Ask A Genius 1560: American Exceptionalism, Marketing Myths, and the World Series
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/02
Why do so many American pastimes have global framing but purely domestic scope?
Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen riff on baseball’s “World Series,” using it as a springboard into American exceptionalism. They trace how marketing, PR, and early propaganda shaped national myths, from deist founders to church-state tensions and voucher-backed microschools. Rosner emphasizes geography, youth, and insulation from world wars; Jacobsen presses on where ideals meet reality. They discuss slavery’s foundational labor, Native dispossession, and contested narratives around the atomic bombings. The pair close by noting a record-length series and the irony of global branding with domestic scope, inviting readers to separate civic pride from comforting stories and examine history with rigor.
Rick Rosner: The Dodgers just won game seven of the World Series, which was good.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m so excited.
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: That’s great.
Rosner: No, you’re not—you’re from Canada. The Dodgers didn’t beat “Canada”; they beat the American League champions.
Jacobsen: Also, it’s not really the World Series; it’s just called the World Series.
Rosner: That’s what they call it, so that’s what I said. It would be fun to make it a true World Series and have the champions play the winners of Japan’s championship series, the Japan Series.
Jacobsen: Here’s the question: why do so many American pastimes have global framing but purely domestic scope?
Rosner: I don’t know.
Jacobsen: I assume it’s marketing.
Rosner:The first modern World Series was in 1903. Baseball had been organized in the U.S. since the mid-19th century—the Knickerbocker rules date to 1845, and professional play began in 1869—so by 1903 the professional game was a few decades old. Major League Baseball then consisted of two leagues, the National League and the American League, with eight teams each—sixteen total—mostly clustered in the Northeast and Midwest, not all within five hundred miles of one another. An exceptional part of American life is public relations and media. The media landscape often rewards exaggeration. Early U.S. publicity and propaganda methods—think Edward Bernays and the World War I Committee on Public Information—influenced later propagandists; Nazi officials studied these techniques in the 1930s.
Jacobsen: I want to get to that, but the point I want to make is that part of American exceptionalism lies in this idea of American evangelism. Lee Kuan Yew used to talk about it—not in a strictly religious sense, but as the American desire to sell America. At the time, that often involved Christianity, but the idea of American exceptionalism includes both positive and negative myths. It’s about marketing—what parts of American exceptionalism are lies, and which parts actually reflect reality to some degree.
Rosner: Before you can separate lies from truth, you have to look at the root causes of American exceptionalism. The first is our origin as a country founded in rebellion. Then there’s geographic exceptionalism—we’re a European culture transplanted to a new continent, and we displaced the native populations. Our geographic isolation, and the fact that we had an entire continent to exploit, insulated us from the worst harms of the world wars. In World War I, the United States lost about 116,000 service members.
In World War II, about 405,000—compared with tens of millions of deaths in the Soviet Union and roughly 70–85 million worldwide (with Europe alone accounting for many tens of millions). We bore a far smaller share of total losses. Because World War II barely touched our shores, our founding ideals could still loom large. The phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Do I have that right?
Jacobsen: I’ll fact-check that, and we’ll get back to it.
Rosner: I think it’s the Declaration of Independence. We have a large expanse of land. We didn’t start off huge, but then we doubled, tripled, and quadrupled as we took over the continent. It was fertile land for rugged individualism. We still have a vast amount of space compared to the smaller European countries. We’re also a young country—about 250 years old. Tied to that, as you said, we’ve been fighting over what’s true and what isn’t. Trump, the Republicans, and DeSantis have been pushing to de-emphasize the uglier parts of our history that everyone knows.
The European Holocaust under Hitler killed about 11 million people, but the U.S. had its own ongoing atrocities. The slavery holocaust began with the importation of enslaved Africans in the 17th century, and by the time it ended nearly 250 years later, roughly as many people had died under slavery as in the Nazi Holocaust. Then there was the displacement and extermination of Native Americans.
That’s harder to calculate—many lived under horrific conditions, and while some survived to continue their lineages, millions perished from violence, starvation, and disease brought by colonization. You could argue that the combined suffering of Native Americans also reached the scale of millions. Enslaved labor built much of the country, including the White House. It also cleared land and made way for agriculture across the colonies. So, one of the lies is that white people did all the important work in building America.
I mean that Republicans and Trump are trying to get education to soft-pedal the brutal treatment of people who weren’t white men. You can say it was a different time, and that we’re a country that tries to do better, but that’s not enough. Under Trump, if you want to talk about how much of America was built on slavery—especially in Florida—you can run into political trouble with those in power. Texas too. Some argue life was hard for everyone back then, but that’s no excuse.
You can also say America was built on lofty ideals and often failed to live up to them, but that’s not good enough for Trump, who wants to dismantle the Department of Education. Until Jimmy Carter created it about 50 years ago, education was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Under Carter, it became its own department. Trump wants to eliminate it again and reduce federal involvement in education, leaving control to the states. There’s also a nationwide push to let people use tax dollars to pay for private education—largely seen as a way to fund Christian schools and Christian microschools.
Jacobsen: You mean like a micro school as in a homeschool or something similar?
Rosner: No, it’s between a homeschool and a traditional Christian or Catholic school. About half a dozen to a dozen families might get together and have their kids taught in a shared space by a mix of teachers and volunteer parents. A church might also set up a small school—not on the scale of a Catholic school with 1,200 students, buildings, and full faculty and staff. I just read about this in Harper’s Magazine. It’s becoming a trend—if evangelicals and similar groups can get the government to pass laws to fund it. And of course, any money going to Christian schools comes directly out of public school funding. It’s a way to un-secularize education.
Jacobsen: That’s a violation of church-state separation.
Rosner: Yes, absolutely. If we’re talking about lies, there are countless small ones that pop up constantly in modern politics—like the claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. It very clearly wasn’t. Many of the Founding Fathers were deists, which isn’t explicitly Christian. They made a deliberate point of ensuring that no single religion would dominate the country. There’s a lot of confusion around that. Do we want to keep going with this? Also, let’s talk about the positive—actual areas of exceptional humane action.
We do have a history of making enormous sacrifices to fight evil. We contributed massively in World War II, which was unusual because the opposing forces were so clearly evil. The U.S. exerted its full industrial might to defeat the fascists. Yes, we did some terrible things at the end, especially with the atomic bombs. But when it comes to the question of lies, I’m not sure the differing viewpoints around the atomic bombings count as lies. I’m not well-versed enough in the details of the decision-making or the possible alternatives to speak authoritatively. The bombs were dropped on two largely untouched Japanese cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb killed about 120,000 people, most of them instantly. The Nagasaki bomb killed between 80,000 and 100,000, most of them civilians. Some historians argue it wasn’t even the atomic bombs that led to Japan’s surrender, but rather the threat of Soviet invasion. In any case, nearly everyone believes some version of misinformation or myth about the decision-making behind dropping the bombs.
By the way, in terms of total innings, this World Series was tied for the longest in history—74 innings total. That ties the 1912 World Series, which actually ran eight games because Game 2 ended in a tie due to darkness. Stadium lighting back then was practically nonexistent. So by the time Game 7 rolled around, both teams had three and a half wins, and they had to play an extra game. This year’s series racked up the same total because of that one 18-inning marathon and the 11-inning Game 7. Which means that you guys—Canada—are arguably the greatest losing World Series team in history.
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