In recent years, a hypercritical perspective on American history and culture has gone mainstream. It echoes American exceptionalism — the belief that the United States possesses distinctive values, particularly liberty and democracy, and should seek to nourish global well-being by spreading them— but represents an inverse orientation to the concept’s traditional form.
This perspective does not simply renounce exceptionalism, as realists do, but instead endorses its opposite, characterizing the U.S. as a unique source of incompetence and malevolence. In extreme cases, adherents suggest that the U.S. endangers the rest of the globe.
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