Politics & Power Quote by Robert MacNeil

MacNeil’s line is the kind of polite critique that lands like a thumbtack: small, sharp, hard to ignore once you’ve sat down. He frames skepticism as “a little infection,” a clever reversal of the old nationalist habit of treating doubt as a moral failing. Here, the “disease” isn’t cynicism for sport; it’s the mild fever you get from watching a country narrate itself too loudly.

The intent is to question not America’s achievements but America’s marketing. “That America can’t be quite as good as it says it is” targets the gap between self-description and lived reality, the difference between a brand and a place. The second question does the real work: why the relentless repetition? MacNeil is suggesting that compulsive self-praise functions less as confidence than as anxiety management. Nations that feel secure tend not to rehearse their virtue; they demonstrate it, then move on.

Context matters: MacNeil is an outsider-insider, a journalist who covered American power at close range (and for American audiences) while keeping a foreign correspondent’s reflex for spotting overstatement. His skepticism is described as something shared by “America’s closest friends,” which turns the critique into a diplomatic warning: allies aren’t impressed by slogans; they’re alarmed by the need for them. The subtext is about legitimacy in the postwar, Cold War, and post-Vietnam era, when American exceptionalism became both a geopolitical argument and a domestic balm. If you have to keep announcing greatness, you’re already negotiating with doubt.