Hello, everybody. I'm Kyle Risdahl. Welcome back to make me smart where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And I'm Kimberly Adams. It is Tuesday, November the 19th. And since Donald Trump was reelected, you may have heard people in the news, online, maybe even in your own life, saying something along the lines of,

this is not who we are or this is in America. And that idea is connected to this notion of something called American exceptionalism.

This idea that the United States is in the world uniquely virtuous and kind of

like above certain things that other nations, not us, might have to deal with.

So we are going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about it with Susie Hansen.

She's been a journalist for many, many years. She was a decade or so in Turkey,

and she's written a book that takes a hard look at American exceptionalism. It's called Notes on a

foreign country, an American abroad, and a post-American world. Welcome to the pod, so is you good to

have you on. Thank you so much for having me. So where does this notion of American exceptionalism

come from? I don't know if it started with one particular thinker or one quote,

but I think that it started with the very founding of the country

because it was seen as, of course, the promised land.

And then with the centuries of immigration,

there was a sense that everyone was going to this special nation,

this country of the future.

And that's where we get these ideas.

I mean, a lot of these are also grounded in Christian notions of a shining city on a hill,

the last best hope of earth, these kinds of phrases that we hear people say.

But I think it's also something that evolved over time.

And so I think that by the time we get to the 20th century when the U.S. was victorious after World War II, I think that those notions that we were exceptional or unique in the world became quite hardened and maybe even just the ideology that we all share.

What is it sort of done to us as a country to carry this ideal

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