is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and
vindicator only of her own.
99
Vindicationsim was largely in defeat for the remainder of the century. What
accounts for the turn away from this early nationalist legacy, from example to mission,
almost a century later, beginning in the 1890s? Why did the millennial displace the
exemplarist as the premise of national purpose? Had the founding fathers’ not controlled
a weak, disunited, and consolidating state contending with British and French
imperialism, would they have opted for vindicationism as a democracy promotion
strategy? Is the explanation of variation in American exceptionalism just power,
independent of any ideational changes? My argument, to be made in the following two
sections on Progressivism and neoconservatism, is that this shift can only be explained by
the confluence of a tremendous expansion of material power and subtle but significant
changes in the nationalist ideology of liberal exceptionalism.
99
Quoted in Walter LaFeber, ed., John Quincy Adams and American Continental Empire: Letters, Papers,
and Speeches (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), p. 42. Although by far the most quoted exemplarist
statement in American diplomatic history, it is probably the speech from which Brands coined the term
“vindicationist.”
Convention