As the drive toward the second impeachment of President Trump gathers steam, Republican dissenters are scrambling for some way to derail the train. Predictably, congressional censure is at the top of the list; House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, recently approached the No. 2 Democrat in the House with an offer to “deliver a large number of Republican votes for a formal rebuke if Democrats backed off impeachment.” The answer was no, and for good reason: Congressional censure is a cop-out and a toothless punishment. It’s only impeachment that leaves a mark.

On Tuesday, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, joined by six GOP colleagues, introduced a concurrent resolution “censuring and condemning President Donald J. Trump” for attempting “unlawfully” to “overturn the 2020 Presidential election” and provoking Jan. 6’s violent attack on the Capitol. Opting for censure rather than impeachment would, Fitzpatrick insisted, “provide closure” and “hold the president accountable.”

Will it, though?

Pop quiz: Name all three presidents who have been impeached by the House. Presidents Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Trump. President Richard Nixon, remember, managed to skip town before the hammer dropped.

Now, name any two presidents who have been tarred with a congressional censure vote. There are four, per the Congressional Research Service. If you’re a history buff, maybe you came up with President Andrew Jackson. Ironically, Jackson’s 1834 censure by the Senate over the “Bank War” is mainly remembered because, three years later, he had his allies in the Senate expunge it from the record. The remaining cases of congressional censure have faded into obscurity. Did you know that, in addition to dithering while the Civil War loomed, President James Buchanan got dinged by the House for excessive party patronage in naval contracts?

Far from holding presidents accountable, censure resolutions are little remembered and thus little feared. Aside from making Jackson really mad once, which was not exactly hard to do, they’ve never cost another president a good night’s sleep.

Impeachment, on the other hand, is constitutional censure: the strongest means of repudiation available to the House. Regardless of what happens in the Senate, a House vote to impeach lastingly mars the offender’s legacy, sending a signal to future presidents about the sort of conduct that’s beyond the pale.

The vehemence with which Trump’s defenders oppose impeachment gives the lie to their claim that it’s pointless without removal in a Senate trial. Lately, Republican pundit Hugh Hewitt denounced the House effort as “performance art politics” while simultaneously bemoaning the cruelty of forcing Trump to wear “a second scarlet I.” Please do not carry out this empty, performative gesture: I implore you!

The formalized disgrace of impeachment is central to the Johnson and Clinton legacies. But making Trump the first president in history to suffer that humiliation twice? That’s going to leave a mark.

It’s hard to feel sorry for him. This president spun up a violent mob hoping to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he’d lost. If that’s not impeachable, nothing is. Trump’s reckless, reprehensible act left five people dead, and we’re lucky it wasn’t even worse. If not for some misdirection by a quick-thinking Capitol Police officer, the mob might have breached the Senate chamber. “We were very close to actually having members of Congress killed,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois.

McCarthy, of all people, has to know that. After fleeing the Capitol, the Washington Post reports, the minority leader spent Wednesday afternoon “hiding from the rioters in a secret location,” begging the president’s son-in-law to wield his influence, then doing TV spots because that was the only way to get a message to Trump about “just how dire the situation was.”

It would be normal, healthy even, to take that sort of thing personally and, as a House leader, insist that it be punished with the ultimate constitutional sanction. What Trump set in motion on Jan. 6 was as close as you can come, in real life, to testing his boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any support.

Some Republicans are starting to prove him wrong. On Tuesday, there was a sense that the dam was beginning to break, as five GOP members, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican in the House, announced their support for impeachment.

One of them was Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan. On Tuesday morning, Upton had been fully committed to the slap-on-the-wrist option as a co-sponsor of Fitzpatrick’s censure resolution. By day’s end, however, he’d changed his mind, revolted by the president’s insistence that his pre-riot rally speech was “totally appropriate.” “Enough is enough,” Upton declared. “I will vote to impeach.”

Like bankruptcy, when it finally comes, impeachment comes at you fast.

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power.

Even though he quit before the full House could vote, Richard Nixon remains the only president in American history to be driven from office through the impeachment process. Little wonder, then, that we’ve been drowning in Watergate analogies ever since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment investigation last month.

So, is the Ukraine imbroglio Watergate 2.0? Not exactly, but there’s enough similarity between the two scandals to give President Trump’s supporters agita. There are close parallels in Trump’s conduct to at least two of the three articles of impeachment that forced Nixon’s resignation.

