What does it mean to say the United States is exceptional? If it just means unique, then the claim is unexceptional because no two countries are exactly alike. If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”¹ If it means that the United States was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the United States is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that, as Bismarck reportedly quipped, “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American exceptionalism means that its power, values and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals and allies alike are sure to push back.²

For these reasons “exceptionalism” is more trouble and probably even more danger than it’s worth: It either means nothing at all or altogether too much. But the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20^th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19^th-century poet, pastor or propagandist employed the word. To be sure, most of them believed the United States to be an historic undertaking, even a “new order for the ages.” But far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.

Not until 1835 did a foreigner, Alexis de Tocqueville, catalogue the features of New World democracy and conclude: “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”³ Note, however, that he applied the term to Americans’ position rather than to the people themselves,...