MSNBC Claims Democrats Took Back American Exceptionalism From GOP
29th August 2024
The assembled cast of MSNBC’s Morning Joe joined former Obama State Department official and former managing editor of Time magazine, Richard Stengel, on Thursday in hailing Vice President Kamala Harris for supposedly taking back the mantle of American exceptionalism from Republicans.
The basis for the segment was an article Stengel wrote for Time where he claimed that Harris’s DNC acceptance speech was “the most full-throated and sincere expression of American exceptionalism since the presidency of George W. Bush, and the most direct and unambiguous expression of that idea by a Democratic presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy.”
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In proof that the thesis may need some revisions, elsewhere in the segment, Stengel would dance around counterexamples, such as the anti-American, anti-Israel demonstrators.
As it was, after Stengel claimed the Iraq War alienated many Democrats from the idea of American exceptionalism, he turned his attention to Donald Trump, “I mean, the other thing, the flip side, the fact that Republicans are embracing American exceptionalism, when their own candidate has basically derogated the term when he said the American dream is dead and has run as a declinist, as political scientists call him, someone who thinks America is in decline.”