Despite the rise of nonexceptionalist and post-exceptionalist forms of scholarship, the credo of American exceptionalism has not lost its power to justify new policy. When President George W. Bush (2001) described “9/11” as a fundamental transformation of history that took place in history (“Everything changed after 9/11”), he added a new mytheme to the mythology of exceptionalism. Bush associated the U.S. monopoly on the legal use of global violence with the intervention in human time of a higher law (what he called his “higher father”). In doing so, he endowed the doctrine of American exceptionalism with a metaphysical and arguably theological supplement, claiming that the preemptive violence through which the United States would defend the globe against the threat of Islamic terrorism was metaphysically superior to that of other nation-states. The apocalyptic and Christian millennialist register of Bush’s invocation of this higher law has not merely reestablished the nation’s claim to historical uniqueness; it has positioned the United States outside the world of nations as the divinely ordained exception. The future organization of the field of American studies will depend on how scholars respond to this latest turn in the discourse of American exceptionalism.

This is an excerpt from Donald E. Pease’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 112).