The usfg redirects its citizens desires to construe U.S. imperialism as the “correct action” – it does this through utilizing the state of exception sustained by fantasies of imminent threats. This began in the cold war --- Their interp is stuck in cold war fantasies.

I have elaborated this theoretical scenario to explain the complex psychosocial processes that constituted the preconditions for the symbolic efficacy of the fantasy of American exceptionalism. I have solicited the insights of Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl to articulate this explanation because they arrived at an understanding of the workings of state fantasy from within the precincts of the Soviet imperial formation onto whom the cold war state had projected the agency responsible for the construction of the U.S. State of Exception. As the subjects within a nation-state that had actually been subjected to the imperial formation that the U.S. state had described as its dialectical contrary, Žižek and Salecl are perhaps the theorists best suited by historical circumstances to explain the perverse logics of the U.S. State of Exception. But the paradoxical logic at work in the primal scene of American exceptionalism discerned by two of its ego-ideals need not impede a more forthright description of the reality effects of this pervasive state of fantasy. After World War II, the U.S. government propagated the belief that America was the fulfillment of the world’s aspiration for the “Nation of Nations” by constructing the threat to the attainment of that ideal in the image of the Soviet Empire. The construction of this national enemy in the image of an Evil Empire enabled the U.S. state to represent its imperial practices as preemptive measures that it was obliged to take to prevent the Soviet Empire from incorporating U.S. citizens within its imperial domain. American exceptionalism produced the desire within U.S. citizens to construe U.S. imperialism as a nation-preserving measure that would prevent Soviet imperialism from destroying America’s national ideals. American exceptionalism also enabled U.S. citizens to turn this nation preserving measure into an exception to U.S. national identity that proved its rule. Rather than construing the occupation of South Korea and West Berlin as violations of the belief in American nationalism, the fantasy of American exceptionalism allowed U.S. citizens to derive enjoyment from these exceptions as necessary means to achieve the state’s destruction of imperialism as a Russian way of life. Exceptionalism became a state fantasy when it caused U.S. citizens to want to participate in the state’s imperial will by changing the objective cause of their desire. The imperialism that the state in fact practiced intensified the need within U.S. citizens to disavow those practices. This need in its turn produced a counterloop of desire for the recovery of the ideal natin. But the latter desire could only be acted upon by renewing the practice of disavowal through which the U.S. national identity was produced. What was important in the practice of this desire was not whether or not the fantasy of American exceptionalism was “true.” What mattered was the way that the fantasy of exceptionalism overwhelmed this question of the truth. Americans could not be deceived about American exceptionalism because, to paraphrase Renata Salecl, they articulated the truth of their nationalizing desire in and through this deception. Throughout the cold war, U.S. citizens structured their position within the United States through the structuring disavowal of imperialism as an American way of life. But the vexed relationship between the ideal nation and the state’s imperial practices did not lead U.S. citizens to abandon their national identity. On the contrary, this intimate transgressive relationship between the state’s imperial practices and Americans’ national ideals seemed to heighten and augment their desire for and identification with these imagined national ideals. American exceptionalism induced Americans to propagate the American national ideal domestically and globally so as to nullify the imperial enemy’s desire for domestic and global dominance. Overall, the fantasy worked by enabling U.S. citizens to experience what was exceptional about their U.S. national identity as the disavowal of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. The United States differed from other nations in that its national fantasy was in fact a state fantasy. It became a state fantasy at the site where the national fantasy would otherwise take hold. Slavoj Žižek has described the site upon which the disparity between the national ideal that national citizens hoped for and the imperfect nations they could expect to produce as the place in which they took up the endless desire to achieve the ideal nation. But in the United States this national site was annulled through the state fantasy of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism defined America as having already achieved the condition of the ideal nation that normally incited national desire. After it defined America as the fulfillment of the world’s dream of an ideal nation, the fantasy of American exceptionalism eradicated the difference between the national ideal U.S. citizens wanted and the faulty nation they had, by representing America as having already achieved all that a nation could be. American exceptionalism thereafter motivated U.S. citizens to displace their normal national desire— to achieve an ideal nation— with the abnormal desire to propagate the U.S. model of nationalism. It was the cold war state that promoted the image of “America” as the fulfillment of the world’s desire for an ideal nation into its rationale for imposing and defending the U.S. model of nationalism across the globe. After the state positioned the “Nation of Nations” as the keystone of its imperial foreign policy, America exceeded the conditions of normal nationness and became the imperial state’s practicable model for nation-building. But the state practices that exceeded nationalism were not predicated on the state’s desire to achieve the ideal nation but on its desire to become the sole imperial power. In doing so, the imperial state formation had not merely surpassed the individual citizen’s desire to achieve an ideal U.S. nation; it actively contradicted the U.S. citizens’ belief that America was indeed an ideal nation. The identificatory mechanisms of American exceptionalism supplied U.S. citizens with the psychosocial structures through which they disallowed acknowledgment of these contradictions. At the level of what I earlier described as their ideal identifications, U.S. citizens wanted to believe that the United States was the perfection of a national ideal rather than a rapacious imperializing power. Moreover they could not articulate criticism of U.S. imperialism without feeling as if they had spoken on behalf of the imperial enemy with which they were also fantasmatically identified. As we have seen, Freud named the figure who aroused such guilty identifications the superego. Jacques Lacan has called the dimension of the state fantasy that oversaw the processes of self - recognition that distinguished the ideal identification from the fantasmatic identification the Gaze. In the reconfigured cultural field that emerged after World War II, the fantasy of American exceptionalism assumed the vantage point of the superegoic Gaze. The fantasy performed its spectacular operation when it brought the visual field into line with the desires that individual U.S. citizens subjectivized when they identified with their appropriate positions in the symbolic order. When U.S. citizens identified with their mandated subject positions, the Gaze named the superegoic figure that made them feel good about their symbolic identifications.21 America’s exceptional Gaze produced U.S. citizens’ acquiescence to their cold war identities by facilitating their self - recognition within them. When it served as the superego, American exceptionalism also demanded that U.S. citizens perform the disavowal of American imperialism as the way to continue to feel good about their national identity. American exceptionalism may have explicitly represented the United States as an exception to the rule of nations, but it tacitly required that U.S. citizens continue to construe it as a nation so that they could practice the state’s desire to proliferate the national model globally. U.S. citizens sustained their fantasies concerning how the nation should be by practicing the American exceptionalism that enabled them successfully to disavow the fact that it wasn’t what it should be. The state fantasy of exceptionalism thereby introduced the disavowal of imperial - ism as the unacknowledged mediator in between the state’s policies and the practicable life worlds of U.S. citizens. Exceptionalism activated a two - tiered process dividing the manifest organization of the U.S. role in the world with the latent fantasy whereby U.S. citizens imagined themselves as practicing nationalism through the disavowal of imperial - ism. It was at this site—where the U.S. imperial practices overran the condition of normal nationality—that U.S. citizens were taken up by a state fantasy of a different order.