Who Lost America?
Who Lost America?
It's Time to Step Up for Our Fourth Founding.
There is no limit to the greatness of the future before America, before our beloved land. But we can realize it only if we are Americans, if we are nationalists, with all the fervor of our hearts and all the wisdom of our brains. We can serve the world at all only if we serve America first and best.
—Theodore Roosevelt
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when a handful of free people breaks through determinism and opens new roads. People get the history they deserve.
—Charles de Gaulle
In 1949, the unanticipated victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War prompted a political cry in the United States: Who Lost China?
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, there’s a new question hanging in the air: Who Lost America?
There’s a looming sense that the United States has lost the plot. We’ve come unmoored from our history and vision and mission. Chinese dictator Xi Jinping conveys the sentiments of many: “The East is rising and the West is declining.“
Many Americans concur. Our polarized politics are marked by a view widely shared among partisans, that our national experiment may be one election away from existential catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, heading into the July 4th holiday in 2022, the Gallup Poll reported that a “record low” number of Americans are “extremely proud” of our country.
The generation of 1776 declared our nationhood and independence. Today, our actions and assumptions all too often declare our discord and decadence. In recent times the world witnessed the wanton vandalism and destruction of monuments to historic leaders, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass to Theodore Roosevelt.
The January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol illuminated the moral chaos of our moment. For the first time in our long history, a sitting president of the United States stoked disorder amid the constitutional process of the transfer of power. Marauding throngs broke through barricades and pierced the veils of reverence of Statuary Hall.
Memorable courage was exhibited by members of the outnumbered, ill-equipped, unprepared security personnel on the scene. In indelible contrast, not one member of the Congress stood their ground against the marauding trespassers. Not one.
The world watched as our self-styled “leadership” class gave way amid a disheartening moment of truth.
The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
For the United States, these are the best of times and the worst of times.
We launched the extraordinary James Webb Space Telescope, advancing our planet’s exploration and understanding of the universe. At the same time, our basic infrastructure—airports, roads, water, communications, energy transmission—are disturbingly out of date, reliably unreliable.
We served the world by developing, with astonishing speed, vaccines that saved millions of lives amid the pandemic that emerged in 2020. Yet we weren’t able to achieve correspondingly rapid distribution of the most basic protections for our own citizens, including masks and tests.
Fortified by the power projection of the most extensive, expensive, advanced, and mobile military machine in history, our politicians routinely saber-rattle against regimes that threaten or violate the prerogatives of other sovereign states. Yet we conspicuously fail to maintain our own southern border amid record levels of uncontrolled migration, pockmarked with criminality, cruelty, and corruption.
Our financial elites stand astride the global reserve currency status of the dollar. Built on the trust earned by the ingenuity, productivity, and sacrifice of prior generations, this affords us a unique power over our own destiny. It enables us to incur massive public and private debt with minimal immediate consequence. This made possible our unprecedented income stabilization outlays during the pandemic lockdowns. Yet we take our good fortune for granted, placing it at risk through unsustainable fiscal and monetary policies.
Our tendency to incur liabilities that accrue to future generations is nowhere more apparent than in our manifestly unsustainable environmental and energy policies. We are blessed with unmatched capacities in fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewable technologies. Yet, far from leading the world, we’re faltering in the necessary, diversified transition toward decarbonization and secure energy.
Our elected officials are little more than fungible, frenetic, superannuated, special-interest sock puppets. In language befitting royal rulers rather than public servants, they condescendingly admonish citizens to wait until laws are passed to learn their provisions.
With a scarcely concealed sense of self-satisfaction, our politicians advocate the adoption of democratic institutions around the world. Yet our own government, under the control of either of the two parties on offer, has failed for a generation to fulfill its most basic tasks. Our elected officials are little more than fungible, frenetic, superannuated, special-interest sock puppets. In language befitting royal rulers rather than public servants, they condescendingly admonish citizens to wait until laws are passed to learn their provisions.
Amid disabling polarization, our politicians call for “unity” … after they win elections. In defeat, the same politicians cast doubt on the legitimacy of our institutions. The rest of us are their captives, trapped in vicious, unceasing two-party warfare undertaken in our name.
We have achieved the greatest multiracial nation in the history of the world. Yet we denigrate the accomplishment, fetishize our failures, and valorize victimhood, placing our continued progress in question.
