American exceptionalism has endured as the guiding ideology of the United States’ imperialist political economy since the nation's inception in the late eighteenth century. The ideology has transcended numerous political and economic crises on the domestic and global stage to remain a powerful influence on US policy. Since mid-January of 2020, the spread of COVID-19 has precipitated a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. China's comprehensive and successful approach to containing the virus helped slow the outbreak and provided precious time for nations around the world to prepare their own preventative response. The disastrous response to the pandemic on the part of the United States has exposed the pitfalls and problems of American exceptionalism. This article analyzes the ways in which American exceptionalism has been unmasked as a dangerous ideological weapon of private capital and US imperial hegemony by the COVID-19 crisis and makes the argument that the American people would benefit from the pursuit of an internationalist political project that is guided by China's application of the principles of multipolarity and win-win cooperation.

The Function of American Exceptionalism in Historical Context

American exceptionalism is the longstanding belief that the United States is an inherent force for good in the world. The ideology emerged from the dominant narration of the founding of the United States, often termed the American Revolution, as a great leap forward for humanity. According to legal theorist Natsu Taylor Saito, American exceptionalism presumes that human history is best understood as a linear progression toward higher stages of civilization, that Western civilization represents the apex of this history, and that the United States embodies the best and most advanced stage of Western civilization and, therefore, human history to date (Saito 2010, 229).

Democracy, liberty, and freedom are heralded as key components that make the US an exceptional nation. Yet these values have often been rendered in service of the prevailing political economy of the United States: capitalism and imperialism. Indigenous researchers Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker assert that mass media and educational institutions in the US have evoked American exceptionalism to distort Native American history. These master narratives, or “state mythologies,” they argue, are strategically “designed to undergird the patriotism and emotional commitment necessary in a loyal citizenry” (Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker 2016, 9). American exceptionalism has at best minimized the massive displacement, murder, and impoverishment of Native American people that lies at the foundations of the US’ economic development model and at worst helped facilitate loyalty among the citizenry to these policies.

Other scholars have remarked that the ideology of American exceptionalism also has roots in the preservation of race-based slavery and oppression. American exceptionalism portrays the enslavement of Africans on US shores as an historical aberration in the creation of a more democratic society. Historian Gerald Horne argues that a combination of geopolitical and domestic conditions related to the preservation of slavery spurred colonial ambitions to break from British rule, not a yearning for democracy:

Far from an historical aberration, this trend has persisted into the present day. American exceptionalism continues to protect a form of unrestrained capitalism in the United States which relies on race-based oppression and imperial aggression to reproduce itself. Workers and racial minorities were facing dire circumstances prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Forty percent of people in the United States do not have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency (Youn 2019). Police homicide represents a leading cause of death for young Black Americans (Khan 2019). A recent study found that wealth for the median Black family in the US will be zero by 2082 (Conti 2019). These conditions contradict the premise of American exceptionalism that the US is a meritocratic society that rewards hard work with a middle-class existence, otherwise known as the American Dream.

In the realm of international politics, political leaders in the US have wielded American exceptionalism to promote expansionism in the name of spreading democracy. As early as 1789, then Secretary of State and future president Thomas Jefferson spoke of the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” destined to overtake the European empires for their imperial possessions around the world (Wenger 2017). In 2012 and 2014, former president Barack Obama declared that the United States was the only “indispensable nation” in the world. Throughout the course of American history, the presumption of American greatness has casted wars of aggression as wars of benevolence. As a result, the trillions of US dollars that the federal government currently utilizes to finance eight-hundred military bases around the world and wars of aggression in nations such as Syria are viewed by many Americans as vital to national security, and in some cases, as humanitarian missions (Sirvent and Haiphong 2019).

