The 1AC’s participation in the liberal order is a product of American exceptionalism that seeks to dominate and control those who are deemed “uncivilized”. The historical amnesia of the 1AC that invests in the rule of law is a discourse that is deadly and produces American exceptionalist thought that constructs and justifies racial hierarchies and intervention across the periphery.

The American post–World War II vision of global order pulled together a set of arguments that had been percolating among pol- icymakers and political elites for the first half of the twentieth century. In this Part, we highlight how with the United States’ emergence onto the global stage, the language of constitutionalism became central to justifying external power and to explaining the presumptive distinctions between American and European imperium. We also emphasize the manner in which constitutionalism creatively married notions of universal inclu- sion and self-government with racial hierarchies about global stewardship—even during the era of decolonization. Finally, we explore perhaps the great paradox of the Cold War: how American constitutionalism embodied a credible global model that was at the same time constitutively linked on the ground to practices of violence and lawlessness. A. Constitutionalism as the Principle of American Power. At the dawn of the twentieth century, elites who favored an aggressive American role abroad had long found themselves fac- ing a basic dilemma. Policies, ranging from participating in World. War I to engaging directly with European power politics to es- tablishing a permanent peacetime security infrastructure, all faced intense internal opposition and seemed to contradict long- standing isolationist and antimilitarist sentiments. In particular, they cut against popular assumptions that foreign entanglements as well as the creation of a large professional military would in- evitably undermine republican institutions and self-government. Indeed, a classic tenet of nineteenth-century American foreign policy held that isolation from Europe and its internecine con- flicts sustained domestic tranquility. None other than Alexander Hamilton had famously argued in Federalist 8 that the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean offered Americans an “insulated situation”18 that did more than anything else to preserve domestic security. These established ideas raised significant popular doubts about the legitimacy of enhanced American interventionism. In response, defenders of greater international authority began— against the backdrop of American militarism in the Philippines, the Americas, and especially during World War I—to intertwine new foreign policy commitments with an account of the federal Constitution in national identity. Such political elites increas- ingly placed the Constitution at the center of American exception- alism and viewed the document and the domestic culture it promoted as an implicit justification for emerging American hegemony. According to this view, the feature that most distinguished the American political project from old-world Europe was the Constitution. Whereas European communities were the product of feudalism as well as political and religious absolutism, the Constitution highlighted the extent to which the American experiment had been built from its founding on an effort to fulfill Enlightenment principles. As David Jayne Hill, Republican Party stalwart, ambassador to Germany, and president of Rochester University, wrote in his 1916 book, Americanism: What It Is, the federal Constitution above all “developed here in America a new estimate of human values, and this has led to a new understanding of life.”19 Contrasting European monarchical despotism with American commitments to liberty and self-government, Hill de- clared that the American colonists sought to “prevent forever the recurrence of absolutism in every form, whether official or popu- lar, whether of dominant individuals or of popular majorities,” thereby producing the “original and distinctive contribution of the American mind to political theory . . . that there should be nothing in government that is not governed by law.”20 In effect, Hill and others mapped out an early twentieth-century variation of what Professor Nikhil Pal Singh has called “American universal- ism”21—namely, the idea that what marks out the United States as exceptional is its status as the place where Enlightenment commitments truly took historical root. At stake in such claims was more than the belief that the Constitution safeguarded liberties at home. It also upheld the view that the Constitution spoke to a special mission abroad. Ac- cording to Hill, European powers sought to divide the world ac- cording to a principle of “imperialism”22 and thus treated other communities as little more than material spoils. Given these facts, a peaceful and stable international order required a strong American presence. This was because the culture of American constitutionalism was “antithetical to Imperialism, whose watch- word is unlimited power”23 and thus offered a necessary counter- balance on the global stage. Supposedly in opposition to empire, the constitutional principle meant that American authority was centrally about creating the conditions in foreign, oftentimes non- European, societies for peaceful self-government. With the world consumed in global conflict and instability, the United States had a responsibility to ensure that