American Exceptionalism in the Time of COVID-19: American National Identity-based Populism versus Cosmopolitan Global Integration Responses to Twenty-first-century Global Crises

Abstract

Ineluctable global interdependency shapes trends in self-identity evolution. Constituencies within national publics benefit from the individual career and prosperity benefits of globalization. Conservative populist constituency ingroups react hostilely to the perceived threat to their traditional status as the core cultural community within nation states. This response produced the political victory of the 2106 Donald Trump presidential campaign. Reactionary populism emerges from perceived threat to core cultural group traditional supremacy within the national polity, heretofore setting the institutionalized, stereotyped norms of individual and constituency behavior and relations. In the US, their status grievances utilize the language of conservative evangelical Christian identity to mobilize their social movement political resources. They draw upon American foundational settler colonial ideologies with a basis in slavery and casteism. Postwar emerging transnational normative authority centers progressively challenge the utilitarian relevance of these parochial, ascriptive norms and ethics. Post-Cold-War reactionary trends displaying nationalist values have intensified globally, and the disruptions in individual and collective formal and informal institutionalized behaviors and role expectations due to the COVID-19 pandemic intensify them. These consequences foreshadow the knock-on effects of anthropogenic climate change. Liberal progressive political strategic responses can highlight transnational diaspora political activism as offering opportunities for pluralization of the American nation state. Communities marginalized as legacies of imperial expansion and settler colonialism display mobilizational capacities to promote government incentivization for corporate environmental, social and governance investment goals that support global sustainable development. This recommendation emphasizes the institutionalization of transnational supraordinate identities in alliance with global epistemic scientific communities. © Common Ground Research Networks, Benedict E. DeDominicis, Some Rights Reserved (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support ISSN: 2327-0004 (Print), ISSN: 2327-2147 (Online) https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-0004/CGP/v21i01/11-34 (Article)