Ukraine-gate’s central charge is that Trump engaged in a third-rate shakedown of a foreign government in order to get dirt on a leading political rival. The readout of Trump’s July 25 call with President Zelensky shows the “quid” — a direct request to investigate Joe Biden. If a “pro quo” is necessary, the emerging evidence powerfully suggests that Trump held up $391 million in security aid to Ukraine as leverage.

A president might legitimately slow-walk foreign aid to induce security cooperation or a better trade deal. But in this case, the motivation smacks of “us[ing] the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as Nixon aide John Dean put it in a 1971 memo. Screwing Trump’s political enemies isn’t a legitimate policy priority of the United States government. Wielding the powers of the presidency for such purposes is — as the Nixon case shows — an impeachable offense.

Trump’s call for Zelensky to “look into” Biden echoes one of the charges against Nixon that led to his second article of impeachment. Article 2, passed by the House Judiciary Committee in July 1974, focused on abuse of power, and the first offense it enumerates is Nixon’s attempt to turn the IRS against his political rivals. In September 1972, for example, Dean gave the IRS commissioner a list of several hundred people the administration wanted audited — all of them staffers with or contributors to Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign.

Nothing wrong with asking for an investigation, Nixon diehards might have argued. After all, some of McGovern’s people probably were tax cheats, and you’ve got to start draining the swamp somewhere! Few at the time seem to have found such rationalizations compelling.

There are further echoes of Watergate in Trump’s recent decision to stonewall the House impeachment proceedings. Defying lawful congressional subpoenas was the basis for Nixon’s third article of impeachment. If, as some have speculated, this president actually wants to be impeached, he’s found a good way to go about it.

Even so, a key difference with Watergate is how comically inept the cover-up attempt is here. Forty-five years ago, it took work to ferret out the answers to “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” But Trump can’t seem to manage a “modified, limited hangout” — repeatedly, he lets it all hang out: releasing the damning summary of what he terms a “perfect call,” or blurting to reporters that “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.” Imagine Nixon attaching the Enemies List to a press release or publicly declaring: “I am a crook. So what?”

Claims that the current scandal is “worse than Watergate” are overblown. Trump’s ineptitude and lack of control over his own administration have limited the damage — so far. True, Nixon also found himself stymied by unwilling vassals, like the IRS commissioner, who flatly refused his demand for political audits. But Nixon was competent enough to bring at least some of his schemes to fruition.

Still, “our guy is too incompetent to pull off high crimes” isn’t what you’d call an inspiring impeachment defense. It’s also unlikely to work.

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, one of America’s leading constitutional scholars exhibited classic signs of “PTSD”: Post-Trump Stress Disorder. Impeachment “should begin on Inauguration Day,” Harvard’s Laurence Tribe howled in December 2016. The next month, Tribe demanded Trump “be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other President in American history”—a land-speed record for somebody entering his second week in office. In the months that followed, the dean of con-law profs urged Trump’s defenestration for everything from emoluments clause violations to mean tweets.

Given that backdrop, when I opened Professor Tribe’s new book, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, coauthored with Joshua Matz, I was braced for an impeach-at-all-costs jeremiad. The last thing I was expecting was an earnest plea for “cool and evenhanded reflection, informed by the Constitution and lessons from history.”

That, however, is exactly what Tribe and Matz have produced. Their intelligent and informative book insists that impeachment is an awkward weapon, one that can’t be “readily fired twice during a single presidency,” and that holds no magic bullet for the problems of American democracy—useful reminders for #Resistance enthusiasts and Never Trumpers alike.

And yet, they lay it on pretty thick: Impeachment, Tribe and Matz insist, is “a great power and a terrible one,” its use fraught with “extraordinary danger.” If, God forbid, we ever need to deploy it, “we can hope only that the nation survives with its spirit intact and the strength to rebuild all that’s broken.” To End a Presidency turns out to be a sober, conventional case for approaching impeachment with fear and trembling.

Too sober and conventional, for my money: The case for impeachment-phobia has by now been adequately made. It permeates our political culture and dominates respectable opinion, whether it’s Senator Jeff Flake—who has compared Trump to Stalin while insisting impeachment is out of bounds—or Stephen Colbert, who rejects it as an “extreme” remedy. Exaggerating the dangers of impeachment, as Tribe and Matz do, has made its use all too rare. Neither the Constitution nor the lessons of our history justify their trepidation.

