Whether Dean's complaints are legitimate or not, it's obnoxious and pigheaded to equate "American" with "good." I wish that Democrats wouldn't stoop to appealing to that ugly facet of our national identity.
I really doubt that facet is unique to American identity. It possibly might be muted a bit in Europe due to exceptionalism there not being as concentrated on national exceptionalism, but the idea that we are better than they seems to be a fairly constant part of the human condition with the only real differences in various times and places being how broad a group the pronoun "we" refers to.
