Some years ago, John Podhoretz, a right-of-center writer, now the editor of Commentary, admonished his colleagues on the left: ěWe speak liberal as well as our own tongue. Why donít you speak conservative?î
I was put in mind of this quip while reading a recent column by the Washington Postís Richard Cohen. In ěThe Myth of American Exceptionalism,î he boldly posits that the ěproblem of the 21st centuryî is ěthe culture of smugness. The emblem of this culture is ëAmerican exceptionalism.í It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God.î
Cohen provides no evidence that anyone on the right defines exceptionalism as he has. What do those of us who use, defend and advocate exceptionalism mean instead?
Among other things, that America is simply different from other nations. It is a nation of immigrants from every corner of the Earth, a nation bound not by ancestral blood but by revolutionary ideas and beliefs brilliantly articulated more than two centuries ago in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The founding of the United States ushered in the modern democratic experiment, along with new concepts of freedom and human rights. In the 20th century, the Greatest Generation fought for the survival of that experiment against its totalitarian enemies, Nazi, Fascist and communist alike. Today, the challenges posed by Islamic totalitarianism test a new generation.
America has been a uniquely productive nation: a font of invention, creativity and economic dynamism. In America, tens of millions of people have risen from poverty.
But, most of all, exceptionalism implies that the responsibility for global leadership rests on Americaís shoulders. Not because Americans hunger for power but because there is no good alternative.
At the conclusion of World War II, the British rejected Winston Churchill ó without whose vision and determination Hitler might well have triumphed ó and turned inward to focus on building a welfare state. That meant relinquishing global leadership. They could do that because they could pass the torch to America.
If that torch has now become too heavy for Americans, or if it is seen as unfair for America to continue to lead, who is prepared to take Americaís place? Those who rule Iran, China and Russia are no doubt eager. But they are despots, as Cohen ought to appreciate.
There are those on the left known as ětrans-national progressives.î They believe the United Nations and similar organizations should be recognized as a world government to which America will increasingly cede power and sovereignty. To favor that option requires willfully ignoring the corruption, both financial and moral, that infects the U.N. and the extent to which it is manipulated by dictators and such anti-democratic and supremacist blocs as the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
In other words: At present, there is no substitute for American leadership. America is the indispensible nation. That is what makes it exceptional.
Exceptionalists do not deny that America has many faults and that Americans have made many mistakes in the past and are likely to do so in the future. But that doesnít lead us to the Lake Woebegone-all-children-are-above-average view of the world expressed by President Obama two years ago in Europe: ěI believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.î
We exceptionalists look instead to President Reagan, for whom exceptionalism meant that America remained ěthe last best hope for a mankind plagued by tyranny and deprivation.î To keep that hope alive will require efforts ó one might say exceptional efforts ó on the part of Americans. It also will require that pundits such as Richard Cohen try harder to understand what his friends on the right are saying.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and political Islam.