Few if any of the Framers viewed the prospect of presidential impeachments with the dismay and perturbation Tribe and Matz demand. “A good magistrate will not fear them,” Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry insisted during the Constitutional Convention. “A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” North Carolina’s Hugh Williamson thought there was “more danger of too much lenity than of too much rigour towards the President.” Given our paltry record of presidential impeachments—only three serious attempts in 230 years—he was more right than he knew.

So it smacks of projection when Tribe and Matz assert that “you can feel the Framers’ anxiety” when considering the structural safeguards they erected around the remedy: “Impeachment was the power they most grudgingly included in the Constitution.”

The authors’ own account of the deliberations in Philadelphia refutes that notion. Opposition to presidential impeachment was a minority view, held by only a handful of delegates who were all but shouted down by George Mason, James Madison, Ben Franklin, and others. The two-thirds requirement for removal more likely reflects exhaustion than anxiety. That innovation came late in the convention and was approved without debate and apparently without notice.

Whether they quite intended to or not, the Framers made it extraordinarily hard to remove a president. Yet our political culture makes it harder still by conjuring up specters of wounded democracy and constitutional collapse. Tribe and Matz fuel those cultural superstitions throughout the book. “There can be little doubt that a successful impeachment campaign would inflict enduring national trauma,” they insist.

But recent experience provides very little evidence for that. As the authors concede—somewhat grudgingly—the Watergate-era crisis of confidence in government helped Americans demystify the presidency and institute necessary checks on executive power. Contra Gerald Ford, the real “national nightmare” was what Nixon and his predecessors had been able to get away with for far too long. And though Tribe and Matz assert that “Watergate permanently scarred a generation of Americans,” the journalist Jeff Greenfield is hardly alone in his assessment: “I’ll tell you what I remember most about Watergate. It was fun.”

During the Clinton imbroglio, despite claims of looming apocalypse from Tribe, among others, late ’90s prosperity rolled on, unimpeded by Bill’s struggles. Lately, though, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, many liberals have begun to rethink their defense of a predatory, lawbreaking executive. Even failed attempts at removal can help vindicate important presidential norms.

Discussing the Clinton impeachment, Judge Richard Posner predicted, correctly, that the episode’s “most abiding effect . . . may be to make it difficult to take Presidents seriously as superior people.”

Maybe that’s a lesson we could stand to have refreshed.

Asked “whether it’s proper to militarize the nation’s city police forces,” President Obama opined last week that “one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.”

But the images coming out of Ferguson, Mo., recently — body-armored, camo-clad “peace officers” with sniper rifles and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles — have a lot of Americans wondering whether that has become a meaningless distinction.

Still, Obama continued, “We don’t want those lines blurred. That would be contrary to our traditions.”

He got that right, at least. America was born amid fear and loathing of standing armies at home. “It was easy to foresee the consequences [that] followed upon sending troops into America to enforce obedience to acts of the British Parliament,” John Hancock proclaimed in his 1774 address commemorating the Boston Massacre: “cruelty and haughtiness … citizens hourly exposed to shameful insults.” Thomas Jefferson worried that a peacetime military force would “overawe the public sentiment” and harm the republican character of our government.

If we share the Founders’ concern about domestic militarization, maybe we should stop subsidizing it. That’s what Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., hopes to do with the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, a bill that has drawn interest from Republicans such as Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Johnson’s bill takes aim at the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, which allows local police departments to acquire “free ‘military-grade’ weapons and equipment that could be used inappropriately during policing efforts in which citizens and taxpayers could be harmed.”

But the bill doesn’t touch the Homeland Security grants that bought St. Louis County its BearCat armored vehicle and that have lately become an even bigger driver of police paramilitarization. Any serious demilitarization effort will have to deal with Homeland Security Department programs arming local law enforcers with MRAPs and drones.

Reformers should expect vigorous pushback from the martial-law-and-order brigade in Congress.

In one of politics’ little ironies, leading terror-war hawk Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., was once the Irish Republican Army’s biggest supporter in Congress. (As Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once cracked, “The only Republican organization I have ever noticed Mr. King represents is the Irish Republican Army.”)

Today, as a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, King is leading the fight to make small-town America look like Belfast during the Troubles. Over the weekend, he told the New York Times there was “no evidence that giving the police heavy weaponry and equipment worsened the situation in Ferguson.”

True enough, nobody got run over by a BearCat in Ferguson, and the press and protesters had more trouble with tear gas than sniper rifles. But one of the main fears about armoring-up local law enforcement is that it will encourage a warrior mindset among peace officers whose true mission is to protect and serve.

