What has gone for good is the unspeakably pompous myth of American exceptionalism, which was tolerable so long as it merely consisted of Americans celebrating the idea that they were a land of meritocratic opportunity, where optimism was justified and self-regenerating, and where people came to flee feudalism, despotism, and ethnic conflict. It became rather less tolerable when it glossed over the evil and hypocrisy of racial problems, exulted in the vulgarity of what was, at least culturally, an excessively pecuniary society, and the vulgarity of an inordinate amount of popular culture.
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