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Barack Obama and American exceptionalism

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Here’s the main webpage for the Obama Presidential Library (The physical library itself has just begun to be built. For researchers, an interesting feature of the project is that almost all the archives will be digitized).

The webpage prominently features this statement from the former president:

As long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible… But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.

We’re still too close in time to the Obama presidency to have a good sense of its ultimate historical significance. One aspect of that significance that will be interesting to watch unfold will be the ways in which the Obama presidency end up affecting the ideology of American exceptionalism.

As the quoted statement illustrates, Obama himself was and remains a big proponent of American exceptionalism, in ways that at the moment seem problematic from a progressive or left perspective.

I understand that statements on presidential library websites trend by their nature toward propagandistic pablum, but even so this kind of thing is a bit much. In what way exactly is it true that in no other country on earth is Obama’s story even possible? Unless you take the statement absolutely literally — it’s true that in no other country on earth would it have been possible for Barack Obama to become president of the United States — it seems patently false, and in a way that, however obliquely, echoes and reinforces the kind of exceptionalist nonsense that was at the core of the political support for the man, loosely speaking, who replaced Obama in the Oval Office.

The line between American exceptionalism and American nativism is a blurry one, and difficult to maintain at the best of times, which these obviously aren’t.

Obama is a complex figure, and I don’t want to make too much of this side of him, but it’s a side that isn’t wearing very well at the moment. How his promotion of his own life story as a paean to American exceptionalism will look to future generations remains an open question.

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