ECHOES OF EXCEPTIONALISM: How Fresh Eyes Restore the Hope of America

America has always been more than its headlines. This nation stretches between two oceans, with fertile plains, abundant resources, and a continental scale that has allowed generations to build, move, and dream on a scope few societies have known. From these advantages, ordinary citizens created the world’s largest and most dynamic economy and marshaled those forces toward liberty, creating opportunity that has drawn millions from every corner of the earth.

Historically, the United States has lit the torch of liberty for others—standing against tyranny in two world wars, confronting totalitarian ideologies across the twentieth century, and serving as a beacon that made freedom seem possible in places where it had been extinguished.

That is the America that still exists in the lived experience of its citizens and in the testimony of those who come here from abroad.

Yet a persistent and well-funded narrative now insists that at least half of this country represents an existential threat to the freedoms it has defended for a quarter millennium.

Inside the institutions where I once worked—as a legislator and later as attorney general—the daily work was substantive, technical, and consequential. We debated real statutes, weighed real trade-offs, and confronted real human costs. But once those same debates passed through the prevailing media and activist filter, they emerged as something unrecognizable, stripped of nuance and engineered for outrage.

In the 16 years since I’ve held public office, this media-curated perversion of reality has only grown stronger. The prevailing narrative is that one half of America is dangerous, backward, or actively hostile to liberty itself.

The result is a sustained effort to convince Americans that the greatest threat they face is one another. We are witnessing the convergence of three corrosive forces: the clickbait economics that convert outrage into wealth, the hollow political rhetoric that converts fear and false hope into political power, and the quiet manipulations of foreign adversaries who understand that a divided America is a weakened America.

Technology has amplified these forces to the point that Americans are drenched in the noise from their first waking moments. It tempts us to fix our eyes on threats shouted from the screens rather than on the blessings woven into our daily lives. This is unhealthy and destructive—unhealthy to our personal relationships and destructive to the community.

Much of the division that now dominates public life is no longer spontaneous. It is funded, curated, and amplified by networks whose incentives reward grievance and whose influence rarely faces serious scrutiny.

These actors convert every controversy into leverage, manufacture pressure where none existed, and treat ordinary citizens as raw material for political mobilization. The media, optimized for speed and emotional heat, rarely pauses to ask who benefits from the outrage it transmits.

The question we face is this: Will we continue to let these forces shape how we see ourselves, our neighbors, and the country we actually inhabit, or will we be willing to step into what is real and reestablish community?

One recent inspiration to rediscover what makes America exceptional has come from a surprising source—our visitors from overseas. Something unexpected is emerging as millions of soccer fans have arrived for the World Cup and have begun sharing their unfiltered encounters with ordinary American life.

What they describe is not the America of constant crisis and existential threat, but a country of small generosities and everyday abundance: strangers who still pay for a meal, towns that welcome outsiders like family, police officers who offer directions with uncomplicated kindness, and grocery aisles that still feel like plenty rather than scarcity.

Their impressions, shared in real time across languages and continents, form a distributed witness that contradicts the dominant narrative of the United States as a decaying empire.

I have witnessed through my daughter’s leadership in local government how a very small number of individuals—often funded by outside interests and leveraging the willingness of some elected leaders to engage in self-focused, performative victimhood—can manufacture the appearance of chaos inside local leadership. Their theatrics can consume attention, distort reality, and overshadow the steady, substantive work of those who actually provide leadership.

Because these performances generate conflict, they are amplified far beyond their true significance. And this is precisely why we cannot rely on media narratives or assume that the loudest voice is the truest one. Healthy communities require personal engagement—judging our local leaders based on lived experience rather than curated outrage.

I felt this contrast in my own life more sharply than I expected. As I watched the posts of visitors celebrating American life with gratitude, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. They revealed an America I feared we had lost, but that was, in truth, still alive all around me.

Years of political engagement and the impact of cancel culture on me and my family had narrowed my vision, training me to see the country through conflict and comparison. The fresh eyes of our visitors reminded me of blessings I had stopped noticing. The difference between narrative and reality became unmistakable.

It was like watching news footage of a protest—tight shots of anger, profanity, confrontation—only to later watch a clip from someone standing on a nearby rooftop showing that the entire scene was ten people shouting at two patient police officers. Encouraging, because it exposed how manufactured the crisis was; sobering, because it revealed how easily a slanted frame can shape our thinking.

Our national blessings are so abundant that America’s greatest strength is that we get what we want. Our greatest weakness, however, is that we get what we want.

We must want something different if we are going to get something different.

Reject the outrage.

Do not settle for observation at a distance. Enter the life of your community. Let your judgments be formed slowly, through the patient work of reading, listening, and encountering others face-to-face. Resist the temptation to absorb whatever is mediated to you. Test everything against the truth you discover in real relationships. And discipline yourself to turn off the noise, choosing instead the blessings of presence—the neighbors across the table, not the outrage icon glowing on a screen.

This is the vigilance our founders expected of a free people.

In this 250th celebration season, step out of the cynicism, receive the blessings of liberty, and witness these blessings through the eyes of those visiting America. 

Spend time with those who have come from elsewhere. Listen to what they actually saw and felt—the kindness at a Waffle House counter at two in the morning, the welcome in a small town that asked for nothing in return, the ordinary decency and generosity that no algorithm or grant funded. Their fresh eyes can help us recover what we may have stopped noticing in our own land. Let their testimony remind you that the America they met is still here, still real, and still worth living in.

Then lift a prayer of thanks. Practice gratitude for this nation—for the land that has sustained us, for the liberty that has been secured and defended, and for every man and woman who sacrificed on distant battlefields, in quiet legislative chambers, and in the daily faithfulness of ordinary citizenship to hand us this great inheritance.

And then—celebrate!

Celebrate the America that visitors are discovering for themselves—an America still generous, still hopeful, still exceptional, and still great.

Phill Kline is a former state legislator and the former Attorney General of Kansas. He is currently a law professor.