When President Donald Trump's old-guard Republican critics lament what he has done to American conservatism, they often complain specifically about the abandonment of the idea of American exceptionalism. Once Republicans were optimists about their country; under Mr Trump they see only "American carnage" and decay. Once Mr Ronald Reagan and Mr George W. Bush believed in America as the leader of the free world, the shining city on a hill; under Mr Trump, the Republican view of the American position in the world is dark, nasty, zero-sum.

In a speech this week in Washington, at a conference organised to give form and substance to conservatism's nationalist and populist turn, the Trump-supporting Silicon Valley heretic Peter Thiel essentially took ownership of that accusation. An uncritical faith in American exceptionalism, he suggested (according to notes taken by attendee Bonnie Kavoussi), often licensed pre-Trump conservatives to ignore their country's mounting problems in their own country, the ways in which we were becoming "exceptional in bad ways" - from our obesity rate to our opioid epidemic, from our decaying infrastructure to our unjustified narcissism.