On the nation’s 250th anniversary, the mayor of the country’s largest city sat at a desk once used by George Washington and told Americans what was wrong with American exceptionalism.

The story of this country, he said, has too often been written by people told they did not belong. Its achievements were really won by the excluded, in spite of America. Dissent, not gratitude, he intoned, is the truest form of patriotism.

It was a deceptive speech, and it deserves a response grounded in facts because the argument now runs well beyond one mayor. A rising movement has made the critique of exceptionalism something close to a creed. And it rests on a lie so foundational that, once revealed, the falsehood collapses.

The lie is this: that American exceptionalism means Americans are exceptional people. Better, wiser, and more virtuous than everyone else. Their evidence? Slavery and massacres and broken promises presented as though they settle the matter. But that was never the claim.

American exceptionalism has never been a boast about us, but rather our founding framework: a particular arrangement of government that locates rights not in the state but above it, divides power so no faction can control it, places the citizen above the government and produces results no other arrangement in history has matched.

The record isn’t even close.

Consider what a self-governing people left free to build actually built. A nation of farmers and tradesmen, within a century and a half, built the most productive economy the world had ever seen. The airplane and the assembly line. The polio vaccine and the transistor. The splitting of the atom and the footprints on the moon. The device you’re reading this on was, in its origins, American. None of it was decreed by a bureaucrat. It welled up from below, from people permitted to keep what they made and free to imagine what did not yet exist. That is not national character. It is what liberty does. Invention is what free minds produce when no one is permitted to forbid them.

Consider what the system did when liberty itself was threatened. Twice in a century, Americans crossed an ocean to defend a principle and people most of them had never met. When the darkest of those wars was won, the United States did what no conqueror had done before. It did not plunder the defeated. It rebuilt them. The Marshall Plan poured one-twentieth of the American economy into the recovery of Western Europe, most of it in grants never meant to be repaid, with much of it rebuilding the very nations we and our allies defeated. A defeated enemy became, at enormous expense, a free and prosperous friend.

Name the other empire that has done it. You can’t because there isn’t one.

At this point, the critics will pull what they think is their strongest claim. But even that is America’s strongest defense. Yes, our founders wrote equality into the Declaration of Independence and then left millions enslaved. But here is what the critics choose to omit: The Declaration’s words were not confined to the men who wrote them. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights marchers of a later century all reached for the same self-evident truths and held the country to its own promise until the promise began, haltingly and at great cost, to be kept.

That is the point the critics avoid. No other society wrote into its own foundation the standard by which its failures could be judged and corrected. When the mayor says the American story was written by people told they did not belong, he means it as an indictment. But those people prevailed because the American creed gave them the ground to stand on. They did not overcome our founders’ principles; they invoked them. A nation whose ideals are used to reform it is not one whose ideals have failed but one whose ideals are working as intended.

One more thing the critics dismiss: For 2,000 years after Rome fell, the word “republic” named something that was tried and failed. A handful of men in Philadelphia made it relevant again. The free nations that now cover much of the earth are, nearly all of them, rooted in what our founders made. The American experiment did not just free Americans. It opened for all of humanity an opportunity that history had closed, and our founders knew at the time that what they were doing was for the cause of all mankind.

None of this asks anyone to pretend the country is without sin or failings. The men were no angels and made allowances for the “crooked timber of humanity.” America’s failures are the failures of human beings. Its achievements are those of a system that remains, after 250 years, the most successful attempt at human freedom the world has produced.

Which is why the critics’ last sleight of hand is the one worth highlighting. They insist real patriotism is dissent, and against it they set a straw man: the jingoist bellowing, “My country, right or wrong.” But most Americans feel neither. What they feel is quieter and more durable: an instinctive patriotism, the unbidden love a person feels for family. Such love of country does not require that it be flawless any more than love of a parent requires perfection. It sees the failings and loves anyway because it grasps what a rare and fragile inheritance has been handed down.

Benjamin Franklin famously said the Founders had given Americans “a republic, if you can keep it.” The keeping has never depended on believing we are better than others. It depends on understanding what we were given, defending it, and refusing to let those who do not love this country rewrite the history the rest of us have every reason to be proud of.