Our collective capacity for misremembering (or altogether forgetting) inconvenient facts is bottomless—and plays a crucial role in sustaining American Exceptionalism. Available yet inert, such inconvenient facts may attract occasional notice and from time to time even cause twinges of remorse. (Who can feel good about the fate that Native Americans suffered at the hands of the U.S. government?) Soon enough, however, such facts get filed away under the heading of “not especially relevant,” and the myth of Americans as God’s new Chosen People survives with hardly a scratch. In the final
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