by Bill Murray
I.
A hundred years ago two battered and beleaguered old men, one an Italian prisoner, the other taken to wandering Irish bogs, arrived at the same fateful truth: the world around them was collapsing.
Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist, imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
William Butler Yeats, a sort of mystic horrified by violence and uncertainty across his Irish homeland, saw the same future. From a cottage in County Galway he wrote “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What was worse, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
One a political theorist dissecting history’s brutal transitions, the other a poet divining the chaos of human nature, both foresaw the same truth—that societies don’t glide one era to the next. Sufficiently stressed they shatter, and from the wreckage, new orders struggle to emerge. A hundred years on, Gramsci and Yeats’s alarmed realizations read less like prophecy than real time commentary.
Today’s Americans grew up confident that they stood outside history’s cycles of rise and fall. Battered but buoyed by victory in World War II (and recognizing an opportunity), the United States built a powerful international system meant to foster global stability and economic growth while, naturally, serving its own interests. And, in a world laid waste by war, so it did.
For the longest time this system forestalled large-scale conflicts, allowing America and its allies to prosper.
That system has played itself out.
It was easy enough for the mighty and victorious United States to stamp its model on a war-exhausted world. Turns out, maintaining that system indefinitely in a restive world is challenging.
Gramsci speaks outside of time straight to this week that the old is dying. As a new alignment struggles to be born, just as he said: witness the morbid symptoms.
American legend still holds that the US is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations. We call it American Exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism thrived during the fleeting unipolar moment. With the Soviet collapse and the Cold War’s end, the U.S. bestrode the globe—for better and worse. But the hubris and mutations born of that era now blind us to our decline.
II.
Stories are handed down through time, customs take root. That’s how we form cultures. Children learn that ‘manifest destiny’ built a continent and that they come from strong, hardworking stock. With luck and good governance in a vast and richly endowed land, Americans hope to enjoy their mountains majesty forevermore.
But contemporary problems creep in. Instruments of governance crafted for an age gone by, deteriorating domestic infrastructure and aging world institutions can’t be fixed by proclamation.
Economic inequality, loss of respect for processes and institutions and especially the press of technological change, all proceed apace. Exceptionalism may once have helped us push our problems to the side, but they remain our problems.
There is a funerary rite called Famadihana in Madagascar that I find ghoulish and kind of gross. Every seven years families dig up their ancestors’ bones, rewrap them in fresh fabric and dance. It’s a way to honor the deceased.
They dig up grandma, dance her around, roll the bones and replant them. It’s alien and macabre to me but (so I’ve read) natural to the Malagasy.
On Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, men jump from wooden towers with only vines tied around their ankles as a rite of passage like bungee jumping without elastic, trusting their lives to nature.
Highlanders in Papua New Guinea believe knowledge comes from the father, but blood belongs to the mother. An adolescent Papuan boy’s path to manhood requires a harrowing, painful night-long ritual of scarification to return the blood.
Traditions like these, utterly unique, give civilizations their identity. Gather the world’s quirks side by side like Noah, regard the epic, living pageant of people and celebrate the wonder of humanity.
Just don’t rank traditions in order of worth. That’s where exceptionalism courts trouble.
III.
Madeleine Albright served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations then Secretary of State starting in 1997. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
This was unabashed American Exceptionalism—an assertion that American leadership was both duty and historical inevitability. It ranked the country’s innate worth ahead of others, and it’s naked hubris hinted at the America First version of today.
Yet the idea of American Exceptionalism wasn’t new. It has been around in one form or another for as long as the country.
Seventeenth century English Protestants, who settled New England because they took exception to conditions at home, considered they were exceptional enough to sail uncertain seas for freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville put Exceptionalism explicitly in the nineteenth century: “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.”
The Albright version of Exceptionalism is a quarter century old by now, and times have changed. American Exceptionalism today is reduced to an easy-to-grasp MAGA shibboleth. For the opportunist politician, Exceptionalism is now the lowest hanging fruit.
Exceptionalism, whether the Puritans’, Toqueville’s, Albright’s or the new Donald Trump MAGA version, discourages collective self-examination. If America is the promised land then decline can’t happen here. The US need not change; it’s Exceptional.
Exceptionalism gives license to critique the Other while ignoring symptoms of our own decay. We do so at our peril. In the case of JD Vance’s criticism of our European allies in Munich, at our considerable peril.
