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Did yous ever wonder why Donald Trump's "Make America Nifty Again" slogan took such root among the Republican base? Did it symbolize a return to an historic period when wages were college and jobs more secure? Or was it coded racial language designed to signal a rollback to a time when people of color (and women) knew their place? In the soul-searching and recrimination among Democrats after Hillary Clinton's defeat, both theories have their champions.

Just a closer look at conservative rhetoric in recent years reveals that "Make America Great Again" was not Trump's invention. It evolved from a phrase that became central to the Republican establishment during the Obama years: "American exceptionalism." People often equate the expression with the notion that God fabricated America "a city upon a hill," in the words of the Puritan colonist John Winthrop. However, every bit University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel noted in a 2011 article, this usage just came into faddy subsequently Barack Obama became president. Previously information technology was mainly used by academics to hateful that America is an exception compared with other Western democracies, for better or worse, as illustrated by its top-notch universities or its bare-basic gun command.

Prior to 2008, "American exceptionalism" appeared in news articles a handful of times a year, but after Obama was elected the references skyrocketed, largely because of a drumbeat from Republicans. In one case the tea party wave made John Boehner speaker of the Business firm in 2010, for example, he summarized the growing consensus among Republicans: Obama had turned his dorsum on the Founding Fathers to the betoken where he "refused to talk about American exceptionalism." (In fact, in 2009 the president had stated, "I believe in American exceptionalism.") The phrase's popularity in GOP talking points—often in attacks on Obama'southward "socialist" policies—paralleled the spread of conspiracy theories about his citizenship and supposed jihadi sympathies.

Defending "American exceptionalism" was a theme of Mitt Romney'due south 2012 campaign; he blasted Obama for supposedly thinking that "America's simply another nation" destined to go "a European-style entitlement society." Romney's entrada co-chair John Sununu added that Obama should "learn how to be an American." (He later apologized.)

The 2016 Republican presidential candidates and their surrogates sang the same tune. When Fox News pundit Sean Hannity asked Jeb Bush-league for his thoughts on exceptionalism, Bush replied, "I do believe in American exceptionalism," unlike Obama, who "is disrespecting our history and the extraordinary nature of our country." Rudy Giuliani was more explicit. "I do not believe that the president loves America," he asserted, suggesting Obama did not think "nosotros're the most exceptional country in the globe." During a spoken communication a month later in Selma, Alabama, the president pointed out that the ongoing fight for civil rights is a cornerstone of what makes America exceptional.

To get more of a quantitative sense of the phrase's evolution, I analyzed the Republican Party platform. All political party platforms typically emphasize organized religion in American greatness, but between 1856 and 2008, the GOP never used the expression "American exceptionalism" or even the adjective "exceptional" to depict the country. By contrast, the terminal department of the 2012 Republican platform lambasting the Obama presidency was titled "American exceptionalism." The 2016 platform put the phrase into the first line of its preamble: "We believe in American exceptionalism." The evolution of "American exceptionalism" into an anti-Obama rallying weep with nativist overtones evoked earlier appeals to "states' rights" to rouse whites resenting the end of segregation.

In his volume Time to Get Tough: Making America #i Once more, Trump, too, framed his agenda every bit a defense of "American exceptionalism." "Mayhap my biggest beef with Obama is his view that there's nix special or exceptional most America—that we're no different than any other country." Trump later adopted a catchier slogan, "Brand America Great Again," but information technology retained the nativist overtones and racial dog whistles of the starting time. Paired with Trump's open conspiracy-mongering most Obama'south forged birth document and supposed Muslim organized religion, it amplified and dramatized the Republican establishment's slyer assertions about Obama's united nations-American values.

Trump would somewhen carelessness dog whistles in favor of blunter race-baiting. What remains to be seen is whether he and the Republican institution will proceed flashing the "exceptionalism" betoken in the mail service-Obama years—to paint new opponents as un-American—or whether that linguistic communication was uniquely deployed to delegitimize the nation'southward kickoff blackness president. At the very least, it provided fertile ground for Trumpism.

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Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/american-exceptionalism-maga-trump-obama/

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