American exceptionalism's influence on the US political landscape has dire consequences for both Americans and people around the world. Race-based oppression has curtailed the ability of working-class Americans to effectively organize for power by shifting the blame for domestic problems onto certain sections of the population such as Black Americans and immigrants from Central America. The United States is currently experiencing a prolonged period of economic and political decline characterized by waning influence in the global economy and the inability of the system of US capitalism to meet the needs of humanity. This has led to a massive increase in poverty, state repression, and human rights violations perpetrated by the US both domestically and abroad.¹ Ingrained American patriotism and superiority emphasizes unilateralism and zero-sum politics rather than cooperation and distracts from the root causes of social problems. American exceptionalism universalizes free-market and bourgeois democratic ideals, thereby erasing and mystifying the relations of power that rest at the foundations of US capitalism and imperialism.

COVID-19 Exposes Myths of American Exceptionalism

The core myths of American exceptionalism have been exposed by the spread of COVID-19 and the crisis the disease has engendered in the United States. The United States is currently leading the entire world in the number of COVID-19 cases and medical experts believe that some 100,000–200,000 Americans may die as a result of the disease by June of 2020.² Contrast this with China, the first country to report cases of COVID-19. As of this writing, 4,642 people have died of COVID-19 in China as compared to the United States’ 34,203 deaths reported in the sixth week of its outbreak (World Health Organization 2020). This number increased to 50,000 deaths by the eighth week of the outbreak in the United States and then to more than 100,000 deaths by June 1, 2020. The US has been far from exceptional in its handling of the pandemic. The question is, what factors led to the US’ poor response?

Any answer to this question must begin with the for-profit healthcare system that exists in the United States. Healthcare in the United States is largely a privilege for those who can afford private health insurance. There are three avenues for receiving health insurance: either one qualifies for the public programs Medicare and/or Medicaid, receives private healthcare from their employer, or goes without health insurance and pays for healthcare expenses out of pocket. The cost of healthcare, whether in the form of out of pocket costs or health insurance premiums and deductibles, has far outpaced real wages in the United States. Over 500,000 people each year file for bankruptcy due to medical bills (Sainato 2019). Early reports indicated that the cost for treatment of COVID-19 was calculated to be upwards of $30,000 (Abrams 2020). The exorbitant cost of healthcare encourages millions of Americans each year to forgo necessary medical treatment. COVID-19 has only elevated mass fear about the cost of healthcare in the United States. Tens of millions of workers lost their job, and as a result, their health insurance, once stricter quarantine measures were enacted in states across the country beginning in mid-March (Hellman 2020).

The for-profit healthcare system in the United States challenges the American exceptionalist myth that the US is a democracy of and for the people. Insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical monopolies prioritize private profit over human need. Ordinary Americans are represented by politicians at all levels of government who make policy decisions based on the interests of corporate healthcare lobbyists. The lack of democracy inherent in for-profit healthcare has produced devastating consequences throughout the Trump administration's COVID-19 response. The Trump administration refused to follow World Health Organization guidelines for COVID-19 testing kits and instead decided to create their own before outsourcing the responsibility to the private sector (Murray et al. 2020). Critical weeks of testing were lost in the process, allowing COVID-19 to spread undetected.

By the time testing capacity increased in the localities across the US, hospitals were already overwhelmed by shortages of ICU beds, masks, and ventilators. Over the last half century, hospital systems have prioritized profitable healthcare markets such as elective procedures and developed large administrative bureaucracies needed to ensure revenue streams from health insurance corporations and consumers. The reason why the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than anywhere else in the world yet suffers from severe shortages in hospital beds and protective equipment is because health insurance corporations do not find empty hospital beds or the mass production of protective equipment profitable (Quigley 2020). In New York State, massive reductions in hospital capacity have left the state with 20,000 fewer hospital beds in 2020 than what existed in 2000 and 90,000 hospital beds short of the number required to address the pandemic (Robinson 2020). The impact of the for-profit healthcare system on the United States’ COVID-19 response demonstrates that, contrary to the dictates of American exceptionalism, ordinary Americans are denied the democratic right to healthcare and to life itself so long as this right infringes upon the capacity of healthcare tycoons to accumulate profit from illness.

