There's this 
who always spends her mornings walking around a local park. She'll pick up cigarette butts and fish hooks, trim bushes, just whatever needs doing. Apparently an 11 year tradition for her.
Today she stopped me to chat for the first time as I was picking up some fishing line. We had a nice little conversation about how important it is to protect birds and how poorly the city does so. I was just about to describe how much I also care about the local wildlife and how important stewardship is.
Within two minutes she's pointing at a bike lane and asks me if I support that. I say "Yeah, I commute on it and it's a lot safer than it used to be". She launches into a rant about how one bike can cause a 4 mile traffic jam and she wishes they'd tear out all of the bike lanes. We have a visible air pollution layer from car exhaust being trapped by the local topography, making the air so dangerous that her demographic is specifically warned against going outside for most of the summer. Okay.
Next came climate change. When she was a kid in the 40s they taught civics. Now kids are just told what to think. The climate changes cyclically and we've found fish fossils in Wyoming. People are so afraid of a perfectly natural cycle. She doesn't care if they're liberal, conservative, whatever. They're taught social studies instead of civics and it makes them believe in stuff like this.
Then vaccines. She was a nurse and couldn't work in medicine these days with that COVID vaccine shit they're forcing on young people like me. It doesn't even work and they fire nurses if they don't get it. She wishes she could get all the nurses together and collectively bargain because they can't fire everyone for refusing to get the vaccine. She's 84.
Sometimes I see a nice old person doing something good for their community and for a brief second I think "that's probably not a rabid reactionary who wants to spend their last years salting the earth". Then they speak and I remember that this is the Burger Reich. Death to America.
Just remember that the fascism of the USA has always been in competition with other fascism in other countries. "Only the strongest survive" is at the core of their shared worldview. So "the cruelty is the point" is really at the core of many older Americans (and many others too) ideology about American Exceptionalism. USA is special in their minds because of how willingly cruel we can be/have been. This is the core that animates so much "I got mine, fuck you" attitude. Individualism is the basis of all their "enlightened moralism".
Never forget that the USA is a fascist state. There will be many reminders.
Never forget that the USA was born out of genocide and grew on slavery and oligarchy. It is woven into the very fabric of their existence. Now a lot of the slavery and genocide has been off-shored, but it is still what makes the USA tick.
It's very much the opposite. The propaganda narrative of American Exceptionalism is that the U.S. is morally superior. We aren't peasants ruled by some far off king, we rule ourselves with a democracy! Society isn't dominated by aristocratic failsons, your success or failure is based on merit! There's so much opportunity here, anyone can make it if they work hard! Capitalism raises all boats! We never had anything so gauche as an empire, we managed a bunch of territory for a while but either granted them independence or made them states! We're the only country to win a bunch of land after a major war and give most of it up!
Of course the reality is far different, but that's the American Exceptionalism narrative. The whole idea is that we aren't just another great power, we're the good guys. A shining city on a hill.
That is the narrative, but I think there's often double think involved with people like this. They will use the exceptionalism narrative when they want to make America sound like the good guy, when they're talking to strangers or children, and they'll really believe it in that moment. But then when they're among close friends they'll openly say that america is great because "we" dominate the globe through force and that is what makes our lives great and it needs to stay that way
I don't think it's quite this, certainly not in lib circles, and I don't think it's even common among Republicans. The justification for empire comes more in the form of "every non-ally is an evil authoritarian nightmare country that's impoverished and backward and has a rogue government that will kill untold numbers of people because they're evil." And would you rather have us running the show, or them?? Throw in a sprinkling of "they will greet us as liberators" where appropriate.
There's a real resistance to thinking of America as an empire. A ton of propaganda effort is poured into the idea that America is fundamentally good, and the bad parts were either isolated lapses or regrettably necessary to keep the barbarian foreigners from winning.
I think the old American Exceptionalism idea has mostly died at this point. Sure, older folks might still believe it, but it doesn't seem to hold sway in the mainstream like it did in the past. This turn is reflected by the grim dark realism trends in media. Idealism is shown to be childish these days, and only the adults making tough choices are going to save the world. 'The cruelty is necessary' is the new message of exceptionalism these days. You can see a turn starting with GW Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' to Obama's 'hope and change' to Biden's 'nothing will fundamentally change'. The 'neoliberal turn' is another example of what I'm talking about.