Why do Americans believe they are exceptional?

Trumpism is not “a fundamental departure from traditional ‘American values,’” Ajamu Baraka writes in the Foreword to American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. Trumpism is, to the contrary, “the unfiltered contemporary and particular expression of the core values that the nation was ‘founded’ on.” This book, Baraka says, concludes “that U.S. society in its present form poses an existential threat to global humanity.”

In this ambitious, wide-reaching book, co-authors Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong don’t examine whether the US is exceptional or innocent, but they ask how we put effort into turning these ideologies into “common sense” that restricts us from imagining otherwise.

The myths of American exceptionalism and American innocence are tools of white supremacy.

Exceptionalism is the notion that the United States has superior values. These values include militarism, imperialist and capitalist rule, and American Dream-esque meritocracy. Exceptionalism works as “a mythology of convenience,” as the authors quote Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. It reconciles what people say they believe with the reality of the world they inhabit. The “ruling elites” in the USA are seen as drawing their…