The phrase as self-promotion
In the closing segment of an episode on North Korea, Bob Zadek raised the phrase “American exceptionalism” while speaking with John Glaser of the Cato Institute. Zadek said he “kind of buy[s] into the phrase,” but added that he would prefer it “was never spoken by our country” and was instead spoken only by the rest of the world in admiration of American efforts. In his account, the phrase has “too often” become self-promotional, used to justify an aggressive, forceful foreign policy rather than to explain how the country wishes to be in relation to the world. He said he was starting to wince at the concept, calling it overused and misused. Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018)
Zadek connected that criticism to the history of the United States and North Korea, describing the present situation as the product of one mistake after another, beginning with acting very colonial after World War II and dividing the peninsula — telling the Koreans, in his paraphrase, that the United States would take the south and the Soviet side would take the north, without regard for what Koreans thought. He asked Glaser whether either political party had shown itself particularly adept or maladroit at negotiation, or whether his characterization of the whole history as a monumental many-generational diplomatic failure on the part of the United States was too unfair. Glaser answered that there had been a succession of failures but that he did not think it impossible to envision a scenario in which the United States smartens up and starts to do it right. Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018)
The exchange places the phrase in a foreign-policy frame: the question is not what American exceptionalism is, but what work the phrase does when a country speaks it about itself. Zadek’s position is that the phrase belongs in the mouths of others. Glaser did not contest the framing directly; his contribution was to describe the mechanics of the negotiations, including the joint communique signed by Trump and Kim at the summit earlier that month, the role Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was supposed to play in leading the effort, and his expectation that a final, concrete and sustainable deal would extend beyond the first term of the Trump administration. He noted that North Korea has an interest in keeping negotiations going as long as possible, taking short steps rather than full denuclearization, maintaining its nuclear weapons while seeking sanctions relief, particularly on its northern border with China. Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era (2018)
Guns, individualism, and the pioneering spirit
A separate treatment appears in the episode with David Harsanyi on the Second Amendment. Zadek introduced the topic by noting that people in Western Europe sometimes ask what it is about America and guns — why America has a special relationship with guns that the rest of the civilized world does not have — and that the United States is unique in its gun legislation and in the social role guns play in American history. He asked Harsanyi for the perspective on why America is different from other first-world countries in its relationship to guns. [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]]
Harsanyi said the answer to that question was the reason he wrote his book. He described a continuum running from the first pilgrims, who within a day had arrows falling on their heads and had to fight back, through the westward movement that did not stop until the 1950s, when people were still going to California. That spirit, he said, is very individualistic, and individualism means defending yourself, your family, and your property by yourself — which means guns, because it is the best and only way to do it most of the time. He characterized self-defense as a liberal idea, small “l,” a classical liberal idea, which people brought with them when they came and never let go. [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]]
Harsanyi further argued that the Revolution could not have happened without that right, because there was an armed citizenry in America, more armed than anywhere in the world, and that this won the country its freedom. He said this had been ingrained in Americans for the past 200-plus years and that he hoped it continues. He compared the right to the Fourth, Fifth, and First Amendments, arguing that just because a person does not use a right does not mean the right itself is not important or should not be protected and nurtured. He also said that in urban places today guns are thought of in a very negative way despite a dramatic drop in gun homicides for almost 30 years and a huge spike in gun ownership during that time, and that the left does not understand that history. [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]]
Earlier in the same episode, Harsanyi addressed the Second Amendment’s text and history. He said the amendment is not particularly well-written, that its wording came out of a long edited process of revisions intended to make it clearer that ironically did not, and that there is not a single quote from a single founder contending that owning a weapon is not an individual right. The only debate around the amendment between Federalists and anti-Federalists, he said, was who would control the militias, not whether individuals would hand back their weapons; the Minutemen did not hand back their weapons after fighting in Concord and Lexington, and militias existed because of individuals, not the reverse. He added that most of the 13 colonies had something similar in their own constitutions that was much clearer about it being an individual right. [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]]
