Or, as Hofstadter puts it:
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
... for a more sober examination of the phenomenon that Wretchard seems to represent, see this Brian Urquhart review of Anatol Lieven's book on American nationalism. For instance:
After setting out what he calls the "American Creed," Lieven examines the historical roots of its antithesis, a "wounded and vengeful nationalism." Irrational hatred, even fear, of the outside world, combined with an obsessive belief in the treachery of American "elites" and intellectuals, is not only destructive at home; it also demeans the traditional idea of a people with a special mission to help other nations that has been variously described over the years by many leaders and thinkers. For one example, Lieven quotes Woodrow Wilson, speaking at the end of World War I: "America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world." Ironically, it has taken Nature itself, in the Asian tsunami disaster, to show us once again that only the United States has the will and the resources—ships bearing helicopters and a worldwide logistics network—to respond immediately to such a vast emergency. Can this terrible experience help revive the reputation of Americans as a people with a compassionate mission in the world?
The missionary idea is further distorted, Lieven argues, by the Manichaean notion, frequently invoked since September 11, of the struggle between Good—America and those who unreservedly agree with it—and Evil. "Wherever we carry it," George W. Bush told the graduating cadets at West Point in June 2002, "the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom." Such rhetoric has not only fueled self-righteous and nationalist extremism; it has also distracted the United States from the basic measures needed for a successful campaign against Islamic terrorism, including the serious pursuit of peace in the Middle East; and it has badly strained relations with the outside world. "If we have any sense at all of history," Lieven writes, "we should know that our system does not represent the 'end of history,' is not divinely ordained, and will not last forever."
In a chapter entitled "The Embittered Heartland," Lieven examines the paradox that while much of the world sees the modern history of America as "an almost uninterrupted chronicle of success" (Senator William Fulbright's words), very large groups inside the country itself do not see anything of the kind. Their sense of inherited defeat and humiliation not only poisons domestic politics but is also an important ingredient in America's particular form of radical nationalism. Lieven identifies an original source of this feeling in the fear on the part of the first, fundamentalist Protestant, Anglo-Saxon core of settlers that it was losing its control of politics and culture to more recent immigrant groups, "cosmopolitan elites," and the like.