The following is an essay that was forming inside my head as I navigated my thoughts on some current themes that you will recognise:
I reject the exceptionalism of the Monroe Doctrine, the broader logic of American exceptionalism that implies that the Western Hemisphere belongs to the United States, and that it is entitled to do what it needs to keep the hemisphere isolated under its suzerainty. Compared to other forms of exceptionalism, it is a relatively mild one, because Americans rarely camouflage it in elevated moral language or divine mandate. But its consequences have been brutal for the people to the south. It has justified coups, sanctions, destabilization, and violence while allowing Americans to imagine themselves hypocritically as reluctant stewards rather than active agents of harm.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in the shadow of two world wars and the rise of American global power, watched liberal idealism collapse into mass slaughter in Europe. He argued that nations are structurally incapable of moral innocence. They clothe their interests in moral language because admitting naked self-interest would threaten their legitimacy. He pointed out that power, once held, always seeks justification.
This is also what Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany and lived as a stateless refugee, reflected on how ordinary bureaucracies could administer extraordinary evil. She warned that when politics is elevated to metaphysics, when a nation imagines itself as history’s chosen agent, ordinary moral limits dissolve. People stop asking whether an act is right and begin asking only whether it is necessary.
We have seen this repeatedly as the United States dismantled other societies in the name of order and freedom: Iran in 1953, Gautemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Panama in 1989, Honduras in 2009 and even most recently and spectacularly, Venezuela. Exceptionalism does not merely excuse these actions. It is displayed with pomp for all of humanity to watch and accept as fact.
Carl Schmitt, an active collaborator of the Nazi regime who dismantled the Weimar Republic constitutionally, argued that sovereignty ultimately rests in the power to decide exceptions. The sovereign is not the one who obeys the law, but the one who can suspend it. Schmitt’s insight was not a defense of tyranny so much as an exposure of how easily legal and moral systems can be overridden once a group convinces itself that it is exceptional.
Critics of empire from William Appleman Williams to Noam Chomsky have made this same point from different angles. Williams, writing during the Cold War, argued that American foreign policy was driven less by security than by economic expansion disguised as benevolence. Chomsky, shaped by the Vietnam War and decades of intervention, showed how exceptionalism functions as a propaganda system that teaches citizens to see their own violence as defensive and others’ resistance as aggression. What makes exceptionalism corrosive is not that it seeks order, but that it claims a unique right to impose its own.
I reject the exceptionalism that China gives itself in the question of Taiwan. This position originated when two political parties both subscribed to the idea of “one China” during a period of civil war and geopolitical crisis. Over time, however, both sides evolved into functioning nation-states with their own political realities. When one side weaponizes history and declares its conditions non-negotiable, it erases the agency of present generations. Exceptionalism here operates by freezing history and denying consent. Through moral grandstanding, both sides remove themselves from the possibility of a workable solution. The only side that matters is that of the people of the two sides, not the state.
In the meantime, China wields its temper against any person or country that does not toe its line. Exceptionalism always demands silence from others because questioning first premises exposes the fiction. The pressure to conform is not a sign of confidence, but of fragility. It almost always results in great suffering before the narrative finally collapses or hardens into permanent repression. I can almost write the future of the history of China extrapolated from its insistence on holding this belief, and it is not a pretty one.
But most of all, I reject the form of exceptionalism that claims a people as “chosen” by a god fashioned around their own temper, especially when that claim is converted into political entitlement. This is the most difficult form of exceptionalism for me because I was raised an evangelical Christian and taught that the special relationship the Jewish people have with my God was central to my own salvation. My moral compass was pointed toward an apocalyptic horizon in which history itself would be redeemed through violence, and dissent from that narrative was treated as rebellion against my God.
What makes this exceptionalism unbearable is its capacity to justify creating a state at the expense of other people who should matter just as much to my God as I do. I cannot accept that murder and dispossession are instruments of divine purpose. If God is God, he does not need priests, pastors or militias acting as his subcontractors.
