On February 18, 2015, in a fundraiser for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walter, former Mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani joined the parade of accusers in American politics – accusing President Obama of not loving this country. He was the latest exemplar of politics-as-accusation, by which politicians and polemicists attack another politician, even a President, for being anti-colonialist or having an anti-colonialist agenda; for not believing in American exceptionalism; and for hating America. But what do these accusations mean? They seem to claim some link with American history and culture to give them meaning, but what is that connection?

Let’s start with anti-colonialism. We have long had to endure charges, by such people as the journalist, film-maker, and polemicist Dinesh D’Souza and the former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, that President Obama seeks to advance an anti-colonialist agenda, or is anti-colonialist. The writers in question link these accusations with the history of British colonial rule in Africa following World War II, suggesting that President Obama is a radical black socialist like some of those Africans who sought to control their own nations after 1945. They fail to note that such American politicians as Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman brought pressure on such allies as Britain and France to grant independence to their African colonies. That is, they advocated anti-colonialism. More curious, the President’s attackers also seem to forget that the first successful anti-colonial movement in world history was led by such radicals as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and other eighteenth-century Americans, who in other contexts are celebrated by these writers and their allies as the Founding Fathers. If they venerate the Founding Fathers without recognizing the anti-colonialism at the heart of their politics and of the Declaration of Independence, how seriously should we take this charge of anti-colonialism?

What of American exceptionalism? Most scholars trace the origin of that term either to the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” (Turner cited the nation’s possession of a frontier for most of its history as the factor differentiating America from other nations and peoples) or to Marxist polemicists, who sought to figure out why socialism never established itself as a going concern in American politics, concluding that some exceptional feature of the American character or American history prevented socialism from taking root here.

But there are two much earlier precedents for American exceptionalism, though they didn’t use the specific term. One precedent is the line of thought associated with Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who identified an inherent exceptionalism characteristic of the American people. Americans were somehow naturally better than people in the rest of the world, Paine and Jefferson suggested, because they were free of the influence of old European institutions and practices such as feudalism. In this, Paine and Jefferson echoed the German philosopher and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who congratulated America for not being haunted by old ghosts.

The other version is associated with John Adams, who voiced it in his 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government. Adams wrote not of an inherent exceptionalism of the American people, but rather of an exceptionalism of opportunity for Americans, who had a chance in 1776 to frame wise forms of government. Adams insisted, however, that aside from this opportunity, Americans were no different from any other human beings on the face of the globe, past, present, or future. For him, human nature was human nature, and he worried that Americans might replicate the mistakes of other nations and other peoples if they were not careful to study history and remember that they were neither unique nor uniquely different from the rest of humanity. ...