It's true that America's governing class sincerely believes in American exceptionalism but as far as I can tell from surveys so do the vast majority of the American people.
I will not vouch for the political typology here ("progressive activists" etc) but the basic demographic data seems sound and there are very high levels of "proud to be American" across racial groups, with skepticism concentrated among the very young.
So I think if you want to know why politicians invoke patriotic tropes ("this is not who we are...") to express their ideas, you don't necessarily need a bigger explanation.
ONE BILLION AMERICANS is in fact a good idea.
I've been interested to learn how many people's attitudes toward openness to immigration + more robust welfare state will flip if given a patriotic frame.
This week’s free post — policymaking for a low trust world:
Rather than getting tied down in an endless cycle of process, targeting, and compliance checks you need simple, crude ideas that clearly do what they say they do.
The Bad Place is programs like PPP that work through complicated and indirect mechanisms, or “trust before streets” concepts that try to address trust deficits with new layers of process that only degrade performance.
Because I'm obsessed with housing policy, I've increasingly seen this through a housing lens.
People who live one block west of me are zoned into Ross Elementary rather than Garrison Elementary. And Ross feeds to School Without Walls for middle school rather than Cardozo.
Ross and especially SWW are seen as "better" than Garrison or Cardozo.
And in DC elementary schools that feed into Wilson High School and especially the sub-set of them that feed into Deal Middle School are seen as particularly desirable.
Republicans have become a dangerously unhinged group with a rising Q Anon caucus and an ongoing effort to steal the election, but they’ve also surrendered on the major issue disputes of the recent past.
Democrats were disappointed by the election result because they want to govern; Republicans have dropped their ambitions and are happy to settle for gridlock.
This is a good example — a rising star in the GOP caucus is defined not by any noteworthy policy ideas, but by her embrace or conspiracy theories and trolling about her handgun.
The extent to which activists are, in effect, contract employees of grant-making institutions rather than representatives of grassroots constituencies is underrated and journalists tend to be too credulous about it.
I don't think anyone really covers the "foundation beat."
For example, if philanthropists choose to create Climate Justice groups who are skeptical of CCS technology on racial equity grounds they can (and in fact have) done that.
But they could have chosen to create CJ groups with the opposite view.
Basically the funders decide how they think issue positions should relate to one another (perhaps covertly influences by take-slingers, per @ProfHansNoel's work) and then they conjure up groups that reflect that alignment.