Another major myth of American exceptionalism is that the United States has moved closer to securing bourgeois rights for all people such as the freedom to assemble and an equal opportunity to share in the prosperity of the capitalist economy. These rights have historically been denied to social groups subjected to racial discrimination and oppression. The spread of COVID-19 has brought this enduring reality to light, especially for Black Americans. According to the Economic Policy Institute, unemployment and homeownership rates for Black Americans have failed to improve since 1968 (Jones, Schmitt, and Wilson 2018). The incarceration rate of Black Americans has tripled over the same fifty-year period. Black Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated as white Americans and twice as likely to be unemployed while trailing white Americans significantly in all major social indicators of health and wellbeing (Jones, Schmitt, and Wilson 2018).

The endurance of race-based oppression in the United States guaranteed that the slow response to COVID-19 would impact Black Americans at a scale much greater than white Americans. Black American workers tend to work in jobs that offer little to no sick leave (Bartell et al. 2019). Furthermore, Black Americans make up a disproportionate number of workers employed by businesses deemed essential by federal, state, and local governments, therefore increasing their risk of COVID-19 exposure (Ray 2020). Black Americans are also the largest population within US prisons, all of which lack the sanitary conditions and basic protections necessary to prevent the spread of the virus. Prisoners in New York State have been forced to bottle hand sanitizer for sixty-five cents an hour even as the virus spreads rapidly throughout the state's prison system (Srikanth 2020). The combination of these economic and social conditions has facilitated mortality rates for Black Americans from COVID-19 that far outpace their representation within the general population. In Michigan and Illinois, Black Americans represent 41 percent of all coronavirus deaths despite comprising of just fourteen percent of the population in their respective states (Thebault, Ba Tran, and Williams 2020).

American exceptionalism claims that the United States is the world's premier example of democracy, freedom, and liberty around the world. Yet the United States’ domestic response to the COVID-19 outbreak has shown that these ideological tenets are largely irrelevant for large segments of the American population. Neoliberal economic policy and race-based oppression have created ripe conditions for the United States to lead the world in both confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. The United States has been further hampered from the beginning of the outbreak by a fragmented governance system that privileges the rights of individual states over the welfare of people. Austerity and privatization have been pursued to the point where the United States lacks a public health infrastructure entirely.

It would be an oversimplification to conclude that American exceptionalism is mythology for all sections of the US population. The ideology speaks to the interests of the US capitalist class quite well. While the US’ response to COVID-19 greatly increased the suffering of poor and working people, the federal government passed several stimulus packages that provided several trillions of dollars to the richest corporations and banks. Financial institutions, military contractors, and healthcare corporations received tens of billions in direct grants from the federal government (Prins 2020). Private capital thus has every reason to boast about the exceptionalism of the United States’ social order. For private capital, democracy, liberty, and freedom exist in the United States insofar as its interests are preserved during periods of crisis like the one presented by COVID-19.

American Hegemony Exacerbates COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 has unmasked American exceptionalism as an ideology which is shaped by the fundamental contradictions of the United States’ hyper-capitalist and imperialist state. The benefits that private capital have extracted from the spread of COVID-19 have come at great cost, and this has been especially true in the realm of geopolitics. A major function of American exceptionalism is to project US hegemony abroad. American exceptionalism universalizes values such as democracy, liberty, and freedom and defines them as the private property of the United States. American exceptionalism assumes that it is the mission of the US to export these values to nations abroad that fail to comply with the dictates of American foreign policy. Just as freedom, liberty, and democracy are reserved for private capital and its wealthy benefactors in the US mainland, so too are these cherished ideals propagated to reinforce the unipolar dominance of the United States on the international stage.