Founding principles and their loss
A third treatment comes from the episode with John McGinnis, a professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law, whom Zadek introduced as a professor of constitutional law and as the author of a blog post titled “The Gathering Storm for Classical Liberalism.” Zadek offered an observation about Trump as transactional — making decisions on an ad hoc basis rather than from a core set of values or creed — and said there is no indication of what Trump believes as a matter of principle. From there Zadek raised a concern about the loss in the country of founding principles, saying that in public debate there is very little reference to America’s first principles and that they seem to be lost in the wash. He asked whether he was reading too much into the events of the day, and said the founding principles are, if anything, what gives American exceptionalism its power. Here Comes the Storm (2019)
McGinnis agreed, and drew a comparison to Reagan, who from 1976 to 1980 went around the country writing speeches trying to imply Hayek’s ideas, whereas Trump’s background is transactional — a real estate operator from New York, which McGinnis called the most transactional background possible. He said he absolutely agreed that Trump does not have the inclusive focus on principle that Reagan did, but identified two matters that gave him hope. The first was Trump’s commitment to appointing judges who will read the Constitution as written — originalist judges. McGinnis said this matters not only because such judges are more likely to get decisions right, but because of a long theory of the Supreme Court going back to the early Republic that the justices are in some sense Republican schoolmasters who, in their decisions, recall the country to its founding principles. He said many justices have done the opposite, citing Roe v. Wade as something made out of nothing that takes away powers from the states, and that originalist justices could be a great ally in teaching and imbuing the country with those principles again. He credited Trump for the appointment of Gorsuch, who he said has turned out to be great, and said Kavanaugh was not yet known but there was reason to believe he would be at least quite good in this respect. Here Comes the Storm (2019)
The second source of hope McGinnis named was Trump’s most recent State of the Union address, which he called a much greater improvement on the inaugural address precisely because it captured some principles — talking about the danger of socialism and the importance of freedom in a way the inaugural address did not. He said it may be that Trump is learning on the job and recognizing, perhaps out of political necessity, that he has to articulate some of the country’s core principles, and that for the first time in his lifetime a lot of these principles are completely up for grabs. He added that Trump is a little better than he thought when he wrote the blog post, because of the State of the Union and because his appointments of justices, and judges in the appellate and district courts, are the best of any president, even better than Ronald Reagan’s. Here Comes the Storm (2019)
Zadek then played a clip of Trump saying that socialism has bankrupted an oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty, that virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay, that socialism’s thirst for power leads to expansion, incursion, and oppression, and that all nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery it brings. Zadek said the passage was right out of Hayek, that it was the first time in his knowledge Trump drilled down to a principle in support of his policies, and that it gave him great encouragement that perhaps there is a “there” there. McGinnis said one reason to think it continues is that the idea of giving the government more power is not popular, which he called a core idea of socialism, and that there are people who proclaim themselves socialists on the Democratic side; for reasons of politics and opportunism it is a useful line to take, and if opportunism and principle coincide, Trump certainly will not oppose principle. Here Comes the Storm (2019)
Across episodes
The topic is touched in three episodes — the North Korea conversation with John Glaser, the Second Amendment conversation with David Harsanyi, and the classical-liberalism conversation with John McGinnis — and the excerpts show no development of a shared argument across them: Zadek’s foreign-policy objection, Harsanyi’s account of an individualist gun culture, and McGinnis’s concern about lost founding principles are three separate treatments rather than stages of one debate.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no definition of American exceptionalism, no account of its origins as a term, and no discussion of how the three treatments relate to one another. Harsanyi’s book is referred to but not named in the excerpts, and the blog post by McGinnis is named only as “The Gathering Storm for Classical Liberalism.” The North Korea discussion ends with Zadek interrupting Glaser as time runs out, and the Harsanyi and McGinnis segments break off mid-sentence, so several lines of argument are left unfinished in the source material.