Since November 8, analysts have discovered numerous reasons for Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US Presidential election. There’s his superficial but effective appeal to those who believe they have lost out economically in a changing America and world. There’s the immersion in Trump’s culture of fear, be it of ethnic and racial groups, women, LGBT communities, or foreigners. There’s the dislike — visceral for more than a few — of Hillary Clinton. There’s the attack media of talk radio and not so fair-and-balanced TV, which has whipped up the hatred of Clinton for more than 30 years while burying issues under spectacle.

In all of this, there is another powerful driver — Trump’s exploitation of the myth of “American exceptionalism”, embodied in the simple but direct chants at sporting events, “U-S-A, U-S-A” and “We’re Number One”.

That sense of being special, even chosen, has been embedded in American culture ever sine the earliest white settlers declared “a city on a hill” in the 1620s. It has been fed by America’s dominant position in world affairs since World War II.

But the exceptional is now in troubled times. The US is no longer a superpower astride the globe, a fall from pre-eminence depicted by the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while the US economy and technology are still among the world’s leaders, the promotion of the American Dream has been dented — not just by “globalisation” and the bursting of the financial bubble in 2008, but by previous decades of increasing income disparity and tensions over social programs.

Donald Trump may have shown little grasp of the complexities of these changes. But in four thunderous if vague words — Make America Great Again — he grabbed the heart of the troubled myth and make it his own.

Exposing the Myth

The “American exceptional” is not the refuge of the naive and uneducated. Far from it: the myth has been embraced and promoted as reality by many of America’s most prominent intellectuals, academics, and pundits as well as politicians. Its reassuring light glows across the political spectrum, from the most strident of neo-conservatives to the most caring of liberals.

In the 1991 moment when the Soviet Union finally gave way, a former State Department official named Francis Fukuyama declared that the US and “liberal democracy” were triumphant at the “End of History”. The neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed a “Unipolar Moment”: “The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.” At war with Iraq as the USSR crumbled, President George H. W. Bush hailed American leadership of a “new world order”.

Both analysis and rhetoric were quickly exposed in a world where history had not ended. The Balkans entered a series of conflicts from Croatia to Bosnia to Kosovo. The mightiest in the US military were confronted by angry militias in Somalia, men waving sticks and machetes in Haiti. The Clinton Administration struggled with Rwanda, where it walked away, and with Iraq, where it occasionally bombed Baghdad in the name of “dual containment” of both Saddam Hussein and neighboring Iran.

But the myth was not going to be aside by such complications. President Bill Clinton looked a new American Millennium: “No nation in history has had the opportunity and the responsibility we now have to shape a world that is more peaceful, more secure, more free.”

When 9-11 struck at the core of America, another President Bush maintained, “We have known freedom’s price. We have shown freedom’s power. In this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory.”

And Bush’s intellectual and political opponents shared the exceptional vision, even if they disagreed with the 2003 Iraq War. “Soft power” was coined for an America which could persuade others to do what Washington wanted — its creator, Joseph Nye, enshrined both the attraction and duty of exceptionalism in his book title, “Bound to Lead”. When soft power was not enough, it became “smart power”, with Nye and other intellectuals bringing back military options to accompany the gentler side of the exceptional.

If only the world had stuck to the script. But it hasn’t, whether that be a China which is not necessarily satisfied with being bound to follow, an expanding European Union which is trying to establish its political and economic place, a Middle East with not only the ongoing Israel-Palestine issue but also the changes and conflicts after the “Arab Spring”, Vladimir Putin’s Russia seeking to re-establish its own “smart power” not only close to home but in distant locations like Syria. Meanwhile, the War on Terror goes on and on, whether the foe is a post-Bin Laden Al Qa’eda or the upstart Islamic State.

And as “We’re Number One” does not necessarily resonate abroad, so it can ring hollow at home. The changing American economy — it is the pattern of high-tech industry versus older manufacturing sectors, not international trade, that is responsible for much of the shift — the long-term gap in incomes and opportunities, and the long path out of the recession besieges the myth with frustration and anger.

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Enter The Donald

Those who had hailed the triumph of exceptionalism fretted over that frustration and anger, recasting their bewilderment at the loss of US primacy as the “decline of liberal international order”.

But one man saw opportunity. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric may have been fumbling, deceitful, and even incoherent at times. However, either from shrewd political sense or an uncanny ability to reframe his audience’s mood, Trump succeed with the simple formula of the demagogue.

1. Blame others for the American loss. The Mexicans sending their rapists and drug dealers. The Chinese “ripping us off”. Scheming foreigners screwing over the US in trade deals. “New illegal immigrant families”. Muslims. Terrorists. Inner-city criminals.

2. Denounce “The Establishment” — even if Trump has been a prominent member of the US business establishment — and the “rigged system” With its “corporate spin, carefully-crafted lies, and media myths”.

3. Promise his personal salvation to Make America Great Again:

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.

Clinging to the Myth

Those who promoted American exceptionalism have looked upon Trump’s seizing of it with horror. Charles Krauthammer saw “an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied”. Francis Fukuyama bemoaned “the hollowing of the middle class in combination with both Republican and Democrats’ failure to establish a social safety net”. Joseph Nye assessed, “One should be alarmed about Trump’s attitudes.”

Yet none of them considered that Trump might be a symptom, rather than a cause, of the problem. To the contrary, rather than reconsidering the persistent myth — from triumphalism to the shock of decline and loss — they doubled down on their investment.

Before the election, Nye blithely assured, “I try to assess the evidence for whether America is in decline or whether American preeminence is likely to vanish in the next two or three decades. And all the evidence suggests the answer to that is no.” After it, Fukuyama saw the Trumpian threat as one to the “hegemonic power of the US” and “an era in which America symbolised democracy itself”.

The thought of setting aside the exceptional — that values are values, whether they come from America or another country, from an “American” or someone who does not hold a US passport — does not occur. The possibility that the “hegemonic” of a US “Bound to Lead” might be replaced with an engagement in which Americans could follow the political, economic, or social ideas of another does not arise.

And so the trap door opens. Anchored to a world in which the US and no other must be the beacon, exceptionalism’s proponents are now bound — when exceptionalism goes wrong — to the self-proclaimed saviour of Make America Great Again. They have no way out, even if the prospect is that the saviour’s “exceptional” will be the dragging down of America and the rest of us into an uncertainty and division with no foreseeable limit.