It looks like Charles wasn't brought up like "them" either:
America is a living idea. It isn’t only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America.
Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment
It is worth reading the whole article but these lines sum it up for me.
This if anything at all can hint towards "exceptionalism", its not a status of being, it is a dream of what can be.
Exceptionalism is not an excuse for what has been done, but a driving force to what can be done to improve. Too often the right use it as a cover all excuse "if we do it, it cannot be wrong". This is why conservatism can never be exceptional, it preserves and refuses progression. Conservatism is a a dream of a Golden Age that never was.
Only by accepting what is wrong, admitting it and changing it, can any hope of exceptionalism be claimed. One cannot hide behind patriotism, nationalism and "love of country" to deny wrongdoing.
As the Pew Research Center pointed out in July, “the view that the U.S. is exceptional — standing above all other countries in the world — has declined 10 points since 2011.” At that time last year, 58 percent of Americans believed America is “one of the greatest countries in the world, along with others,” while only 28 percent believed America “stands above all other countries in the world.”
I would say this is because we fail to progress, fail to include and injustice is far too easy to behold. When the right work tirelessly to uphold inequality, promote discrimination, and so the seeds of hate this cannot be deemed to be progress, in fact it is trying to roll back society into some mythical nonexistent past. It is a dream of the past that never was, not an idea of the future. The real past was far from exceptional, slavery, civil war, inequality, discrimination and restricted voting rights to name a few.
When the right belittle women, people of color, other faiths, and nations this is anything but being exceptional it is falling back into failed ideology of the past. When the right deny voting rights due to fears of non existent voter fraud this is a fraud in itself so as to hide darker reasoning.
You cannot just claim exceptionalism, you have to prove it day after day. When the US becomes a truly equal society, when the weak are protected, when all have equal opportunities, when race, gender and sexuality become a non issue, then such a claim might have meaning. Then we are all created equal might resonate.
Just a thought