I like the Thiel-Dougherty case for being skeptical of exceptionalism because it fits with the arc of conservative debates before and after the rise of Donald Trump. The modern conservative movement — at its most idealistic, at least — was organized to defend genuinely distinctive features of American life: our unique mix of commercial dynamism, religious zeal, communitarian affections and decentralist suspicion of the state. But in the post-Cold War dispensation this defense became rote and unconvincing, because even as they chest-thumped about their own patriotism and the perfidy of liberalism, conservative politicians didn’t seem to be actually cultivating or sustaining the things their ideology claimed to be defending.

This tendency culminated in an Obama-era conservatism that decided that anyone unhappy with Republican governance was just an ingrate who didn’t deserve the American experiment: You were a socialist if you doubted the perfection of our health care system, part of the mooching “47 percent” if you didn’t think a capital-gains tax cut would solve the working-class’s social crisis, an appeaser if you doubted the wisdom of a maximally hawkish foreign policy.

Whereas the conscious un-exceptionalism of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, his willingness to poor-mouth America, to bemoan the ways we’ve lost ground to our competitors, to promise to restore lost greatness and blame both parties for decline — all of this was actually much more suited than the Romney-Ryan message to the actual socioeconomic conditions faced by many Americans. And in the shadow of that Trumpian un-exceptionalism a far more interesting debate about what ails America has opened up on the right, one that acknowledges more of the failures that exceptionalism encouraged (misguided military adventures, above all), and the problems of stratification, stagnation and social breakdown that it often overlooked.

But — and you know there’s a but — none of the people having this lively debate are the president of the United States. And in the president himself you can see how nationalism-in-power, instead of correcting exceptionalism as Thiel suggests, can simply become a cruder, more exclusionary version of the “everything is awesome” mentality that inspires its irritation in the first place.

This happens in two ways. First, once nationalists control the government, they feel tempted to insist that they have succeeded in restoring greatness long before any restoration is accomplished. In Trump’s case this temptation is a compulsion: In a little over two years we have gone from “American carnage” to yesterday’s tweeted proclamation that America “has never been stronger than it is now — rebuilt military, highest stock market ever, lowest unemployment and more people working than ever before. Keep America great!”