We project power—whether “hard” military power, or “soft” cultural power—to an extent comparable to the great empires of history. Yet we don’t acknowledge the obligations that inevitably ensue. We’re not listening and learning and adapting to new realities. We presume that the existing world order, created in our own image and interest after the Second World War, is inevitable if not invulnerable.
Twenty-first-century Americans are heirs to an extraordinary experiment in human endeavor. Yet we decline to acknowledge or honor the achievements of our forbears. Such self-regarding heedlessness inclines us to skirt the hard work of tending to our national character and institutions for the benefit of rising and future generations.
E Pluribus Unum?...or Ex Uno Multis?
Our founders regarded American government as an experiment. There was—and is—no precedent in history for a democratic republic including so numerous a people, across such a great expanse of territory, from such varied national, religious, racial, and ethnic origins.
In many ways—certainly on paper—we’re stronger than ever. Yet our internal cohesion is giving way.
Today’s Americans can create our own lives, indeed our individual identities, to an extent inconceivable even in the recent past. That’s an undoubted source of economic prowess and cultural creativity. It’s also occasioned our succumbing to tribalization to an extent not seen since the 1960’s—or, some say, the 1860s.
This is reflected in the rise of the latest variants of “identity politics.” We increasingly see ourselves and others through the prism of a series of group identities that are asserted as self-contained, incapable of full comprehension by outsiders. From race and ethnicity and national origin, to gender and generation, the claims of group identities are rising.
Demands for recognition and respect of non-majority identities are by no means new. They recur through the course of our history. They’re a feature, not a bug of our national experiment.
Demands for recognition and respect of non-majority identities are by no means new. They recur through the course of our history. They’re a feature, not a bug of our national experiment. They prompt periodic resets of American political life, sweeping more people into full participation. Those holding power are persuaded to acknowledge the rights of others, in the ceaseless cause of aligning our practices with our ideals.
What’s different now is that the most conspicuous variants of identity politics reject the ideals of individual rights and autonomy for all. Instead, they assert that existing hierarchies are irredeemably illegitimate, built on oppressor group power dynamics. Rather than making it possible for more people to compete and earn places in talent and competence hierarchies, these critics seek to invert them. Those classified as members of historically marginalized groups would be placed at the top based on immutable characteristics. This approach inclines toward rule by an elite, tending toward autocracy rather than democratic self-governance.
This yields a banquet of consequences. Group victimization is venerated; individual achievement is derogated and deconstructed by frenzied packs of injustice collectors. Institutional power is honored; political persuasion is neglected. Representative democracy is discredited as built upon past, unjust assumptions and institutions, rather than safeguarded as a foundation for the ongoing pursuit of progress.
Our surpassing identity, as Americans, is the ultimate intersection of the multitudes of identities that are conceived and brought to life within our nation’s nurturance.
Our surpassing identity, as Americans, is the ultimate intersection of the multitudes of identities that are conceived and brought to life within our nation’s nurturance. At a moment when the constituent identities are more far-reaching than ever before, anywhere, confidence in our national project is waning.
Multifarious factors contribute to this state of affairs. Our political system is inert. Participation, competition, and debate is constrained by the demands of a corrupt, self-serving, self-perpetuating two-party system. We have succumbed to dysfunctional arrangements that the founders feared and intended to foreclose.
Negative partisanship rules. Elections focus on the catastrophic consequences of empowering the other party rather than advancing the merits of one’s own. Each side sees the other in cruel caricature, a contrived menace. The system itself is relentlessly defamed and diminished.
This would be a challenge for any country. It’s an existential threat for the United States. Our reciprocal recognition of rights and autonomy is the foundation of our national identity.
With the advent of the digital age, our politics have become totalized. The personal and the political are converging. Everyone knows that our politics are paralytic, yet far too many recognize the need only for “the other side” to change. We internalize the zero-sum catastrophism of the dominant party duopoly.
We sort ourselves into enclaves of the like-minded. Political affiliation is an adjunct of socioeconomic status. In the midst of our efflorescence of asserted identities, we segregate ourselves from those outside of our narrowing circles of engagement.
Over the past half century, to an astonishing and inspiring extent, we have overcome longstanding prejudices against family members marrying people whose racial, ethnic, religious or sexual preferences differ from our own. Now many Americans declare they would oppose family members marrying outside their chosen partisan identities as Democrats or Republicans.
