What Survives the Myth of American Exceptionalism

Dear Reader,

No one warns you about the soft diplomacy required just to say where you’re from. It’s strange to carry a nationality that always needs explaining. Stranger, still, to feel both tethered to it and in constant negotiation with it. Especially when you’re American abroad, you learn to explain your country the way you’d explain a difficult loved one — lovingly, critically, with exhaustion. 

You start to develop a reflex for caveats. Emotional labor, in its most casual form: “I didn’t vote for him” or “I know ‘America’ is a continent not a country.” You learn to explain the U.S. as both a cultural juggernaut and a brittle, insecure empire. Eventually it comes second nature to name the harm while still trying to locate whatever it is you’re supposed to feel about the place that shaped you. 

It is jarring to realize that most of the world doesn’t see the United States as good or even competent. That what we call “the American Dream” barely translates. The Dream wasn’t built for most of us, but we were raised inside its echo, taught to believe in the promise even as it disintegrates beneath our feet. 

I have been lucky enough to travel and live elsewhere. Each return home makes it harder to ignore how deeply American exceptionalism is a performance — slick, persistent, persuasive. Beneath the slogan, it’s mostly a refusal: to care, to learn, to imagine more. 

The illusion fades when it becomes clear that other countries with similar tax burdens manage to give people healthcare, affordable childcare, functioning public transit, and a sense of stability not tied to their Linkedin headline. Countries with fewer resources provide more care: to their children, to their elderly, to each other. Where friendship and family are not luxuries to squeeze into a schedule; they’re the point. A safety net that catches — a life not governed by productivity. 

It’s easy to feel humbled abroad (and think you might be better off living there). But the blood pressure rises when it hits you:
We could’ve had those things, too. We just chose not to.

We as Americans carry the weight of a project that once promised transcendence and now mostly delivers descent. Growing up we saw upward mobility: progress was linear, that if we worked hard, we’d be rewarded. Instead, most of us are watching that future narrow. Stagnant wages, disappearing rights, and an economy that rewards hoarding, not living. 

Being an American is less like an identity, and more like a disclaimer. Something I counter before I admit. I’ve had to correct myself in Spanish — no, not Americano, because that word belongs to many. We in the U.S. just took it, the way we take so many things. When people ask where I’m from I try to be honest. I name what’s harder to say: the dictatorships we’ve funded, the wars we’ve justified, deaths we wrote in footnotes. Beneath our contradictions lie histories of violence, racism both glaring and polite, and a national character that confuses self-interest for freedom. We too, contain multitudes. 

These days, I find myself most proud of the US in the moments that are least political: the Olympics, the Women’s World Cup — the odd viral moment of global dominance that feels unifying for half a second. Still the weight returns. The knowledge that American primacy comes at an extraordinary cost. And most of us are paying for it with our futures and our sanity. 

Power isolates. You rise high enough and the air gets thin with consequence. What we export: our culture, our wars, our algorithms — always return to us, heavier and more hollow. Hegemonic strength is a mirror that distorts. We see ourselves as brave and benevolent though rarely responsible. It’s hard to be the global superpower and still claim the underdog, and yet America manages both. Loudly. 

Hegemony makes for great PR until the empire starts to rot from the inside and everyone else sees it before you’re even willing to admit the smell. Being at the top doesn’t make us free, it just makes our delusions harder to challenge. When your country writes the rules, it rarely teaches you how to question them. They told us to dream big, without warning us that the ceiling would collapse mid-ascent. 

There’s a kind of care in the act of confrontation. A belief that this place can be improved if we refuse to let it slip by unexamined. Baldwin said it best: 

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” 

I don’t know if I’d call it love anymore. I do feel bound to do the work: the unglamorous, unending kind. Staying informed. Asking better questions. Choosing solidarity when it’s easier to scroll. Paying attention to who is building humanity in the margins, not just who holds power.

I seek out history that punctures the myths: looking for truth in places the textbooks overlooked (or intentionally left out). 

Hegemony is a burden. So is staying here. If I’m going to carry it, I’ll do so with intention. Shoulder to shoulder with others who still believe this country deserves better — even if they’ve stopped believing we’ll be alive to see it. 

The story has lost its spine. But what’s left — ritual, resistance, a refusal to look away — might be the beginning of something more honest. 

✏️ Fridge Notes

• "American Exceptionalism is a Dangerous Myth" — Eric Levitz, The Cut
• "Embedded hegemony and the evolution of the United States structural power" — Madison Cartwright, International Relations Magazine Vol 39, No. 2.
• "Global Hegemony and Exorbitant Privilege" — Carolin Pflueger and Pierre Yared, University of Chicago Research Brief.
• "Pandemic shows contrasts between US, European safety nets" — David McHugh, Associated Press.
• "Don't Ask Me to Love America when America Doesn't Love Me" — Vic Mensa
• "Still Exceptional After All These Years?" — Stewart M. Patrick, Council on Foreign Relations.

🌸 Pressed Blooms

• "He loves his country best who strives to make it best" — Robert G. Ingersoll
• "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" — Fredrick Douglass
• "The function of freedom is to free someone else" — Toni Morrison
• "Patriotism, to me, means seeing America for what it is – and not turning away." — Rebecca Solnit

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading, and for being someone who still insists on asking more from the places we’re told to accept as-is.

Until Soon,

Sarah

soft power strategist / daughter of florists / fan of deliberate edits.