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Perry Miller and the Winthrop Revival Perry Miller and the Winthrop Revival
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The Answer to Almost Everything Lay in the 1970s The Answer to Almost Everything Lay in the 1970s
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The Power of the Positive The Power of the Positive
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Endgame Endgame
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Declinism and Contemporary Exceptionalism Declinism and Contemporary Exceptionalism
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11 The Newly Chosen Nation: Exceptionalism from Reagan to Trump
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Published:December 2021
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Abstract
This chapter argues that a post-1970 crisis in exceptionalism facilitated a reassertion of American chosenness powered by a politically active evangelicalism. In theory, this process subordinated material abundance and political ideology to religion, but political ideology fused with chosenness, and both rested on assumptions of continued material abundance. The City Upon a Hill idea, previously highlighted academically by Perry Miller, was politically misappropriated as the Shining City; this formulation is contrasted with Jimmy Carter’s failed invocation of the Protestant jeremiad. Instead, Ronald Reagan successfully proposed a positive-thinking alternative. The role of the 1970s and its portents of anti-exceptionalism is the key material underpinning these changes in ideology and politics to a conservative, politico-religious exceptionalism. This shift was seemingly validated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed an untrammeled American exceptionalism to triumph as the “Indispensable Nation.” The quick emergence of the terminology of American exceptionalism, previously obscurely academic, is analyzed as a response to the post-9/11 challenges to US material and politico-economic hegemony in global perspective. Finally, the chapter discusses the paradoxical flourishing of declinism as a discourse—at the same time as the insistence upon exceptionalism as a party-political dogma and a patriotic necessity soared.
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