The US commitment to its own perceived superiority has only made it more difficult for the world to address the pandemic. During the early stages of China's battle with COVID-19, the US media intensified its routine depiction of China as an authoritarian regime and accused the central government of engaging in coverups that allowed COVID-19 to spread within the country (Palmer 2020). Despite the World Health Organization's (WHO) praise of China's response to COVID-19, the United States’ media and political class has repeatedly accused China of engineering the pandemic. US State Department Secretary Mike Pompeo has gone so far as to push for COVID-19 to be called the “Wuhan virus” in the G7's joint statement (Moreno 2020). So-called civil society organizations such as Radio Free Asia have further damaged US–China relations by spreading the conspiracy that China has purposely underreported its coronavirus cases and deaths (Singh 2020).

Anti-China rhetoric has not only deflected attention from the United States’ own problematic COVID-19 response but also serves long-standing geopolitical objectives. The Trump administration's National Security Strategy document released in 2018 clearly outlined the primary means that the United States seeks maintain its global hegemony. The document named China as an adversary in a global competition between Great Powers (Ali 2018). This declaration of future military aggression toward China built upon the Obama administation's Pivot to Asia, which moved over fifty percent of all the United States’ military assets to the Asia-Pacific (Robson 2017). Indeed, the RAND corporation dedicated an entire report in 2016 to the possible outcomes of a US military intervention directed at China (Gompert, Cevallos and Garafola 2016).

Ordinarily, the ideology of American exceptionalism successfully frames China as a draconian dictatorship that deserves whatever aggressive measures the US employs. The success of the ideology is largely predicated upon the United States’ position as a hegemonic power in world affairs. US efforts to antagonize China and maintain hegemony have delegitimized American exceptionalism because they have played a significant role in exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis. This has only further eroded global confidence in US leadership, and for good reason. For one, the preoccupation on the part of the US media and political class with demonizing China's early efforts to contain the virus wasted precious time that could have been more effectively spent preparing for the virus’ spread worldwide. Furthermore, the US pursuit of hegemony and dominance over other nations has arguably endangered countless lives by making it more difficult for the world to contain the virus’ spread.

There is perhaps no better illustration of how American hegemony has exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic than in the United States’ unrelenting sanctions campaign on Iran. Sanctions, or restrictions of a nation's access to key global markets, have been a longstanding US policy against Iran in one form or another since 1979 (Targ 2020). The policy was briefly relaxed from 2015 to 2018 before the Trump administration renewed sanctions by pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear agreement. Prior to COVID-19's emergence, US sanctions had crippled the Iranian economy through the devaluation of the national currency, the prevention of oil exports, and the subsequent lack of access to raw materials needed to produce medicines for life-threatening diseases.³

The United States placed new sanctions on Iran's oil sector in mid-March of 2020 (Cunningham 2020). Additional sanctions further hindered the Iranian government and economy from being able to effectively address the spread of COVID-19 in the early period of the country's outbreak. The results were nothing short of disastrous for the Iranian people. Iran has over 80,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 5,000 deaths. According to The Lancet, sanctions have placed great strain on Iran's healthcare system.

But sanctions are only one method of military aggression that the United States employs around the world to maintain hegemony. The US has spent 4 trillion dollars on direct military interventions in the Middle East since 2001 (O’Connor 2018). Around 7,432 US bombs and munitions were dropped on Afghanistan alone in 2019 (Borger 2020). US wars in the Middle East have led to the destabilization of the entire region and at great human cost. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is estimated to have killed more than one million civilians over the course of eight years and has been linked to an astronomical increase of cancerous diseases in the country from depleted uranium pollution (Reese 2014). There have been no indications that the US will scale back its aggressive military operations worldwide. In fact, the Trump Administration has ordered the US Navy to strike Iranian naval vessels even as the U.N. calls for a global ceasefire to address the pandemic (Seligman 2020).

US military aggression has made it far more difficult for the world to place its full attention toward addressing the COVID-19. Aggressive measures such as military occupation and sanctions indirectly exacerbate the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States has also directly contributed to the worsening of the pandemic globally by stealing shipments of medical supplies from other nations. Shipments of masks and ventilators to nations such as Brazil, Germany, and Canada, all presumable US allies, have reportedly been diverted to the United States. The United States government has thus treated its shortage of medical equipment as another kind of war. Instead of using diplomacy and cooperation, the US has exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic abroad by engaging in what some observers have called “modern day piracy” (Willsher et al. 2020).

