In recent years, however, a resurgent left fueled by an influx of Millennial voters has launched a new challenge to exceptionalist discourse. Partly, it’s because a higher percentage of Millennials are people of color, who generally look more skeptically on America’s claims of moral innocence. Partly, it’s because the financial crisis has cast doubt on whether America’s economic model is preferable to those practiced in other nations. Younger Americans—a majority of whom embrace “socialism”—believe it’s not. Most of all, the challenge to exceptionalism is a response to Trump.

The generational divide is evident in polls. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.” Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better. A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives. While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one.

These numbers help explain why left-leaning politicians and commentators up and down the age spectrum have grown more willing to challenge the linguistic conventions that traditionally reserved certain epithets for America’s adversaries. A few years ago, commentators rarely evoked the specter of American “authoritarianism.” Now it’s commonplace. Books such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here hit the best-seller lists after Trump’s election. Anti-Trump activists began calling themselves “the Resistance,” a term that, by evoking the French or Polish Resistance to Nazism, implies opposition to a tyrannical regime in the United States.

With his embrace of foreign authoritarians and his cultivation of conservatism’s xenophobic and racist fringes, Trump has become a galvanizing figure for the left, which for the first time since the 1960s has begun regularly evoking the specter of American “fascism.” Ocasio-Cortez refers to Trump’s “fascist presidency.” In a video last year, Bernie Sanders quoted a scholar who accused Trump of “flirting with fascism in the open, in broad daylight.” This week, the former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes described parts of Trump’s kickoff reelection speech as “indistinguishable from fascist rhetoric.”

The new prominence of the “antifa” movement also testifies to this linguistic shift. The term—which is shorthand for “antifascist activists”—comes from Europe, where communists and anarchists waged street battles against fascists in the 1930s, and against neo-Nazi skinheads in the 1970s and 1980s. But when anti-skinhead activists began Americanizing the movement in the 1980s, many adapted the term: “antiracist action.” Fascism didn’t seem like an American problem. That’s no longer the case. Leftist street activists now embrace the term antifa, and the movement has grown dramatically under Trump.