Polls reveal that many partisans are entirely misinformed about the views of those across the political divide. We’re not only divided; we’re cowering at the shadows of phantoms of our fevered, manipulated imaginations.
All too often, rather than celebrating our differences, we respond with disdain or disgust. Some see the seeds of civil war finding fertile soil in our present discontents.
Evidence of demoralization isn’t hard to come by. In early 2022, against the inspiring, chastening backdrop of the doughty resistance of Ukraine against brutal Russian subjugation, nearly four-in-ten Americans told pollsters they would flee rather than defend our homeland in comparable circumstances.
Many Americans are reluctant to display Old Glory. Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a number of our Twitter accounts were adorned with Ukrainian flags, but not our own.
The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name
A people is an assembled multitude of rational creatures bound together by common agreement on the objects of their love.
—St. Augustine of Hippo
The Russia-Ukraine war is a flash point of contending nationalisms. The Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has declared that Ukraine possesses no national identity other than as territory of Russia. By contrast, the courageous and largely unexpected response of Ukrainians has revealed an organic nationalism of stunning power.
Many outside observers found themselves at a loss for words. They recognize and condemn Putin’s forthright advocacy of Russian nationalism. Yet they don’t acknowledge the Ukrainian nationalism elicited by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In the words of political scientist Stephen Walt, “Nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world.” If we don’t recognize it and comprehend it, we’re not seeing the world as it is, as it has been, as it will be—or as it can be.
This might seem a minor matter. It’s not. In the words of political scientist Stephen Walt, “Nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world.” If we don’t recognize it and comprehend it, we’re not seeing the world as it is, as it has been, as it will be—or as it can be.
Nationalism is often dismissed as a cluster of self-interested, destructive characteristics. To some, it’s simply applying the adage, “Every man for himself,” to countries. To others, it’s a rationalization for unjust dominion over weaker states.
In our unsettled moment, the term is contested. Some deploy it as a catch-all vessel of opprobrium. It’s often intended to curtail conversation and marginalize opposition rather than spur thought and inform debate. Unsurprisingly, some others adopt and embrace the label, if only to troll and trigger polite society and received opinion.
The term is indelibly associated with right-wing and populist politicians, with a provenance in Hitler’s national socialism and Mussolini’s fascism. Today’s rising variant of populism is often placed into this category.
In fact, nationalism is far more protean. History reveals it to be an unmistakable strand of the left as well as the right. Gandhi and other anti-colonial leaders were nationalists. Nelson Mandela and numerous other African leaders would overthrow the yoke of colonial oppression to create new nations. Going back to the Versailles Conference of 1919, Ho Chi Minh sought national self-determination for Vietnam. In a speech on September 2, 1945, Ho cited the words and vision of the American Declaration of Independence in his argument against French colonial rule.
The potency of nationalism can be seen in the founding of new nation-states. The United Nations now includes just under two-hundred member states, nearly a four-fold increase since its establishment in 1945.
If we don’t comprehend nationalism, we risk misperceiving our own history and circumstances. What’s more—as in American statecraft and warfare in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—we can drift far off course if we don’t clearly perceive and apply empathy in analyzing the nationalisms animating others.
Reclaiming ‘The Other N-Word’
If we’re to come to terms with nationalism, we must achieve a shared understanding of it. Perhaps the most authoritative attempt to define it has come from Benedict Anderson, in his seminal book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Anderson suggests that nationalism is mischaracterized as “an ideology.” He proposes that it be classified “as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’”
Anderson defines a nation “as an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”
Anderson defines a nation “as an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”
He elaborates:
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
The nation is limited, insofar as “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.” It is sovereign in seeking to be free and independent. It is a community insofar as it supersedes other identities:
The nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
The binding attachment need not be expressed or experienced as separation and exclusion, much less as hatred and war.
In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism—poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts—show this love very clearly in a thousand different forms and styles.
Twenty-first-century Americans don’t tend to refer to ourselves as nationalists. This may arise from the multifaceted nature of our nationalism. America’s is not a prefabricated nationalism built on shared racial or ethnic or religious identity. Our nationalism comprises an overarching identity, encompassing an ever-expanding array of individual identities. The energy and innovation sparked amid the interaction of a highly diverse population—in viewpoints and values as well as race and ethnicity and religion—renders the United States a locus of freedom, an example to the world.