China and Multipolarity as an Alternative to US Imperial Decline

The ideology of American exceptionalism has been unmasked in the age of COVID-19. American exceptionalism frames the United States as the most accurate representation of freedom and democracy worldwide. However, the United States’ COVID-19 response has demonstrated that freedom and democracy have always been narrowly applied within the framework of a class society. These principles largely exist exclusively for the rich and more accurately pertain to capital's ability to accumulate private profit regardless of the domestic or international consequences. However, the freedom and democracy that capital enjoys in the United States comes at the direct expense of a large portion of the human population.

Whether one considers the large number of US based workers lacking the sick leave to protect themselves from COVID-19, the hundreds of thousands of homeless individuals sleeping on the street, or entire nations such as Iran being starved by sanctions of critical resources in the fight against COVID-19, it is clear that American exceptionalism is an ideology of domination rather than cooperation. American exceptionalism has remained legitimate in US political discourse mainly because of the unipolar influence that the United States has possessed over the world's economic, political, and military affairs. However, the United States’ model of unipolar military domination and free-market capitalism is in sharp decline, which is evidenced by its shrinking share of the world economy and its regressive role in the global response to COVID-19. China, on the other hand, is a society on the rise. Not only does China possess a growing market socialist economy that is currently the second largest in the world, but China's COVID-19 response was also far more effective in curbing the spread of the disease and its potentially lethal impact.

China, a country of 1.4 billion, was the epicentre of the outbreak yet has more than 9,000 fewer deaths than New York City, which sports a population of nine million. China's planned socialist state certainly had much to do with its success in containing COVID-19. Because the commanding heights of the economy are state-owned and subject to a state plan, China was able to rapidly employ a total lockdown of Wuhan, institute widespread and free testing and contact tracing, and build two hospitals in Hubei province dedicated to coronavirus treatment in a matter of days (China Watch Institute et al. 2020). However, China's success with containing COVID-19 has not been simply a product of its effective governance at the domestic level. China's model of international cooperation aided its success and serves as an alternative to US imperial hegemony and decline.

China's method for addressing the pandemic was in accordance with the principles of win-win cooperation and multipolarity, both of which have been focal points of Xi Jinping's tenure as President of the People's Republic of China. Multipolarity emphasizes a world order where more than two nations have comparable influence while win-win cooperation seeks to bring about shared benefits from global trade rather than a condition of inequality. These principles have been most starkly materialized in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Belt and Road Initiative is a framework for infrastructure development that has brought 126 nations together around the common goal of shared prosperity. China's President Xi Jinping remarked at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China that the nation should

Adherence to the principles of multipolarity and win-win cooperation has perhaps been even more apparent in the way that China has led the global response to the pandemic. China has sent medical equipment and experts to 120 countries fighting their own battles with COVID-19 (Sun and Cheng 2020). In late February, China provided Iran with specialists and hundreds of thousands of masks to help the sanctioned nation address the outbreak in its early stages.⁶ In mid-March, China sent hard-hit Italy a team of medical experts and 10,000 lung ventilators, 50,000 test kits and 20,000 protective suits (Chan 2020). Iraq received a polymerase chain reaction lab from China to expand the country's testing capacity.⁷ China has shared its expertise and resources with the people of the world without asking for anything in return.

The assistance that China has provided the world in its struggle to reduce the impact of COVID-19 stands in stark ideological contrast with the United States. While the US offers a model of international governance which places a priority on its own economic and military supremacy, China has pointed a way forward out of a crisis that relies upon a completely different set of principles. China realizes that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only a threat to human life, but also to its goals of building a modern socialist society that can achieve goals like eradicating absolute poverty and reducing the impact of climate change. Humanitarian assistance is viewed as a victory for China because the stability of the world is intimately connected to China's own stability. The US, on the other hand, is mired in decline and thus employs American exceptionalism to reinforce an international order based on zero-sum politics. This explains why as China has stepped up its international aid to the world, the US has demonized such actions as “mask diplomacy” and threatened to pull its funding from the World Health Organization after President Trump accused the U.N. agency of being too “China-centric.”

