Gitmo Reversal

Whenever I hear talk of American exceptionalism (AE) I wonder what does that mean? How different are we from a banana republic when one attack on native soil creates an atmosphere of fear so strong constitutional law goes out the window? How exceptional are we, when military courts hidden on foreign islands, is the best we can do? How exceptional are we when religion freedom means you can't build here because we hate you? This is just another example of how far America has traveled from its core values.

But maybe AE like all things is just a myth used when necessary, forgotten much of the time. "Such tendencies in American Life as isolationism and the extreme nationalism that usually goes with it, hatred of Europe and Europeans, racial, religious, and nativist phobias, resentment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the eastern seaboard and its culture - all these have been found not only in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with it. One of the most interesting and least studied aspects of American Life has been a frequent recurrence of the demand for reforms, many of them aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with strong moral convictions and with a choice of hatred as a kind of creed." Richard Hofstadter circa 1955, 'The Age of Reform'

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