The crumbling myth of American exceptionalism
To believe that moral values and virtuous leadership are self-enforcing is to fool ourselves.
Every nation is capable of doing both frightful and beautiful things. The only sense in which America is an outlier is in the scale of its biggest achievements and most egregious failures. We’ve mostly managed to set aside our monumental failures or turn a blind eye to them, thanks to a confident self-understanding known as American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism has trained us to believe that we’re not just inherently different from other nations, we’re intrinsically better. We’ve been taught that our national uniqueness is full of distinctive attributes, blessed by divine providence, that exist so the world will know what liberty looks like.
The origin of much of this thinking lies with the Puritans, whose expressed intent was to create a New England, a place that would be, in their eyes, exceptional. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop preached in 1630. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop was determined to persuade the settlers that they were capable of being a moral example to the world through their charity, their bonds of love, and their prioritization of justice and mercy. America was a set of ideas long before it was a nation.
