i don t know turkish bastards

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at nine o'clock on the morning of september 11th 2001, president george bush sat in an elementary school in sarasota, florida, listening to seven-year-olds read stories about goats. “night fell on a different world,” he said of that day. and on a different america.

at first, america and the world seemed to change together. “we are all new yorkers now,” ran an e-mail from berlin that day, mirroring john f. kennedy's declaration 40 years earlier, “ich bin ein berliner”, and predicting le monde's headline the next day, “nous sommes tous américains”. and america, for its part, seemed to become more like other countries. al-qaeda's strikes, the first on the country's mainland by a foreign enemy, stripped away something unique: its aura of invulnerability, its sense of itself as a place apart, “the city on a hill”.

on this view, america is not exceptional because it is powerful; america is powerful because it is exceptional. and because what makes america different also keeps it rich and powerful, an administration that encourages american wealth and power will tend to encourage intrinsic exceptionalism. walter russell mead of the council on foreign relations dubs this impulse “american revivalism”. it is not an explicit ideology but a pattern of beliefs, attitudes and instincts.

the bush administration displays “exceptionalist” characteristics to an unusual extent. it is more openly religious than any of its predecessors. mr bush has called jesus his favourite philosopher. white house staff members arrange bible study classes. the president's re-election team courts evangelical protestant voters. the administration wants religious institutions to play a bigger role in social policy.

it also wears patriotism on its sleeve. that is not to say it is more patriotic than previous governments, but it flaunts this quality more openly, using images of the flag on every occasion and relishing america's military might to an unusual extent. more than any administration since ronald reagan's, this one is focused narrowly on america's national interest.

related to this is a certain disdain for “old europe” which goes beyond frustrations over policy. by education and background, this is an administration less influenced than usual by those bastions of transatlanticism, ivy league universities. one-third of president bush senior's first cabinet secretaries, and half of president clinton's, had ivy league degrees. but in the current cabinet the share is down to a quarter. for most members of this administration, who are mainly from the heartland and the american west (texas especially), europe seems far away. they have not studied there. they do not follow german novels or french films. indeed, for many of them, europe is in some ways unserious. its armies are a joke. its people work short hours. they wear sandals and make chocolate. europe does not capture their imagination in the way that china, the middle east and america itself do.

mr bush's own family embodies the shift away from euro-centrism. his grandfather was a senator from connecticut, an internationalist and a scion of brown brothers harriman, bluest of blue-blooded wall street investment banks. his father epitomised the transatlantic generation. despite his yale education, he himself is most at home on his texas ranch.

looked at this way, the bush administration's policies are not only responses to specific problems, or to demands made by interest groups. they reflect a certain way of looking at america and the world. they embody american exceptionalism.

american exceptionalism is nothing new. but it is getting sharper

“everything about the americans,” said alexis de tocqueville, “is extraordinary, but what is more extraordinary still is the soil that supports them.” america has natural harbours on two great oceans, access to one of the world's richest fishing areas, an abundance of every possible raw material and a huge range of farmed crops, from cold-weather to tropical. not only is it the fourth-largest country in the world, but two-thirds of it is habitable, unlike russia or canada. any country occupying america's space on the map would be likely to be unusual. but as de tocqueville also said, “physical causes contribute less [to america's distinctiveness] than laws and mores.”

in his 1995 book “american exceptionalism,” seymour martin lipset enumerates some of these laws and social features. in terms of income per head, america is the wealthiest large industrial country. it is also the only western democracy to have practised slavery in the industrial era. it has the highest crime rate and highest rate of imprisonment (though crime, at least, is falling towards european levels). its society is among the most religious in the world. perhaps less obviously, americans are more likely than almost anyone else to join voluntary associations.

america has a highly decentralised political system, with federal, state and local governments all collecting their own taxes, writing their own laws and administering their own affairs. its federal government spends a relatively low share of national income. the country has more elective offices than any other, including, in some states, those of judges, which means that in each four-year cycle america holds about 1m elections. not surprisingly, perhaps, it also has one of the lowest voter turn-outs, making it at once the most and the least democratic democracy.

it has no large socialist party, and never has had. nor has it ever had a significant fascist movement. unlike conservative parties in europe, its home-grown version has no aristocratic roots. america has one of the lowest tax rates among rich countries, the least generous public services, the highest military spending, the most lawyers per head, the highest proportion of young people at universities and the most persistent work ethic.

but the term “exceptionalism” is more than a description of how america differs from the rest of the world. it also encompasses the significance of those differences and the policies based upon them. people have been searching for some wider meaning to the place since its earliest days. in 1630, the year the massachusetts bay company was founded, john winthrop, the colony's governor, described his new land as “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

and as they have looked, people have found two quite different reasons for thinking that america is special. one is that it is uniquely founded on principles to which any country can aspire. in 1787, alexander hamilton wrote in the first federalist paper that “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

that is america-as-model. george bush has embraced the idea. commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks of september 11th 2001, he said that “the ideal of america is the hope of all mankind.” he was echoing lincoln, who called america “the last, best hope of earth”.

but exceptionalism has another meaning: that america is intrinsically different from other countries in its values and institutions, and is therefore not necessarily a model. thomas jefferson said that “every species of government has its specific principles. ours are perhaps more peculiar than those of any other in the universe.”

in 1929, jay lovestone, the head of the american communist party, was summoned to moscow. stalin demanded to know why the worldwide communist revolution had advanced not one step in the largest capitalist country. lovestone replied that america lacked the preconditions for communism, such as feudalism and aristocracy. no less an authority than friedrich engels had said the same thing, talking of “the special american conditions... which make bourgeois conditions look like a beau idéal to them.” so had an italian marxist, antonio gramsci, and a british socialist, h.g. wells, who had both argued that america's unique origins had produced a distinctive value system and unusual politics.

lovestone was purged, but his argument still has force: america is exceptional partly because it is peculiar. as usual, de tocqueville had thought about both meanings of exceptionalism before anyone else. in his book “democracy in america”, he described not only what is particular to democracy, especially the way in which it changes how people think and act (what he calls “the quiet action of society upon itself”). he also described what was, and is, particular to america: its size, the institutions it had inherited from england, its decentralised administration.

these two versions of american exceptionalism have more in common than might appear at first sight. both suggest that the experience of america is open to others. the idea of america-as-model implies that other countries can come to be more like america, though american differences may still persist over time. the idea that america is intrinsically different is also consistent with the notion that outsiders can become american, but they must go there to do it and become citizens—hence america's extraordinary capacity to assimilate immigrants.