Trump’s initial response to the news that former President Jair Bolsonaro received a 27-year sentence for attempting to carry out a coup d’état to overturn the results of the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections was incoherent and as much about himself as his ally: “Well, I watched that trial. I know him well–foreign leader [sic.]. I thought he was a good president of Brazil, and it’s very surprising that could happen very much like they tried to do with me.”
The immediate reaction of U.S. Secretary of State Marcos Rubio’s immediate reaction to the news was much more vehement and an exercise in hypocrisy mixed with irony. “The political persecutions by sanctioned human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes continue, as he and others on Brazil’s supreme court have unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro,” he declared on X. He then added: “The United States will respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”
In referring to Bolsonaro’s conviction, Rubio repeated Trump’s constant assertion that any legal measure against him is a personal persecution. He also used the language of human rights to denounce the justices of the Brazilian Supreme Court, ignoring the fact Bolsonaro has made a political career out of condemning human rights defenders. Not only did Bolsonaro praise the 1964 takeover and the state policy of torture during the dictatorship in his vote to impeach former president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, but early in his political career he lamented that the armed forces hadn’t killed 30,000 opponents of the military regime.
Having already slapped 50% tariffs on many Brazilian goods as a means of pressuring the government to interfere in the trial against Bolsonaro and the six others involved in coup planning and having cancelled the U.S. visas of 8 of the 11 Supreme Court justices, it is hard to imagine what other measures the White House might impose. However, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who seems to have a direct link to at least some officials surrounding Trump, promises there is more to come.
Rubio’s assertion that Brazil is on the verge of becoming a dictatorship reflects a superiority that many U.S. policymakers have had toward Brazil that goes back to U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon’s conspiratorial actions in supporting the 1964 military takeover in the name of democracy.
But Brazil is not the United States’ only target. Unfortunately, throughout the world there is a long and sorted history of U.S. government officials believing that the American system of government is superior to all others. This narrative emphasizes that the United States is the “leader of the free world” and grants its politicians the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries deemed undemocratic. In part, the justification for this notion is rooted in what is known as “American exceptionalism.”
John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872) is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new West.
The “Devine” Destiny of the United States
Since the early nineteenth century, U.S. politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, and even foreign observers have argued that there was something unique or “exceptional” about the United States. The reasons varied. For some it was because of the country’s vast natural resources and expansive territory. Others argued that the nation was the beneficiary of a divine blessing. Its political system, democratic values, and historical development made it destined to play a special role in the world.
French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the first person to systematically articulate this vision in his classic work, Democracy in America, which compared the recently formed nation to the Old-World powers of Great Britain and France:
“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. history textbooks praised the uniqueness of the country as an example for the world. The ideology known as Manifest Destiny justified the movement of settlers westward to occupy Indigenous lands. Moreover, despite the bold and magnanimous words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men [sic.] are created equal,” the institution of slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war.
The conquest of Mexican lands and the growing U.S. influence in Central America and the Caribbean coincided with this idea about the singularity of the United States as a unique democratic nation. At the turn of the twentieth century during the age of imperial expansion, the occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands and later the U.S. involvement in World War I reinforced the belief in this special role.
The ideology of American exceptionalism was especially strengthened at the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. The northern hemisphere was basically divided into two completing economic and political systems with the dominant political cultural in the United States affirming that it was uniquely the superior of the two.
The United States, victorious in the defeat of fascism in Western Europe and Japan, became the leading industrial power in the West. There was an unprecedented increase in the standard of the living for the U.S. middle and working classes, once again proving the United States’s special stature in the world. Despite on-going institutional racism that continued to separate Black citizens in an apartheid-like system in the South, the country’s prosperity fueled an expectation that the “America Dream” offered unbridled consumption that was available to who lived there.
The Soviet Union, which defeated fascism in the East at the cost of 20 million civilian and military casualties, consolidated hegemony in Eastern Europe in centralized, socialist regimes under the control of communist or workers’ parties. To some in the West, they promised an equalitarian and just new society. U.S. ideologues countered that capitalism combined with American democracy offered a loftier system.
