“America,” declared Donald Trump during his second inaugural address, “will be far more exceptional than ever before.” These words may have puzzled those who have followed Trump’s statements about such matters over the years. In April 2015, a couple months shy of announcing his candidacy for president, Trump was asked how to restore American exceptionalism. “I don’t like the term,” Trump replied. “I’ll be honest with you. … I don’t think it’s a very nice term. … First of all, I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, ‘We’re exceptional. We’re more exceptional.’ … I don’t like the term. I never liked it.”

Trump has distinguished himself as a leader congenitally opposed to American responsibility as the guarantor of world order. Adopting the program of “America First,” he has scorned coalitions and alliances, and without any special regard for democratic values, he has recoiled from liberal causes and praised powerful revisionist regimes that hope to overthrow the order built and maintained by American power. Faith in the liberalising powers of commerce and technology that animated US foreign policy after the Cold War has given way to a pervasive pessimism—the conviction that, in a zero-sum world, all nations must go their own way. This narrow appeal to the American national interest is at odds with larger ideas about America, not to mention with the very idea of America itself.

Trump’s disdain for American exceptionalism was hardly novel—the term has fallen out of fashion across the political spectrum over the last couple of decades. President Obama demonstrated a similar reticence about the phrase when he was president. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” he said in 2009, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As a number of critics pointed out at the time, this concept of exceptionalism is so elastic that it really means nothing at all. 

But American exceptionalism was originally coined as a question, not as a boastful conceit. As European, Asian, and South American societies turned to socialist nostrums and models in the aftermath of World War II, the United States stubbornly held on to its liberal creed, which led Marxist theorists to wonder what made America uniquely immune to the appeal of socialism. It was liberal anticommunists who first embraced this definition of exceptionalism.