In 1630, long before Americans declared and constituted a nation and a state, John Winthrop offered a vision of a “City on a Hill.” In Winthrop’s telling, the settling of the New World in Massachusetts represented an opportunity to craft a unique place, undertaking God’s work. In demonstrating our faith through our works, the city on a hill would cast a guiding light for the world.
This is the foundation of an American nationalism that is intentionally based on reason and spirit and faith rather than derived from race and place. Our national idea is distinct yet not exclusive. It strives to express and extend its universal ideals through example rather than dominion. It's not fixed. It’s fluid, evolving, contingent. It’s a living force.
What a calling is to an individual, nationalism can be to a commonwealth. It can be a source of solidarity. It’s expressed over space and time through a unifying narrative. From history it derives values and experiences that can inform our navigation of the present. These elements yield a vision for conjuring and creating a future.
Perhaps more than any other nationalism, America’s is self-created. It requires tending.
Liberty, Equality, Identity
American history is frequently presented as an ongoing struggle to reconcile evolving notions and applications of our ideals of liberty and equality. This is doubtless true. It’s also incomplete.
Equally significant, though less often recognized, is the third, binding element: identity. It is in the interplay of these forces—liberty, equality, identity—that our nationalism is comprehended, refined, revised, and sent into action.
By the 1770s, as noted by Edmund Burke and others, the British subjects in the distant New World harbored sensibilities that were coalescing into a distinct identity. Critics and naysayers hurled the term “American” as an epithet against such bumptious adventurers, far removed from what they regarded as the refinement and sophistication of Europe.
The targets of such mockery would claim the term as our own. The Declaration of Independence defiantly asserted a distinct American identity. The Constitution founded a state whose institutions would reflect and advance that notion of nationhood. The “new man” of America would create a new nation, the United States.
The founders were extraordinarily audacious yet grounded by humility. They were mindful of the precarity of their enterprise. As with any experiment, there were sure to be many failures—and compromises—as they forged the path forward.
Our new representative democracy would be of unprecedented geographic reach. It would extend the franchise further than the United Kingdom from which it sprang. Based on the consent of the governed, the new system would require unceasing citizen engagement. Many of the British subjects in the American colonies, perhaps a third, had not supported the revolution. Going forward, culminating in the tragedy of the Civil War, some states resisted incorporation into a national vision that they experienced as overriding their preexisting identity, sovereignty, and institutions.
From the start, the American experiment would rise or fall on the “national character,” as understood and given life by citizens in our lives and work. Statesmen, up to and including the president, would be held to account by their peers, their fellow citizens.
Washington’s Farewell Address, published at the close of his second and final term as president, is his political testament. Alongside the Declaration and the Constitution, it’s the third foundational document of American nationalism.
Washington’s Farewell Address, published at the close of his second and final term as president, is his political testament. Alongside the Declaration and the Constitution, it’s the third foundational document of American nationalism. A decade of revolution separated the Declaration and the Constitution. The Farewell was informed by a decade of experience in operating the new government.
Washington devotes considerable attention to cultivating civic solidarity through institutions as well as the customs of citizens. He offers a vision of statecraft intended to reconcile the realities of international engagement with the universal ideals expressed in the Declaration. He urges succeeding generations to avoid entanglements that could imperil the existence or impair the integrity of the new nation.
Washington’s Farewell is timeless manual for statesmanship. In our democratic republic, this renders it a manual for citizenship as well. He offers his experience and observations as an “example” for his fellow Americans. He honors the “novel example” that the United States offers the world. This is not a small thing. Washington, along with other founders, shared the sentiment expressed by their contemporary Edmund Burke: “Example is the school of mankind, and he will learn at no other.”
If America were to lead the world through the power of her example, the founding generation, guided by Washington, would lead the nation through their own examples of citizenship.
In establishing precedents throughout his career, Washington sought to raise the national character. He established practices and expectations of public service and citizen comportment that continue today.
In contrast to our ideals of liberty and equality, our national identity is particular to us. This prompted the founding generation to dedicate considerable attention to history, language, rhetoric, civic education, mythography, memorials, art, songs, seals and symbols, coinage, and the like. Our national identity is anchored in the depth of our shared, lived experience, including our interaction with the natural environment.