Joseph D. McNamara, former police chief of Kansas City, Mo., observes that “the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing.”

That’s as it should be, some law enforcement officers insist: In a 2013 PoliceOne.com article, SWAT commander Glenn French writes: “We trainers have spent the past decade trying to ingrain in our students the concept that the American police officer works a battlefield every day he patrols his sector.” As a former LAPD officer explained in the Washington Post last Tuesday, “If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”

How’s that for “cruelty and haughtiness”: Respect my authority — or get “served”? This is one culture war worth fighting.

GENE HEALY, a Washington Examiner columnist, is vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency.

Through the fog of Twitter, it’s difficult to discern the precise details of what’s been happening in Ferguson, Mo., in the 10 days of protests spurred by the police killing of an unarmed teenager.

Still, maybe it’s not too early to wonder: When, exactly, did the United States become a banana republic?

“Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb?” asks my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson. What could possibly justify police “red-dotting” peaceful protesters with laser sights, or an attempted head-shot, with a tear gas canister, at a man standing in his own yard, insisting, “this [is] my property!”? Here you can watch police fumigate a news crew and take down their cameras — then chase off the other journalists filming the assault.

The Ferguson clampdown has even law and order conservatives like Red State’s Erick Erickson worried about “the militarization of the police and overkill by local police forces.” But maybe they’re not worried enough.

Last week, I found myself musing darkly, “Just wait till Ferguson’s cops get federally funded drones.” If you think paramilitary policing looks dystopian now, just wait till you see what’s being cooked up in defense contractors’ labs.

For decades now, as Radley Balko makes clear in his indispensable 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, federal subsidies have encouraged the proliferation of military ordnance on the home front — from M-16s to grenade launchers to 30-ton armored vehicles. Since 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has accelerated police paramilitarization with more than $7 billion in Urban Areas Security Initiative grants.

With Homeland Security funding, “Police departments are arming themselves with military assets often reserved for war zones,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., noted in a 2012 report on the UASI program. Among those assets are surveillance drones and the Long Range Acoustic Device — a sound cannon deployed last week in Ferguson that can disperse crowds with a 149-decibel assault (permanent hearing loss begins at 130).

A Homeland Security report obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2013 revealed that the agency has considered outfitting its expanding inventory of drones with “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize” targets of interest.

Meanwhile, both Homeland Security and the Pentagon maintain a keen interest in developing crowd-control weapons for occupations at home and abroad. In 2007, the department’s science and technology arm “contracted for the development of the ‘LED Incapacitator,’ a nauseating strobe” weapon meant to overwhelm and disorient targets with rapid, random pulses of light.

Some have called it the “puke saber,” but the final product won’t necessarily be handheld. As the department noted in a cutesy blogpost entitled “Enough to Make You Sick,” “output and size can easily be scaled up to fit the need; immobilizing a mob, for instance, might call for a wide-angle ‘bazooka’ version.”

Then there’s the Pentagon’s “Active Denial System,” colloquially known as the “pain ray.” It’s a truck-mounted millimeter wave gun designed to create “an unbearable burning sensation” in anyone it’s aimed at.

Just imagine what a “puke cannon” or a “pain ray” could do to a crowd of looters — or a crew of pesky journalists. In time, and with the help of federal subsidies, we may graduate from banana republic to a science-fiction dystopia straight from the fevered brain of Philip K. Dick.

As James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

It’s no accident that technology developed for population control in foreign counterinsurgencies is being turned inward — in fact, it’s been a matter of deliberate federal policy. But it’s not too late to reverse the slide.

GENE HEALY, a Washington Examiner columnist, is vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency.

Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon, backed into a corner by the Supreme Court, surrendered Watergate’s “smoking gun” tape. Recorded six days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, it revealed the president scheming to get the CIA to quash the investigation — making it clear that he was in on the cover-up from the start.

Nixon announced he would resign three days later, and on Friday, Aug. 9 — after a cringe-inducing double V-for-Victory salute from the South Lawn — it was: So long, don’t let the helicopter door hit you on the way out.

That afternoon, a newly sworn-in President Gerald Ford bemoaned “the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.” Given 22,000 American casualties in Vietnam under Nixon, it seemed an oafish comparison at best. Still, Ford’s point was, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

“Nightmare”? Lighten up, Jerry. The revelers who gathered in Lafayette Park had the right attitude: They stuck a sign on the White House fence reading, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

“I’ll tell you what I remember most about Watergate,” journalist Jeff Greenfield enthused 10 years later: “It was fun.”

