American Exceptionalism Between Utopian Dream and Reality

The original motivation of the present book goes a long way back to my childhood years, which therefore explains a somewhat naive outlook on the world. I was born and spent my childhood in the final years of Romanian communism, an era of grotesque socialist ideology, harsh violations of human rights and severe economic deprivation. My contact with anything that America represents was extremely limited at the time. It mainly consisted of the official representation of the United States by the communist propaganda in an overwhelmingly negative light, as the epitome of ruthless capitalism; a space of promiscuity, drugs, violence and contempt for the people, unlike glorious socialism which was the world’s last and only chance of salvation. The effect that this type of black-or-white propaganda had on my crude judgment was that I ceased to believe in either of the two.