This is more than mere patriotism. Patriotism connotes individual decisions to love our country. Such sentiment may wax and wane. It may be comprehended in a multitude of ways. It can be a fashion statement. It can be a status indicator. In our social media moment, many Americans calculate whether displaying our national iconography is consistent with their personal brand.
Such patriotism is comprehended and expressed in the first-person singular, present tense. In our materialistic moment, it’s closer to calibrating identity as consumers of products than as citizens of a republic. It’s no accident that recent political candidates, all the way to the presidency, routinely offer enticements and entitlements resembling commercial appeals.
Our nationalism is something more. It’s a gift we did not earn. It entails obligations we cannot avoid. It’s first-person plural. It encompasses past-, present-, and future-tenses. It’s an evolving, negotiated narrative. It’s the foundation for a shared identity that fills the gaps and reconciles our ideals and realities of liberty and equality.
Our nationalism is something more. It’s a gift we did not earn. It entails obligations we cannot avoid. It’s first-person plural. It encompasses past-, present-, and future-tenses. It’s an evolving, negotiated narrative. It’s the foundation for a shared identity that fills the gaps and reconciles our ideals and realities of liberty and equality.
Stephen Decatur’s timeless injunction—“our country, right or wrong”—may be a step too far. Nonetheless, nationalism denotes a unique if not unconditional attachment. Theodore Roosevelt reached for bracing clarity: “The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.”
History is the binding element. It enables us to learn from earlier generations and to respect and serve rising generations.
The visions of our leaders endure if they speak to the nation as a whole. They apply history to challenge and renovate existing understandings and arrangements. They reach across time and space.
The founding generation achieved this. Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the Civil War generation achieved this. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson achieved this in the early twentieth century. Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Ronald Reagan achieved this later in the same century.
American notions of liberty, equality, and identity impose stern decrees on those who would speak to the nation as a whole. Change can be daunting. Some well-intentioned people abandon faith in the institutions and even the ideals. By contrast, those who succeed in speaking to the nation strive for progress toward realizable ideals.
A Certain Idea of America
American nationalism is a work in progress. It’s built on shared understandings, experiences, and dreams.
From John Winthrop’s vision of a City on a Hill, through the Declaration and the Constitution to the present day, we have safeguarded and nurtured a certain idea of America. We are not concerned with who you are or where you came from. We value what you can do.
American nationalism can be comprehended as a calling built on three elements of citizen service:
What we owe—and how we can serve—one another;
What we owe—and how we can serve—the nation;
What America owes—and how we can serve—the world.
As with all service relationships, the value of American nationalism is assessed by those to be served. We first answer to one another. We then seek to serve and protect the national institutions and ideals on which we rely.
We also serve the world. Thomas Paine distilled the sentiment: “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” The Declaration of Independence exemplified and sought to instill “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
By contrast with nations built on a racial, religious, authoritarian, or totalitarian vision, American nationalism does not seek to fill the spiritual void at the core of classical liberal project. The separation of church and state purposefully leaves a God-sized space in our constitutional system. American citizens are presumed to possess civic virtue, in many cases imparted by religious faith. They possess a spiritual kinship as individuals and members of communities determined to act in concert.
Reconciling these elements amid changing circumstances is the evergreen project of statesmanship and citizenship.
At hinge moments in our history, our shared narrative is updated. Each generation sees a new world, with new eyes. We link ourselves with the past and future. Our perspectives are reconfigured, expressed in a revised political settlement.
One Revolution, Three Foundings
The United States has operated under one constitution, with three distinct foundings.
—The First Founding had three parts. Our nationhood was acknowledged and asserted in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The American Revolution earned that independence and gave life to our national identity. We undertook construction of our nation-state with the drafting and ratification of the Constitution of 1787.
—Our “Second Founding,” in the words of the nineteenth-century statesman Carl Schurz, was Lincoln’s. Through the redemptive charnel house of the Civil War, we established that the Declaration bears our fundamental national ideal. The Union was confirmed; the states are not at-will members of a confederation. Slavery was eradicated. We continued to include ever larger groups of Americans into full participation in national life.
Lincoln’s leadership not only preserved the Union. He sought to bolster social inclusion and mobility. This was an impetus for the Homestead Act, which opened public lands in the West to settlement and cultivation. So, too, the Morill Act, establishing agricultural and technical colleges through land grants to the states.