Four decades on, it’s clearer than ever that Aug. 9, 1974 — when Americans finally dethroned an imperial president, and began reining in the imperial presidency — is a day worth celebrating.

The Nixon tapes revealed much more than the cover-up of a “two-bit burglary.” Nixon’s “plumbers” broke into a psychiatrist’s office, looking for dirt on Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg — and even considered a diversionary firebombing of the Brookings Institution that would let them steal Brookings’ files.

But Nixon was so irresistibly hate-able, it’s easy to forget that, as constitutional scholar Philip Kurland put it in 1978, “The primary evil revealed by the events of Watergate was the presidency: not the man but the office. It was and is bloated with unrestrained power.”

Indeed, many of the charges contained in Nixon’s articles of impeachment — criminal misuse of the CIA, IRS, and FBI, for example — were business as usual for his predecessors. John F. Kennedy had his CIA director wiretap members of the Washington press corps; Lyndon Johnson had the agency bug Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane. Kennedy’s Ideological Organizations Project at the IRS made Lois Lerner look like an amateur. And, as Americans learned from the mid-1970s special committee investigation of intelligence abuses led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, nearly every post-World War II president used FBI wiretaps to keep tabs on political opponents.

As Chris Hayes recounted in 2006, “Church and many Democrats had every reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full depths of Nixon’s perfidy,” but soon discovered that presidents of both parties enjoyed “using the available federal machinery to screw [their] political enemies.”

The Church committee’s revelations spurred reforms designed to check executive lawlessness. In the years since, those reforms have been dangerously undermined, and we still hear presidents echo Nixon’s infamous statement that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

One thing we don’t hear anymore, however, is a phrase Nixon’s chief of staff uttered, in all seriousness, during a discussion about the release of the Pentagon Papers: “The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this.”

“The implicit infallibility of presidents.” Try saying that out loud without smirking. In the wake of Watergate, presidential “infallibility” is no longer an “accepted thing” — it’s something that’s impossible to contemplate with a straight face.

In that much-maligned era, Americans rediscovered their historic skepticism toward power, and, for a time, brought the presidency down to size. We didn’t finish the job, but what we achieved 40 years ago suggests that we can do it again.

GENE HEALY, a Washington Examiner columnist, is vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency.

“What would Ronald Reagan do?”

That’s become the go-to inquiry for conservatives on nearly every public policy question, from the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to corporate welfare in the Sooner State (visit the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’ “Virtual Reagan Wall,” where you can “share your message about what Reagan would do to improve Oklahoma today”!).

When likely 2016 contenders Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Texas Gov. Rick Perry squared off for an op-ed duel on the Iraq crisis recently, it quickly degenerated into a rapid-fire “Reagan-off,” with Perry unleashing a hellstorm of Gipper references, roughly one per 100 words.

It’s not obvious that channelling a president who left office more than a quarter century ago is the best way for Republicans to craft sound policy for the 21st century Middle East. But if you think the Reagan legacy holds lessons for today, why not start with a question we can actually answer, like: “WDRD?” — that is, “what did Reagan do” in the region?

The man had a record, after all — and when you look at that record, it’s obvious that most of today’s conservatives, Perry included, would hate Reagan’s Middle East policies.

Perry imagines a reincarnated Reagan who’d bring “moral and strategic clarity” to our Iraq policy. “Strategic clarity,” perhaps; “moral,” not so much.

Reagan’s approach to Iraq was ruthless realpolitik: his administration viewed Saddam Hussein as an essential counterweight to Iranian power and backed the dictator in his bloody eight-year war with Iran. Reagan officials took Iraq off the State Department’s list of terror-supporting states, reestablished diplomatic relations and shared intelligence that “proved vital to Iraq’s conduct of the war.”

In the broader Middle East, Reagan fought a naval quasi-war to keep Gulf shipping open and, in 1986, launched airstrikes on Libya designed to punish without inducing regime change. But after cutting and running from the disastrous peacekeeping deployment in Lebanon in 1984, Reagan decided the wiser policy was to keep U.S. forces over the horizon and our boots off the ground.

Nor did Reagan think uncritical support for Israel served U.S. interests. He pushed for weapons sales to Saudi Arabia despite Israel’s vehement opposition, insisting “it is not the business of other nations to make United States foreign policy,” and he backed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. As Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev has put it, “if Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he’d be impeached.”

Indeed, at the time, many on the Right, neoconservatives in particular, did hate Reagan’s policies in the Middle East. In 1982, Norman Podhoretz decried “the continuing tilt in American policy toward the enemies of Israel.” Podhoretz also worried that the Reagan team was too timid about stationing troops in the Arab world, having backed away from their earlier assessment that “it would be necessary to station American ground forces somewhere in the region” to act “simultaneously as a deterrent and a ‘tripwire’ ” against the Soviets.

Some of Reagan’s policies in the Gulf — like his administration’s complicity in Iraqi war crimes — are hard to defend. But his reluctance to put American soldiers in the crossfire isn’t one of them.

Reagan later called the deployment of the Marines to Beirut — where 241 died in a terrorist truck-bombing — his “greatest regret” as president. As he put it in his 1990 autobiography: “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of hatred and complexity of problems that make the Middle East such a jungle.” But Reagan learned something from that mistake, returning to a policy of “offshore balancing,” unburdened by dreams of a miraculous regional transformation.

Conservatives could stand to learn that lesson as well.

GENE HEALY, a Washington Examiner columnist, is vice president at the Cato Institute and author of “The Cult of the Presidency.”

“We are exceptional in a certain way that no other nation is,” Secretary of State John Kerry told U.S. embassy staffers in Vienna last week.

We’re the only country founded on “the idea that people are created equal and that all people have a chance to aspire for greatness. … Pretty amazing, right?” Kerry enthused.

So far, so patriotically correct — but Kerry really stepped in it when he admitted getting “a little uptight when I hear politicians say how exceptional we are.”

“Not because we’re not exceptional,” he hastened to add — but because bragging about it is “kind of in-your-face.”

Hit the Drudge siren! Mobilize the shock troops of righteous indignation!

“This guy is America’s Chief Diplomat? Shameful,” tweeted Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

“Deeply offensive,” huffed Ben Shapiro.

“These people are laden with self-hatred and self-guilt,” Rush Limbaugh proclaimed.

Here we go again. The Kerry kerfuffle is an even-more-tedious replay of the conservative rage-spasm over President Obama‘s 2009 comments at a NATO summit in France. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama affirmed when asked by a reporter. But he ran into a conservative buzzsaw when he allowed that “the Brits” (who gave us Magna Carta) and “the Greeks” (who invented philosophy and drama) probably have their own versions of exceptionalism as well.

There’s something sweaty and desperate about a patriotism that cannot tolerate the diplomatic acknowledgment, on foreign soil, that other countries might have their own reasons for national pride. You’d think a great-souled nation could afford a little magnanimity — but too many conservatives think it betrays weakness. We’re well on our way to becoming the first hyperpower with short-guy syndrome.

Worse still, some neoconservative ideologues have turned American Exceptionalism into an ersatz religion, fidelity to which demands reshaping the rest of the world in our Image, by force, if necessary.

In a recent column, David Brooks laments Americans’ waning faith in the “democratic gospel,” our “sacred purpose” and sole reason for being. Brooks can’t see any point to an America that minds its own business at home and abroad: “If America isn’t a champion of universal democracy, what is the country for?” he sputters. We’ll be condemned to “just go our own separate ways making individual choices.”

Jefferson called that “the pursuit of happiness”; apparently, it’s David Brooks’s vision of Hell. But the older, wiser version of American Exceptionalism held that the source of our national greatness was a system that gave Americans space to pursue their own dreams. As the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, America’s founding creed “can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.”

When it comes to living up to that creed, though, lately we’re not doing so hot. As conservative legal scholar F.H. Buckley points out in his new book, The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America, the U.S. is no longer “even in the top tier of economic freedom” in cross-country comparisons. In the latest edition of the Cato and Fraser Institutes’ Economic Freedom of the World rankings, we’re number 17 and we don’t try harder.

We’re not exactly lighting up the scoreboard on measures of civil and political liberty, either.

No wonder, then, that a recent Pew poll notes a significant drop in the percentage of Americans who think the US “stands above all other countries in the world” — a decline that’s been “particularly acute among Republicans.” Meanwhile, record numbers of us tell pollsters that the federal government is “the biggest threat to the country in the future.”

Maybe conservatives should take a break from chest-thumping about American Exceptionalism and focus on restoring the limits to government power that made us exceptional in the first place.

GENE HEALY, a Washington Examiner columnist, is vice president at the Cato Institute and author of “The Cult of the Presidency.”