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American exceptionalism is a double-edged sword, often taking the form of a cultural predisposition to promote universal values to the world, but also taking a form of exempting the United States from scrutiny regarding living by those values itself. As 46.1 percent of the American public voted for the latter version of American exceptionalism in 2016, this essay examines several areas of that self-exemption, including treaties the United States fails to sign or ratify, trade policies, trafficking in persons policy, torture in counterterrorism policy, targeting Muslims indiscriminately in drone strikes and screening refugees, transparency lacking in campaign finance, trust in institutions, and the style of populism emergent in the 2016 election. There are prospects for renewal when such a gap emerges between ideas and institutions, based on earlier cycles in American history. U.S. legitimacy as a powerful catalyst for a world order favoring human dignity depends on being an exemplar.

One irony of the Obama presidency is how much it relies on hard power. The president came into office proposing a dramatic shift from George W. Bush's perceived unilateralism, and most of his predecessor's hard-edged counterterrorism tactics and massive deployments in wars abroad. Yet after three years, Obama has escalated forces in Afghanistan, embraced the widespread use of unmanned drones to kill terrorists at the risk of civilian casualties, kept Guantanamo open, and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in a thoroughly unilateral fashion. Adapted from the source document.