The U.S. American left and reverse moral exceptionalism: when do villains become heroes?

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ABSTRACT This article takes the assassination of Qasem Soleimani as a case study that manifests the schism between the realities of those in revolutionary struggle and those on the U.S. American left who might gather in solidarity with them. I explicate “reverse moral exceptionalism” as a nationalistic tendency to insist on oneself as central to every event of significance on the world stage and which positions the United States (U.S.) as a singular source of evil in the world. Based on an ethnocentrism that approaches the world from a position of dominance, reverse moral exceptionalism saturates the space available for others and induces the inability to listen to the testimony of others. Cartesian “either-or” logics situate all non-white state actors as inherently colonized and by extension, all colonial brown actors emerge as apolitical victims. I argue that when whiteness is only understood in racially provincial terms, it distorts understandings of inter-racial collusion in the transnational context. I attend to the unlikely ways in which whiteness and its concomitant forms of exceptionalism permeate U.S. American nationalist subjectivities, setting the groundwork for an anti-colonial discourse that paradoxically justifies oppressive regimes and brings about indifference to grassroots revolutionary discourse and the micropolitics of resistance.