I cannot accept that dispossession becomes righteous because it is dressed as destiny. The logic of being “God’s chosen people” cannot result in immunity from moral judgment. At that point, a religious concept has become a political weapon. This refusal aligns with Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual shaped by exile, who insisted that human beings must not be erased by civilizational abstractions. Said has as much reason to be heard by his creator as I do mine. Antisemitism erases Jews as humans, and this is wrong. But Jewish exceptionalism erases others as humans and this is just as wrong. Frantz Fanon, who wrote from within the lived reality of colonial domination showed how power survives by turning the dominated into symbols rather than people.
I was trained to believe that my moral imagination must stand down in the presence of a book, whose origins I am not allowed to question. In retrospect, this mirrors what René Girard described: societies sacralize violence by projecting their internal conflicts onto chosen victims, transforming bloodshed into purification. It also reflects what Talal Asad has shown about religion’s modern role, how it can be absorbed into state power and used to convert moral questions into matters of loyalty.
I am glad that many of my own Jewish friends do not subscribe to the political reading of “God’s Chosen People”. Thinkers like Martin Buber, shaped by the moral catastrophe of European antisemitism, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who warned relentlessly against turning the state into an idol, insisted that faith collapses the moment it sanctifies domination. My rejection is not of a people, but of exemption.
For a long time, I accepted all the stories of cruelty in history because I believed my own salvation required me choosing sides in a cosmic war. I accepted a deferred morality, one that permits suffering now because justice will arrive later. Today my belief is that if this is salvation, then I will choose eternal damnation instead because I simply cannot plausibly visualise my creator in this way. I am not rejecting faith. I am rejecting any faith that requires injustice, prejudice and preference to authenticate itself.
Exceptionalism stands in the face of a creator who loves all of humanity. A God who created the universe does not require centuries of suffering to complete his narrative. This is where postwar moral philosophy bites. Theodor Adorno, writing after Auschwitz, warned against making suffering meaningful too easily. Emmanuel Levinas, whose family was murdered in the Holocaust, insisted that ethics begins in responsibility to the other, not in the triumph of any story.
There are also forms of exceptionalism embedded in Islam, just as in Christianity and Judaism, but because I am not Muslim, I do not need to resolve their internal contradictions. All belief systems contain this software system operating inside people’s heads that trap them into self-justifying narratives. Those inside rarely see the inconsistencies. Those outside see them immediately.
There are forms of exceptionalism that men give themselves over women, white men over others, the Hindus with their upper castes over lower ones. It is rampant in human society. I am not claiming that all forms of exceptionalism are identical in origin, intensity, or consequence. They differ historically, culturally, and psychologically. What they share is not content but structure: the move from identity to entitlement, from entitlement to exemption. The pattern is always the same. Someone is placed above, someone below, and someone benefits at the expense of the other.
Exceptionalism is a means by which people ascribe to themselves a certain privilege at the expense of all others and justify behaviours and goals they reserve exclusively for themselves. It is how a group slides from identity into entitlement, and from entitlement into moral immunity. It is not merely pride. It is a political and moral weapon. It converts power into virtue and necessity into innocence. Exceptionalism is also a refusal of moral symmetry.
So what is the cure to exceptionalism? Cosmopolitan thinkers like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum, all shaped by plural societies and historical trauma, argue that difference does not erase obligation. We are all responsible to act in the interest of the other in the way we believe that we are entitled to have our interests safeguarded. Isaiah Berlin distrusted grand historical teleologies, and democratic theorists from John Rawls to Jürgen Habermas ground legitimacy in present consent rather than inherited destiny. Be present. Be kind.
So I reject exceptionalism not because I reject identity, history, culture, or faith. Instead, I want to revel in them. But the moment a people believe they are exceptional, they stop listening. And when they stop listening, they stop being moral. When they stop being moral, they become evil.