The Global South, known as the Third World at the time, became the battleground between these two power blocks in which both sides disputed the hearts and minds of nations seeking to achieve the economic and social development that they admired in the Global North.
In 1964, Brazil was a tragic victim of this worldwide conflict, as the United States opted to support an authoritarian regime in the name of democracy to prevent the possible shift in the nation’s allegiance from the West to the East. It was a cynical move embedded in fierce anti-communism and a desire to retain U.S. economic hegemony in the region.
By the late 1960s, powerful capitalist interests realized that the high wages granted American industrial workers cut into their profit margins, and so they increased investment abroad. In growing numbers, U.S. factories moved to foreign countries where cheap labor could ensure on-going profitability and a flood of consumer goods into the United States. Although many people think that the principal objective of President Richard Nixon’s China initiative in 1972 was to establish new markets for U.S. goods, the process ended up offering cheap labor and a tightly controlled work force that could produce inexpensive products for U.S. and other consumers.
In many ways, the transfer of U.S. industrial might abroad ultimately led to the electoral victories of Trump. Millions of children and grandchildren of formerly well-paid unionized workers, currently find themselves in low-paying service jobs and see themselves as less well off than previous generations. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement gives them hope that they might return to a long-gone prosperity. Trump’s rhetoric is merely a nostalgic promise to return to a glorious and exceptional past.
Trump and other right-wing politicians place the blame of America’s demise on Blacks, who they claim live off the social welfare State and the tax dollars of hard-working white citizens. Additionally, the president preaches that millions of immigrant workers entering the country illegally steal the jobs of those already experiencing downward mobility.
Even the Supreme Court’s recent assaults on affirmative action and Trump’s dismantling of “diversity, equality and inclusion” programs that are designed to overcome historical racial inequalities are instrumentalized to blame people of color for the decline in the standard of living of white citizens.
Trump’s magical solution to reindustrialize by imposing high tariffs on trading partners to promote the return of production to the United States is illusionary. Similarly, the attempt to expel a million undocumented immigrants a year so that U.S. citizens can take on their low-paying jobs is a promise that will bear no tangible improvement in their lives. Should MAGA supporters take these jobs, they, like the Latino workers expelled from the United States, will hardly earn enough to survive.
Protest against the Vietnam War, USA, Virginia, 1967
The Decline of the American Empire
The Cold War consensus in support of U.S. foreign policy, based on an unconditional belief in American exceptionalism, began to crack in the 1960s. Tens of millions of young people protested U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s brought millions into the streets. President George W. Bush faced massive opposition to his war in Iraq in the 1990s.
The authoritarian turn under Trump now leads political commentators to argue that the United States in no different than other countries led by strongmen. The pejorative term “Banana Republic,” once only used to describe dictatorships in Latin America, is now employed to point out the autocratic nature of the current administration. Trump’s critics rightfully acknowledge that the overt political persecution of politicians, judges, and government officials in the United States is no different from that taking place in Nicaragua, Hungry, or Russia.
In that regard, it is noteworthy that Democratic Party congressional leaders, such as Jim McGovern of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the chairwoman of the House of Representatives Brazil Caucus, have applauded the conviction of Bolsonaro. A recent New York Times opinion piece acknowledged that unlike Brazil, the United States was unable to hold Trump accountable for his attempt to overturn the results of the U.S. elections in 2022. Left-leaning cable newscasters and journalists nationwide that commented on the trial repeat this argument.
Most American know virtually nothing about Brazil, but as the price of a cup of coffee increases significantly, many may ask who is to blame. Although the White House might escalate its attacks on Brazil, there is a small, but surprisingly growing sentiment that Brazil, not the United States, is the exceptional country that needs to be imitated.
After all Bolsonaro is likely to serve time in prison or under house arrest, while Trump remains free to destroy his country and do endless damage to the world.
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