and honey. The Promised Land was won by a westward movement of hordes of cowboys who were nothing but gold-rush mercenaries. The nation of shopkeepers, the United Kingdom, sent a few of its shop men to the west. Napolean was dead right when he identified the national spirit of Britain as being one of mere and only, business.

These marauders came to be later thought of as exceptional and were hero-worshipped in this alien land which was not their own where to this day none but the white lives matter. This exceptional band of women and men drawn together by their westward movement imported Africans from coastal Africa and added to their exceptionalism. They treated Africans as worse than animals. The works of black authors like Toni Morrison show the heartlessness of the white woman more eloquently than any non-fiction writer can ever do.

So, we turn to the Turner thesis and from there to a discussion of America’s exceptionalism. If we do that, we can understand how today the great disorder plaguing the world was born. Mind you, it is Richard Slotkin who identifies his own nation as ‘a great disorder’ and it is no heir of Bharat who is doing so.  This heir of Bharat is astonished that America has forgotten the xenophobia in its blood ---- WASP America is thoroughly intolerant of the rest of the country and the world.

White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant is who Americans are. America remains even now fiercely anti-Catholic, anti-black and anti-Semite. This sadly, how exceptional America and white Americans are.

In Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1861-1932) essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Turner writes that the “peculiarity of the American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people --- to the changes involved...in winning a wilderness and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive…conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life”. 

This essay is today known as the Turner Thesis. It not only suppressed the atrocities of white scalp hunters but fuelled the writing of westerns which suppressed the truth of the violence that occurred during the extermination of Native American Indians at the hands of cowboys.

Further Turner wrote that the “true point of view in the history of [his] nation [America] is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West”. White settlers in the west justified the genocide of native Americans by creating an alternative history of the native Americans’ violence. Thus, we find Cormac McCarthy pointing out in Blood Meridian how white scalp hunters butchered other white settlers pretending to be native American Indians:

The tracks of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers [sic] in that wilderness and disguised their work to be that of the savages [native American Indians]. (McCarthy Blood Meridian)

This movement to the west and the mass destruction of native Americans and their tribes, their religions was done systematically, and white families settled in self-sufficient groups and justified their looted land as being predestined to them by God --- these were exceptional women and men called out of the waste of Europe to win for the faithful, the land they called America.

They valorised independence, they valorised the do-it-yourself ethic and the all-embracing spirit of capitalism and sensory excesses as something God wanted them to have. This self-deluding doctrine of being THE chosen people called out of all nations is as much a hoax as any other ideology practised by the white man everywhere else in the world.

The Ku Klux Klan was very active in the past and is now again active once again and the Klan will not rest till all manners of non-white, non-Wasp elements are wiped out from the face of not only of America but the rest of the world.

Everything is a business interest since the west-coast was won from the red savage. The savages have moved beyond the West coast and now have found fit habitations in Bharat. Thus, the American statesman glibly calls out imaginary atrocities in our land, when their own history haunts them as the ghosts of millions of raped and murdered black babies cry out for justice from their tiny graves throughout the Promised Land. The white man and his family whose heirs are contemporary white Americans, did not hesitate to rape babies just because they were the babies of slaves, and these white men who murdered them were no other than their fathers and brothers. The white man had been a scalp-hunter and is just another hunter-gatherer even now.

Of course, they hunt now for metaphorical scalps with which they have to justify with their huge war-machine. The exceptionalism of America lies in its being an exceptionally violent nation --- a great disorder which at heart is shaped by the blood of the Other. It is a gunfighter nation, a nation whose diplomatic core was polluted by hatred and fear of any nation which aspires to blossom as wealthier both in human resources and soft power. Unless Indians are careful they will try to turn us into a clone of their cronies.

Which is this America that Trump represents, and which America did the shooter represent? The irony is that Trump is hated by Democrats and the latter decry all violence. The lone wolf shooter became a gunfighter absurdly by espousing the Republican value of owning guns. The United States is indeed a gunfighter nation. Perhaps, that is why the gun culture is so rampant in the U.S. and they are sold freely.

Sources:  I have simplified and reworked material for this essay that has been already written.

Author Dr Dr. Subhasis Chattopadhyay has an interest in American Studies.

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Editor’s Notes 

We admire the many qualities of the American nation for e.g. innovation. The deeper intent behind this article is to understand the American mind.

Stephen Walt wrote about '5 Myths of American Exceptionalism' in foreignpolicy.com. Excerpts, “Most statements of "American exceptionalism" presume that America’s values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.”

“A crucial component of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States has a divinely ordained mission to lead the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan told audiences that there was "some divine plan" that had placed America here, and once quoted Pope Pius XII saying, "Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind."