There's only one problem with that: It's not strictly true. Although a superiority complex has long pervaded the national psyche, the expression "American exceptionalism" only became big a few years ago. (In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton called on Americans to "vindicate the honor of the human race.") What's more, Tocqueville didn't invent the term. Who did? Joseph Stalin.

In the 1920s, the lingering specter of World War I and austere German reparations battered Europe's market-based economy, giving rise to class tension and stark inequality. For worn-down workers, socialism and communism started sounding like pretty good ideas. A world revolution -- indeed, the rise of the proletariat -- seemed possible, and the Communist International was stoked.

But the Americans just wouldn't fall into line. The United States had long since passed the United Kingdom as the world's largest industrial power, but hadn't yet plunged into the Great Depression. To members of the U.S. Communist Party, it was a paradox. Why, in the what appeared to be the purest capitalist Western economy wasn't there any desire for egalitarianism? Had Marx been wrong when he wrote socialism would, inexorably and universally, emerge from the ruins of capitalism?

America's radical left considered the national condition, contrasted it with Europe, and concluded leftism would be a hard sell stateside thanks to characteristics forged along the frontier. Americans were different: individualistic, profit-crazed, broadly middle class, and as tolerant of inequality as they were reverent of economic freedom. The nation had "unlimited reserves of American imperialism," lamented Communist propaganda at the time.

In 1929, Communist leader Jay Lovestone informed Stalin in Moscow that the American proletariat wasn't interested in revolution. Stalin responded by demanding that he end this "heresy of American exceptionalism." And just like that, this expression was born. What Lovestone meant, and how Stalin understood it, however, isn't how Gingrich and Romney (or even Obama) frame it. Neither Lovestone or Stalin felt that the United States was superior to other nations -- actually, the opposite. Stalin "ridiculed" America for its abnormalities, which he cast under the banner of "exceptionalism," Daniel Rodgers, a professor of history at Princeton, said in an interview.

Stalin, to say the least, wasn't happy with Lovestone's news. "Who do you think you are?" he shouted, according to Ted Morgan's biography of Lovestone. "(Leon) Trotsky defied me. Where is he? (Grigory) Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? (Nikolai) Bukharin defied me. Where is he? And you! Who are you? Yes, you will go back to America. But when you get back there, nobody will know you except your wives."

As the Great Depression enveloped the United States, Stalin's argument -- if not his bluster -- seemed well grounded. "Exceptionalism was a disease, a chronic disease," wrote communist S. Milgrom of Chicago in 1930. "The storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism," the American Communist Party declared at its convention in April 1930.

Communist leader Jay Lovestone said the American proletariat wasn't interested in revolution. Stalin responded by demanding that he end this "heresy of American exceptionalism."

Of course, the predictions failed: with the help of war, and despite Franklin Roosevelt's new welfare state, the U.S. economy stayed on the capitalist track. As American communism receded, so did talk of exceptionalism in leftist circles. Dismissive references appeared in academic research now and again, but usually in relation to communism's failure in America. Not until the 1980s did it suddenly reemerge, charged with a new connotation of national superiority. According to a Factiva survey, The New York Times was the first mainstream outlet to revive "American exceptionalism," when in 1980 Richard J. Tofel implored Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to defend this distinctive cultural aesthetic: "As our unquestioned supremacy recedes, we need to decide what "America" means to us, and what it means to the world."