THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
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Global Climate Action Summit 2018
Blog 2: Exceptionalism gets a progressive spin
Alison Holmes reports from the heart of the GCAS
www.globalclimateactionsummit.org
ex-cep-tion-al
adj. "unusual, not typical".
At an evening affiliate event of the Global Action Summit (GCAS) Member of the California State Senate Kevin de León declared California to be "exceptional". In the context of the event, he was conveying his sense of pride in California as a leader on the issue of climate change, a hard-earned and rightly celebrated position. Yet, it did jump out as an interesting word choice given the brevity of his comments and the fact he is in the midst of a heated election campaign. In the moment and space of GCAS, it may have been entirely apt, but the niggling question of whether he intended to invoke the political, even ideological history of the term, remained. Despite the assertions of some, the idea of exceptionalism is not uniquely American as many countries have made claims to uniqueness or a superior position. However, the idea is particularly American in the revolutionary sense with claims that the United States was somehow a "first new nation" based with specific and "better" values of liberty and individual freedom as well as the related, but arguably potentially more dangerous idea that the United States has a mission to spread these ideas to the rest of the world. Thus, to hear the word falling from the lips of a Democratic Latino Senate candidate here in California was, on some level, almost unsettling. Of course, in a discussion of any broad political idea or concept, context matters, intention matters, and the frame set out for the future matters, but one was left wondering if it is wise or even sustainable to suggest it is possible to have some kind of two-tiered, federal/state, double exceptionality and how strange it is to hear diametrically opposed policies growing from the same 'exceptional' root.
