This Week: The Idea that Is America
Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club! This is where we regularly invite authors to come and discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators. Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter/John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, and Chris Hayes.
This week we'll be discussing Anne-Marie Slaughter's The Idea that Is America.
In the book, Professor Slaughter outlines what she believes are the core values that have guided America thus far and must inspire American foreign policy in the future: liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance, faith, justice, and humility. This week, we will discuss Slaughter's argument that because these values are universal, acting in the world with them in mind is not tantamount, as some of the left would argue, American exceptionalism.
Joining the conversation will be Rachel Kleinfeld, Bruce Jentleson, David Shorr, Suzanne Nossel, Lee Feinstein, Michael Levi and David Rieff.
-ahg
I'm sorry to post w/o having read this book but I'd really like to read/see/hear more about it beforehand. If the impression I get from the very short description above is any indication then I'm not sure that I will. It seems to me to echo the same egocentric and hypocritical position that has alienated us from virtually every nation and people on the face of the earth.
It's not that those ideals listed are not truly inspiring nor that using them as a basis upon which to engage other nations is a bad thing, it's that we don't truly even practice or embrace them here at home. We need to be honest about that fact because it is a critically important distinction. And while we may be too busy wondering what Paris is eating in prison and how much it will cost us to fill our tanks for our 4th of July road trips, the rest of the world sees us trying to paint it with a very broad brush only using the colors red, white & blue. And no amount of back slapping or misty-eyed idyllic theories of what America is supposed to be, that we put forward to justify doing as we please, is going to get the rest of the world to buy it. Not a single word of it.
The real "Idea that Is America" these days appears to me to be "do as we say, not as we do". And there's nothing inspiring or enlightened about that. In fact, I think you could argue that in doing so you actually turn those admirable values into American exceptionalism. But I look forward to hearing more about this.
Thanks.
June 19, 2007 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink