Opinion | Is America a City on a Hill or a Nation on the Precipice?

If America were a painting, it would almost certainly be a self-portrait.

Ours is a nation obsessed with depicting and interpreting itself, usually with the boldest of brushstrokes. We’ve claimed an American way, an American creed, an American idea, an American experiment, an American dream, even an American century. Our political battles do not center only on who is right or wrong but on whose positions best reflect the nation’s professed values. “That’s not who we are” is our harshest burn.

In our most back-patting moments, that self-portrait has a one-word caption: exceptional. We tell ourselves that we are the world’s last and best hope, unique among nations, chosen by God, exempt from history, on a mission befitting a “shining city upon a hill,” as Ronald Reagan put it in his 1989 Oval Office farewell.

Now is not a back-patting moment. Americans’ confidence in vital government institutions — the military, the judiciary, the electoral system — ranks lowest among the world’s rich nations, and satisfaction with the way our democracy is working is the weakest it has been in the four decades Gallup has tracked it. The coming presidential election feels more existential than exceptional, as did the one before it and the one before that. No wonder Americans alternate between hailing our ideals and deploring how we fail to live up to them or denouncing those ideals for not delivering the exceptional nation we desire.

But the reality or falsity of American exceptionalism is not a measurable, observable or unambiguous fact, no matter how confidently or derisively we invoke the term or how brightly Reagan’s metaphor still glitters. To claim American exceptionalism is to assert a political or cultural belief and to engage in an endless argument, one which our political leaders are compelled to join — whether extolling the city that is, pining for one that was or imagining the one yet to be.

In late 2016, during his final weeks as vice president, Joe Biden decried the coarse presidential campaign the nation had just witnessed. “So much for the shining city on the hill,” he said. Yet on Friday, the day after his painful debate performance, Biden called the United States “the finest and most unique nation in the world,” the only one built not on ethnicity, geography or religion but on the ideal of human equality. Donald Trump, for his part, has gone from praising American exceptionalism (“really a great term”) to dismissing it (“I don’t like the term, I’ll be honest with you”) to hailing it again (“America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world”) to claiming during the debate that, under Biden, “we’ve become like a third world nation, and it’s a shame.” His version of American exceptionalism is about beating the world, not leading it.

President Barack Obama told the graduates of West Point in 2014 that he believed in the nation’s exceptionalism “with every fiber of my being” and has lauded American values, including free speech and equality, “that, though imperfect, are exceptional.” His exceptionalism is more self-critical, regarding the American story as a struggle to live up to the truths of the Declaration of Independence, truths that may be self-evident but are hardly self-fulfilling.