As the chaos in Missouri has reminded us this past week, the gap between what the United States is supposed to be and what it actually is remains more than large enough to fit a SWAT team or two. But while the always-childish fantasy of a post-racial America is choked by tear gas and pummeled by rubber and wooden bullets, the past few days have also seen the resurgence of another distinguishing aspect of the American character: Our unshakable belief in our own superiority, and our unwavering optimism that said superiority means we can right the world’s many wrongs.

I’m thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton’s recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, an interview that my colleague Joan Walsh rightly described as “sobering” for any progressive who’d resigned herself to a Clinton candidacy but hoped the former secretary of state had lost the martial inclination that likely cost her the presidency in 2008. Because while it’s true that some in the media (especially those with a neoconservative worldview) exaggerated the forcefulness of Clinton’s criticisms, it’s also true that Clinton reminded us that her view of the world differs from the president’s in some fundamental ways.

“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Clinton told the hawkish Goldberg, implicitly arguing that Obama’s relative reluctance to send U.S. troops into other countries was no better than his predecessor’s belief that no problem was too big to be solved by an American with a gun. Sounding another dog-whistle for the unreconstructed neo-imperialists among us, she went on to complain that “we don’t even tell our own story very well these days,” chalking up America’s diminished global reputation not to its policies but rather its shoddy branding. (This is a move conservative Republicans pull after every election loss, which should tell you something of its intellectual merit.)

The key moment, however, was what came next, after Clinton’s use of the corporate “tell our story” cliché, when Goldberg said that “defeating fascism and communism is a pretty big deal.” “That’s how I feel!” was Clinton’s enthusiastic response, before she added, with faux modesty, that a belief in the U.S. as global savior “might be an old-fashioned idea,” but she’d keep it all the same. It was a striking exchange not just for its historical ignorance (when it comes to defeating both Nazism and Bolshevism, it’s the people in the Soviet Union and its satellites, not Americans, who deserve the credit most) but also for its schmaltziness and the way it put a folksy, heartland spin to a historical narrative that inexorably leads to militarism.

For all the ways he’s disappointed when it comes to ending the neo-imperial era of American foreign policy, President Obama doesn’t talk like this. He doesn’t go for the kind of rhetoric that places the U.S. as the protagonist and hero in a geopolitical drama of good vs. evil. And unlike Clinton, he doesn’t talk about groups of Islamic extremists as if they’re simply the latest versions of a cosmic evil that once took the forms of Nazi Germany and the USSR. He’s a nationalist, sure; and he certainly shares Clinton’s preference for a global order in which America pretends to be first among equals, when the real balance of power is anything but. Still, Obama, unlike Clinton, doesn’t talk about the world as if it were the stage for a great struggle between slavery and freedom. He knows that kind of talk was discredited by the results of our foreign policy from 2002 to 2008.