As it happens, the question of whether to evict Trump from office, with its apparently foreordained answer, finds both sides in a sullen, recriminatory mood, hardly a triumphal one. No one is feeling especially special.

Partisans on either side of the Trump question would be hard-pressed to invoke impeachment to make a case to other countries—as Americans historically have been prone to do—about the superiority of our system and the infection-prone political culture that surrounds it.

But let’s give it a try: Discordant as it may seem, this is a fine moment—just as the old jalopy seems to be sputtering—for a revival of American exceptionalism as an idea at the center of national and even global politics.

Specifically, the trial and election that will follow it this fall represent a vivid opportunity for progressives to stake a claim on American exceptionalism. This would be a turnabout from the past generation, in which exceptionalism was a stick for conservatives to use against people who allegedly do not believe in it.

Liberals are not likely ever to embrace a brand of American exceptionalism of the sort espoused by Ronald Reagan, one based on the conviction that a higher power favors the United States. “I have always believed,” he said in 1982, “that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom.”

But there are other, more secular strains of American exceptionalism, and they are fast becoming more relevant. The question of the age is how to hold concentrated power accountable to rule of law and to the public interest. Democrats see Trump’s defiance of the House majority during the impeachment inquiry as the most immediate front in this campaign. But the same question echoes on multiple fronts: The implacable rise of authoritarian governments around the world and the problem of bringing to heel technology with unprecedented capacity for surveillance and manipulation.

These problems summon a different kind of American exceptionalism, rooted not in faith but in the historical record. The United States from its first days saw itself with a special responsibility. It required the efforts of exemplary citizens, not divine intercession, to transcend despotism and corruption of the old world. “Commerce, luxury, and avarice have destroyed every republican government,” John Adams told his friend Benjamin Rush in 1808 after leaving the presidency. “We mortals cannot work miracles; we struggle in vain against ... the course of nature.”

That is a pessimism that echoes in the sulfurous climate of 2020, in which one doesn’t sense leaders of either party feeling exuberant about their circumstances.

Trump defenders see a president who promised to "Make America Great Again"—the very slogan, with its forlorn “again,” highlighting the fragile nature of exceptionalism—and for his efforts is being harassed on flimsy charges by agents of national decline.

The Democrats who say Trump must go, but know he likely won’t go as a result of this trial, have had their confidence in the basic foundations of governance shaken in even more fundamental ways. First, he wins the office in fluky circumstances without majority support. Than he brazenly tightens his grip so that Republicans in an ostensibly separate branch of government are forced to tolerate or even celebrate his abuses of power. As the opposition sees it, the muscles of accountability and institutional responsibility on which constitutional democracy depends are severed.

Repairing these muscles is not likely the work of the next two weeks, the expected length of Trump’s trial. But the long-term effort of reviving faith, among liberals and conservatives alike, that politics is on the level and that the country is not facing decline would be aided by a creative and credible brand of exceptionalism.

Democrats are understandably wary of an idea that historically has been an effective weapon. In 1988, George H.W. Bush used his Republican nomination speech to say that Democrat Michael Dukakis did not believe in exceptionalism and instead saw the United States “as another pleasant country on the U.N. rollcall, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.”

And, in truth, Democrats are allergic to notions of exceptionalism that invite jingoism. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Barack Obama said in his first year in office, “just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

What Obama and liberals reject, however, is a brand of exceptionalism that implies America can do as it likes. What needs rediscovery is that brand that believes that national pride can be infused with humility.