American Exceptionalism

In contemporary parlance, 'American Exceptionalism' usually connotes a superiority that validates unilateral action.  Now, the concept originates with de Tocqueville, in reference to the nation's birth in revolution and its Democratic construction.  However, the popularity of the phrase itself can be traced to its use by the Marxist Lovestone, in the 1920s, to argue that America is immune to the doctrinaire Communist projection of an inevitable internal dissolution, thereby drawing the enmity of Stalinists.  Thus, implicit in the revival of the expression in the 1980s is that the more recent American distinctiveness is the result of the 'defeat' of the Soviet Union due to massive increases in Defense spending,  Hence, as subsequent Foreign policy has often been demonstrating, the phrase now represents shifts in the concept of America--from Liberation to Aggression, and from Democracy to Capitalism.