The most hawkish elements of the US political establishment have come together to place the blame for COVID-19 squarely on China. These forces make up the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States. According to Jude Woodward, however, there are sections of the US ruling elite that favor collaborative relations with China. Figures such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye have opposed a new Cold War with China on the basis that realism and coexistence should guide the US’ approach toward China (Woodword 2017). While Kissinger and Nye have certainly played a role in projecting US hegemony abroad, their position on China indicates that divisions in the US ruling class do exist. Such divisions reflect a growing tension between the desire of certain sections of the establishment to maintain US economic and political supremacy in world affairs and other sections that fear the negative consequences of hostile US–China relations on economic investment should US aggression toward China reach a breaking point.

Tension among US policymakers must be studied further alongside China's approach to international relations so that more Americans can become involved in the development of a multipolar counterweight to the increasingly aggressive posture of the United States toward China amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has ultimately shown the world that China's dedication to multipolarity and win-win cooperation is a viable alternative to US imperial hegemony and the ideology of American exceptionalism that defends it. American exceptionalism promotes disdain for nations that refuse to bow to the dominance of the United States. In contrast, multipolarity privileges a world order where more than one nation is influential in the affairs that govern international relations. China has shown its commitment to multipolarity by approaching the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to unite the world around the common enemy of a deadly disease. China has shared with the world both the lessons of its domestic experience with COVID-19 and the materials needed to contain the disease in a manner that respects self-determination and international law.

The United States, on the other hand, has repeatedly casted suspicion and blame onto China since COVID-19 began to spread around the world and has yet to cease its military and economic wars of aggression. American exceptionalism provides the ideological justification needed to sustain these wars. The constant contrast that US power brokers make between so-called authoritarian China and the so-called democratic United States has made a real impact on the consciousness of the American people. A recent Harris Poll found that fifty-four percent of Americans believe that China should pay reparations to the United States for damages related to COVID-19 (Rogin 2020). This shows that a belief in the exceptionalism of the United States is fundamentally connected to maintaining imperial superiority over countries such as China, often at the expense of human life.

COVID-19 has further unmasked American exceptionalism as a win-lose ideology not only for the world, but also for the people of the United States. American exceptionalism is a glorious ideology for private capital. Painting China as an inhumane villain behind the COVID-19 pandemic and the US as its innocent victim takes the focus off the fundamental contradictions currently to blame for the poor domestic response to the virus in the United States. Decades of unmitigated neoliberal austerity and privatization coupled with a centuries long history of white supremacy have ensured that the US is the world leader in the number of deaths from COVID-19. China's win-win model of cooperation is a proven alternative to the deceit of American exceptionalism. Win-win cooperation requires an understanding that domestic stability and international stability are intertwined phenomenon. China's political leadership has stressed that international cooperation in the fight against COVID-19 is not only about building goodwill between countries but also ensuring that imported cases and the global spread of the pandemic does not lead to another outbreak inside of China.

Conclusion

This article analyzed the function of American exceptionalism in maintaining the dominance of US-led private capital and white supremacy at home and US imperial hegemony abroad. American exceptionalism has only exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic by providing justification for war, neoliberal economic policy, and racism. Contrary to what many in the United States believe, China's response to COVID-19 has been an international success. The United States has engaged in blaming China to deflect from its own problems and continues to engage in military aggression around the world at the risk of prolonging the virus’ spread. China, on the other hand, has provided concrete aid to embattled countries fighting COVID-19. China's win-win model of cooperation and its adherence to multipolarity guides its continued commitment to international solidarity. Academics, activists, and organizers in the United States seeking their own path toward socialism and peace should conduct further research into these principles and apply them to their own objective conditions, especially where it relates to the critical need to reduce the hostility of the United States toward the People's Republic of China.