The West just isn’t what it used to be. Our culture is now veering away from liberal individualism, which was a problem from the start, and is now turning down the much rockier path of liberal exceptionalism. It’s not enough to be unique these days. It’s the twenty-first century and being unique isn’t unique anymore. A person must be unique and also persecuted: suffering some injustice at the hands of a cruel and overwhelmingly conformist society. In its essence, this attitude is nothing more than individualism being amplified by Marxism. It’s liberty meets conflict theory.
In order to bring down society, all of its norms must be met with counter-norms. If the norm is white, then the exceptionalist must be brown or black. If the norm is straight, then the exceptionalist must be gay. If the norm is hard-working and honest, then the exceptionalist must be a criminal. It should come as no surprise then that I define exceptionalism in politics as a violation of society’s norms, however reasonable they might be, for the sole purpose of being different.
This process is not really comparable to a few naysayers or curmudgeons who just don’t want to get along with their neighbors. This is much more pervasive. It’s a movement that begins as a subculture that spawns other, even more vicious subcultures, that are united in their hatred for the norms of the parent culture. It’s like a school of piranhas that individually could not harm a man in the water, but acting together could chew the flesh from his bones.
It’s not hard to tell that exceptionalism is being pushed by the powers that be. You can hardly go one day without reading an article in the New York Times or Washington Post about what it’s like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America; or watching footage of teary-eyed illegal immigrant children on CNN; or hearing on NPR about how pedophilia is just another sexuality in a broad spectrum. Christianity, whiteness, and marriage are all old, bourgeois norms that must have their Marxist counter-norms.
It signals just how deep the rot has grown in our culture; exceptionalism is not only tolerated, it’s considered chic. It’s a way to signal one’s allegiance to the Marxist cause and therefore an effective means to catapult one’s way to the very upper echelon of the Cathedral. If the American government still had a spine, if the West still smugly touted its cultural superiority, I can assure you we wouldn’t be reading in the papers about these delicate, persecuted snowflakes. In cultures where there are very real consequences for being an exception to the mainstream, ones where you might get carted off to a gulag or your neighbors might come over to tar and feather you, being an exceptionalist becomes very uncool. Being different is chic only if it seems like it’s dangerous but truly isn’t; it’s like the rollercoaster effect, where the illusion of danger enhances the experience but it’s the certainty that there is no real danger that allows the whole thing to be fun rather than frightening. In political terms, this means that most people don’t embrace counter-norms until a culture becomes too weak to stop people from embracing them.
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