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Europeans didn’t take Donald Trump’s 2016 election as the wake-up call they should have. Instead of an all-hands-on-deck build out of their own defenses, European governments found graveyards to whistle past while praying Trump was an aberration. Europe, MAGA Exceptionalism now declares, is complacent.
America’s nearly decade and a half old pivot to Asia diagnoses China as its new principal antagonist, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company as the ground zero formerly occupied by Quemoy and Matsu.
MAGA’s version of Exceptionalism summons Taiwanese manufacturing to America’s shores via implied ultimatum. MAGA does diplomacy by threat, treating the fate of the island more as a transaction over microchips than human drama and strategic dilemma.
To the extent that MAGA Exceptionalism challenges authoritarianism abroad, it does so even as it accelerates America’s democratic decline. Maddening question: why can’t more people see it?
Not only can it happen here, it obviously, quite clearly and quickly is happening here. The road to ruin isn’t hypothetical; we are on it.
Exceptionalism isn’t the cause of American political decline; it’s the story we tell ourselves to avoid confronting it. Exceptionalism allows us to look at other countries with righteous indignation rather than inward, toward our own faltering institutions. It’s an excuse, a rationalization, balm for a society avoiding the truth.
When we critique European NATO spending, Hungary’s corrupt media consolidation or the Chinese internet’s Great Wall, we allow ourselves to avoid difficult questions about our system, our institutions and our current governance. To solve the problem, it’s time to grapple with the changing world.
IV.
Change is unrelenting, shaped by invisible forces, unanticipated circumstances and random events. Those coming of age online grapple with a new deluge of contradictory narratives. Our new arbiter of everything, social media, rewards emotion over analysis.
Yet despite the churn of societal change, for now America maintains immense economic, cultural and military influence. Those inclined might be persuaded its decline is exaggerated.
Perhaps every country assumes that because it has survived past crises, it will always rebound. If infrastructure crumbles, society adapts. If political dysfunction worsens, elections continue. But until we recognize our own decline we will not act to stop it.
Ever since the unipolar moment American Exceptionalism has served as a shield against inconvenient questions, but the MAGA strain of Exceptionalism is different—it adds a torrent of diversion used to hide massive corruption.
Many of us not aboard the MAGA train fear an incipient, malignant strain of neopopulism may come to define the coming decades, just as it stalks the mountains to the prairies today. Others (not a whole lot of others) hope for a progressive resurgence.
The second quarter of the century is off to a shaky start. Today’s populism diverts and delays focus from real and challenging issues like climate and immigration, and the destructive synergy one derives from the other.
Jamelle Bouie has been cited as saying that “most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.” Given the chaos of MAGA’s first six weeks, that doesn’t sound good.
But moments like these need not only be moments of disorder; they can simultaneously become incubators of a yet-to-be-born order to come.
If Gramsci predicted this moment, when the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born, then our present moment—our only moment—holds terrifying responsibility. The interregnum is not an abstraction, it is all around us. Gramsci’s morbid symptoms are everywhere you look.
Shocked, often embittered anti-MAGA voters heard pundits’ pleas in the days after election day: Stay with us! Don’t drop out! Please, remain engaged!
Many of us, utterly deflated, dropped straight out for a time and have yet to come back. But I expect it’s temporary, and that if chaos continues, a reckoning, possibly a clash, is coming.
Yeats warned us what happens when the center collapses, when the worst seize the moment and the best hesitate. For now the center is holding, only just; only in the sense that it hasn’t yet collapsed. The imperative is for the best not to hesitate. The question is whether they will.
This is not a time for calm and reassurance. It is a time of judgement unique in Americans’ formerly exceptional lived experience.
I think one place to find wisdom just now is in the stoicism of Eastern Europeans. Watch today’s frontline against Russia and Belarus: the Nordics, Baltics, Ukraine, Poland and Romania. They have a lived history with disorder.
Listen to what they are saying. Shaped by their experience in the Soviet era and the raw days of deprivation in the early 1990s, these governments don’t do a lot of swagger. Instead they display an inner conviction and a quiet determination to do what is necessary, come what may.
Is the Exceptional country listening? Can it absorb the wisdom of others? In spring 2025 America appears equally likely to press on with its brusque, MAGA Exceptionalism—right up until the rule of law is lost to a nation that refused to listen.
The American lighthouse keeper has been climbing his stairs to tend the flame for 249 years. The haul to the top is more of a trudge every year, and it shows.
Still shining his faltering light, the proprietor of the ailing international rules-based system, newly infected by the novel MAGA virus, has grown weary. He’s weighing retirement. When he goes, as Gramsci would put it, that is the time of monsters.
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