A Communist Invented Your Favorite Bumper Sticker

Turns out "American exceptionalism" started as a Marxist insult, got excommunicated by Stalin, and ended up on a bald eagle bumper sticker anyway.

Sunday afternoon, Hollywood Lanes, minding my business, and Jesus Quintana’s two lanes over doing his whole routine — licking the ball, doing that slow-motion strut like he’s got a camera crew following him around, telling anybody who’ll listen that nobody, and he means nobody, fucks with the Jesus. Eight-year-olds included, apparently. Don’t ask.

And I’m sitting there with a White Russian, half paying attention, and it hits me — that’s a hell of a claim to just walk around making. Nobody fucks with the Jesus. We’re just built different. Don’t question it, don’t examine it, just accept it, man, because we said so. And I think, huh. I’ve heard that one before. Just usually with a flag involved instead of a purple jumpsuit.

Rug’s still not entirely right, TV’s still off from last time I looked at it too hard, and now I’m looking at my own country the same way — like there’s a tag on it somewhere if I flip up the corner. So. American exceptionalism. Let’s flip up the corner.

Here’s the toe in the box, man, the thing I did not see coming. “American exceptionalism” — the phrase every guy with a flag pin uses to mean we’re simply better, built by God’s own hand, can’t be compared to lesser nations — that phrase was invented by a Communist¹. Not Jefferson. Not Tocqueville, either, and I gotta clear that one up because everybody credits him and he never said it that way — the man called America “exceptional” the way you’d call a weird bowling alley exceptional, meaning different, not meaning superior.

No, the actual guy is Jay Lovestone, head of the Communist Party USA, writing around 1928, arguing that American capitalism was some kind of freak exception to the laws of history Marx had laid out — too much land, too much industry, not enough rigid class lines, so the revolution that was supposedly coming for everybody else just wasn’t gonna show up here on schedule. That’s it. That’s the whole original meaning. Not a boast. A diagnosis. Practically an apology.

And then — this is the part I love — Lovestone takes this idea to Moscow to run it by Stalin himself, and Stalin hears “American exceptionalism” and loses his mind, calls it a heresy, and has the guy thrown out of the Comintern on the spot. Neither one of these men thought “exceptional” meant “better.” Lovestone meant “temporarily immune.” Stalin meant “dangerous lie you’ll get purged for repeating.” And a year later, when the Depression hits, the Communist Party’s out there gloating that the whole house of cards of American exceptionalism just blew down. It was an insult on the way in, a heresy in the middle, and a punchline on the way out.

I told Walter this and watched something behind his eyes just short-circuit.

“Say that again.”

“Stalin, Walter. Personally. Called it a heresy.”

“That’s not — that phrase belongs to us, Dude. I’ve seen it on a bumper sticker next to a bald eagle. You’re telling me it started with a card-carrying —” and he can’t even finish the sentence, he just sort of vibrates for a second, this whole man built on rules discovering the rulebook was written by the other team first.

Donny, God bless him, goes: “So it means the opposite of what everybody thinks it means?”

“Yeah, Donny.”

“That happens a lot, huh.”

Kid’s on a roll lately.

Now, credit where it’s due, because I try not to just torch everything on principle — the phrase didn’t stay a Kremlin insult forever. By the middle of the century, guys like Seymour Martin Lipset picked it up and used it straight, as actual social science: America really doesn’t have a major socialist party like Europe does, really is more religious, really has weaker unions, really does run hotter on individualism. That’s not a boast, that’s a measurement. Fine. No note. That version I can abide.

Then Reagan gets ahold of it, and this is where I gotta bring up the nihilists, because it’s the same move, just with better lighting and a bigger budget.

You remember the nihilists. “Ve believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing.” All that leather, all that menace, screaming about how nothing matters — and it turns out the second an actual situation shows up, a real dog, a little teeth, they fold instantly. All threat, no conviction. It’s the most cowardly worldview dressed up as the most dangerous one.

Reagan runs the exact opposite play, and I gotta hand it to him, it’s genuinely a hell of a piece of work. He builds his whole political identity around this line from John Winthrop, 1630, “a city upon a hill” — except Winthrop’s sermon isn’t a victory lap, man, it’s a warning. He’s telling his people, hey, everybody’s watching us, and if we screw this up, if we don’t take care of each other, God and the whole world are gonna know we failed, and it’ll be a disgrace visible from anywhere. Conditional. Nervous, even. A guy checking his own math before he starts the trip.

Reagan takes that, bolts the word “shining” onto it — which Winthrop never wrote, not once — strips out every trace of the warning, and turns it into a guarantee. Some divine plan put this whole continent between two oceans just for us, can’t lose, already won, don’t examine it further. That’s not a misquote, man, that’s a full rewrite, and the son of a bitch sells it so well it becomes fucking gospel man. Where the nihilists commit to nothing and back down from everything, Reagan commits to a completely fabricated certainty and never once backs down from it. Worst part is, it works. It’s still working.

Maude, when I brought this one to her, didn’t even look up from whatever piece she was harnessed into. “He did the reading,” she said, “badly, and got an A anyway, because nobody else in the room had done it either.” Then something about vagina, dropped into the sentence with zero connective tissue, like punctuation. Classic Maude. I still don’t always know what to do with that, but I’ve stopped asking.

And once you’ve got the rewrite, the institutions come running to make it official — “city on a hill” lands right in the 2012 Republican platform, plain language, no metaphor about it anymore, and that same cycle Romney’s out there writing a whole book called No Apology, hammering Obama for supposedly saying America’s just another country with a flag. Before all that, most people had barely even heard the phrase. After it, you either say it with your whole chest or you’re the guy who doesn’t belong on the lane. Same exact energy as Jesus back there licking his own ball and daring anybody to say something. Nobody fucks with American exceptionalism, Dude.

And look — even the stuff that feels like it just grew out of the ground, purely organic, folksy, “this is who we are” Americana? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet? That’s not a saying somebody’s grandpa came up with on a porch. That’s a Chevy jingle from the 1970s. The ad copy for the myth turned out to be an actual ad. It’s rugs all the way down, man.

So that’s the whole thing, front to back. Somebody swaps your rug and calls it heirloom. Somebody reruns a sitcom and calls it your childhood. Somebody rewrites a four-hundred-year-old warning sermon and calls it a promise from God. Different rooms, same con, and every time, all they need is one institution with enough standing to make the new version stick before anybody checks the original tag.

I’m not saying burn the set down. I’m not saying quit the league. I’m saying, next time somebody tells you nobody fucks with something — a phrase, a decade, a country, a purple jumpsuit — it’s worth asking who swapped the rug, and whether they kept the receipt.

The Dude abides. He’d just like the story to abide by the facts every once in a while, is all.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism