America the Unexceptional

On the deeper meanings of the right-populist revolution

US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky openly clashed in the White House on February 28. "You're not acting at all thankful. It's not a nice thing," Trump said. "It's going to be very hard to do business like this," he added. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The bulk of my writing since Inauguration Day has been anxiously focused on Donald Trump’s efforts to govern in an extra-constitutional, dictatorial way—and how the political system, economy, and culture are responding to those efforts.

But I want this post to be a little different. I’m going to try and stand back a bit from the breakneck news cycle and take in a little more of the whole, to try and do some of what this newsletter was founded to do, but which the breathless pace of the past three months have precluded, or at least made exceedingly difficult.

I’ve been inspired to make this attempt by an extremely stimulating 86-minute conversation between Yascha Mounk (at his excellent self-titled Substack) and Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Krastev is a thinker less well-known in the United States than he should be. I’ve felt that way for so long that I brought out two of his excellent books—Democracy Disrupted (2014) and After Europe (2017/2020)—during my time as an acquisition editor at Penn Press.

Krastev is brilliant and remarkably free of ideological blinders. That’s quite unusual, especially in U.S. intellectual life. He knows modern history (political events and ideas) in all of their national variants extremely well, and he uses that knowledge to achieve moments of clarity about the present without forcing them into predetermined moral categories. It’s rare I finish reading an essay or interview with Krastev without feeling my own mind starting to make fresh connections and achieve new insights about what’s going on. That’s certainly how I felt after reading the transcript of his discussion with Mounk.

Take the idea with which Krastev starts the conversation. Mounk begins by asking him, quite broadly, for help in making sense of Trump’s return to the American presidency and what it means for the world. To which Krastev responds by describing the second Trump administration as “a revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court.”

To my mind, that’s an incredibly fruitful observation. As he elaborated on it, I came to realize that it is precisely this blend of tendencies—toward both radical, destabilizing change on multiple fronts and performative genuflection in the direction of the emperor on the part of his courtiers, fellow Republican officeholders, and sundry hangers on—that has made these past three months so peculiar and disorienting. It became a cliche during the first Trump administration to say this isn’t normal. But the abnormality has now gone far enough that neither pole of the administration’s self-presentation fits with the normal style and rhythms of liberal-democratic politics. We are living through an idiosyncratic blend of imperial obsequiousness and pageantry with the frenzied destructiveness of a factional insurgency.

As insightful as that observation is, I was even more stimulated by an extended thread of the conservation that focused on the theme of American exceptionalism—and in particular on the ways that Trump has taken up and inverted this crucially important tradition of civil religion and national self-understanding.