the principle of constitution- alism, rather than that of imperialism, dominated the international order.24By the 1940s, the war with Nazi Germany and the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union pushed these arguments linking constitutionalism, tutelage, and American power to the political center. In justifying American involvement in World War II, those in the Roosevelt administration focused on the perceived cultural and political differences between the United States and the country’s collectivist or totalitarian foes. In par- ticular, commentators and policymakers once more rallied around the claim that the United States had been defined from the Founding by neither race nor religion, but rather by a civic faith in fundamental rights, the rule of law, and basic equality Enlightenment principles that they argued made the coun- try the first truly universal nation. As the editors of the nascent liberal journal, Common Ground, declared in the fall of 1940: Never has it been more important that we become intelli- gently aware of the ground Americans of various strains have in common; . . . that we reawaken the old American Dream, a dream which, in its powerful emphasis on the fundamental worth and dignity of every human being, can be a bond of unity no totalitarian attack can break.25The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal offered perhaps the most seminal popular presentation of these ideas in An American Dilemma, a formative text on race relations and American iden- tity for mid-twentieth-century political elites. Myrdal contended that the Constitution embodied what he called “the American creed”26 and through the text “the nation early laid down as the moral basis for its existence the principles of equality and liberty.”27 Myrdal argued that, although racist and archaic practices may have continued to persist in pockets—or entire regions—of the country, these practices were incompatible with national val- ues. “The main trend” in American history was “the gradual real- ization of the American Creed.”28 So pure were the country’s founding motives that America could be seen, at its core, as noth- ing less than “humanity in miniature.”29 Myrdal, along with many Cold War policymakers influenced by American Dilemma, employed these creedal arguments to then call for a postwar order premised on American preeminence. Precisely because the United States was a nation founded on plural- ism, tolerance, and the rule of law—embodied concretely in the Constitution—American power internationally stood “warm- heartedly against oppression in all the world.”30 Given that the country’s constitutional values expressed the global community’s ideals, pax Americana necessarily involved a defense of liberal goals against illiberal threats. Such creedal constitutionalism thus gave an account of the justness of American security prerog- atives and provided the ideological foundations for the “American Century.” Yet, for all the claims about the opposition between American constitutionalism and European imperialism, it is essential to ap- preciate the extent to which these notions of American exceptionalism rested on background judgments about racial hierarchy and nonwhite dependence. In the early decades of the twentieth cen- tury, the figure that best embodied this interconnection was none other than President Woodrow Wilson, liberal internationalist and domestic segregationist. Wilson viewed the world as divided into distinct ethnocultural “peoples” at different stages in the process of political evolution.31 European Americans, especially of Anglo-Saxon descent, stood at the forefront of this evolution, due to their long-standing acculturation in the practices of republican freedom. While democratic self-government was a universal good and all peoples had the potential eventually to enjoy its benefits, only those who had reached political maturity were ready in the pre- sent. “Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure” less de- veloped peoples “the precious possession” of real self-government, Wilson stated, “a thing no more to be bought than given.”32 Precisely because the United States had supposedly reached the end stage of ethnocultural development—and was not stained by the absolutism and internecine violence marking Europe—it had a unique global role to play in shepherding less developed peoples on the path to freedom. In effect, emerging accounts of American universalism, grounded in constitutional experience, reaffirmed rather than undermined white American supervision and interventionism. Indeed, for this very reason, regardless of American self-presentation the new American imperium often echoed the old European variety. This is perhaps best illustrated by publishing magnate Henry Luce’s own famous call in 1941 to “create the first great American Century.”33 For Luce, Americans enjoyed a right to global dominance because they were nothing less than “inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization.” In this way, even the language of exceptionalism vis-à- vis other empires placed US elites and policymakers in a long line of European officials, officials who too justified their nation’s global power based on special cultural attributes and historic destiny. And perhaps most important for those on the receiving end of American power in the first half of the twentieth century, the new politics of US global authority could seem awfully similar to its European rivals.