1st paragraph

Cultural Exceptionalism is the claim that a particular people or nation possesses an especially distinctive cultural identity or unique historical destiny. In the most trivial sense, all cultures are different from one another, and hence exceptionalism might be merely a default position. (The idea of culture itself, in fact, might be exceptionalist in this broader sense.) True exceptionalism, however, entails a somewhat stronger set of claims, fraught with value judgments and articulated through a characteristically literary discourse.