The anti-war movement inverted this moral logic. In the 1969 book that helped make him famous, American Power and the New Mandarins, Noam Chomsky argued that “by any objective standard, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world.” Invoking some of the most notorious fascist crimes of the 1930s and 1940s, the anti-war leader Jerry Rubin declared, “Vietnam is the Guernica, the Rotterdam, and the Lidice of the 1960s.” This antiexceptionalist discourse—which denied America’s moral superiority over the adversaries it had long contrasted itself against—even penetrated the Democratic Party. In 1971, George McGovern—who the Democrats would nominate for president the following year—called Richard Nixon’s bombing of Southeast Asia “the most barbaric act committed by any modern state since the death of Adolf Hitler.”[...]
The generational divide is evident in polls. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.” Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better. A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives. While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one. [...]
Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.
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