“The Railsplitter” spurred enactment of the transcontinental railroad. This would tie together the vast area between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Lincoln established Yosemite Park in 1864. This laid the foundation on which our National Park System would be constructed.
The Second Founding was not a revolution—it resulted from the defeat of the rebellion unleashed by the Confederacy. It was a renovation of the First Founding.
—The Third Founding began to emerge amid the contending visions of Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” and Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom.” They sought to update our nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, confronting challenges uncannily similar to those of our time.
Their joint heir, Franklin Roosevelt, promulgated the Third Founding a generation later. At home, the New Deal political settlement produced our industrial age social welfare state. Its milestones include the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) of 1935, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the GI Bill of 1944.
The Third Founding made an enduring mark by undertaking big things. Their spirit is symbolized by those we recall as the “Greatest Generation.” Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic program knitted the nation together through extensive infrastructure investment. This ranged from rural electrification to the Tennessee Valley Authority, to an array of construction projects, many of which remain nearly a century later. Perhaps most astonishing was the unprecedented mobilization of national resources to make the United States the “arsenal of democracy” in the Second World War.
In 1941, amid the remorselessly metastasizing havoc of that global conflagration, FDR offered his vision of the “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear. This would become the hub connecting the New Deal domestic program and Allied aims for a subsequent world order.
The Strange Death of Neoliberal America
As in the early twentieth century, there are unmistakable indications that longstanding understandings and arrangements are approaching their end.
A century ago, our political economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial. Now our political economy is hurtling, yet again, into uncharted territory. At home, the New Deal dispensation is being overtaken by onrushing circumstances.
—An Oligarchy Like No Other. Wage and wealth inequalities were reduced considerably in the decades immediately following the Second World War. Now they have returned to levels comparable to their previous height in the 1920s. Reduced social mobility is a bright flare indicating that our political economy is trending toward oligarchy.
Billionaires are taking center stage throughout American life. The tendrils extending from the tech revolution have enabled them to achieve power and influence more far-reaching than all but a few political leaders. In some spheres—including the public square—they may hold power greater than government itself.
—The Triumph of Free-Market Fundamentalism. The 1980s saw the rise of free-market policies in the United States and other nations. This was seen a necessary corrective to a stagnant political economy. It fit comfortably into the Cold War narrative, drawing a line in the sand against the collectivism of Communist regimes.
Markets can enable accomplishment of many worthwhile goals. A challenge arises when they are venerated for their own sake, rather than recognized as instrumental in nature. Free-market fundamentalism has been a reinforcing element in the rise of a new oligarchy.
As occurred in the early twentieth century, the American commonwealth has moved too far toward wealth, and away from what we hold together. Almost without noticing, we have begun to place transactional, market value above other values. We’re uneasily uncertain if the current market system is serving us.
It’s more and more clear to more and more people that our political economy is unstable and unsustainable.
Rising oligarchy may go hand-in-hand with veneration of materialism. The result can pose a threat to the national character. Surveying similar conditions in the early twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt offered a somber prophecy:
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
—The Financialization of Everything. A related trend, turbocharged by our technology revolution, is the financialization of everything. The finance sector has assumed outsized proportions. Talent is disproportionately diverted to Wall Street. Innovations such as just-in-time supply chains have taken on lives of their own. Massive, distant financial firms are entering domestic markets that have long been the province of individuals and families pursuing virtuous lives as citizens. Perhaps most notably, this includes residential real estate.
—The Bureaucratization of Everything. In the mid-twentieth century, political debate was centered within a pro-government vs. pro-market frame. That dichotomy holds much less resonance today. A number of the areas that most affect our lives and work are highly regulated, private-sector bureaucracies. Their ecosystems often include non-governmental organizations, such as foundations and advocacy groups.
Technology, energy, health, housing, banking, finance, higher education, and insurance are frequently experienced by citizens as interrelated elements of a treacherous, arbitrary netherworld. Far too often, they combine some of the worst aspects of the private sector (focus on short-term profits at the expense of consumers) and the public sector (lack of competence, responsiveness, innovation, and adaptability).
Bureaucracy, of any type, can condition employees to outsource their personal and professional values. Left to its own devices, it can assume a life of its own. Impenetrable and opaque, it presents the prospect of cronyism in the short-term and corruption down the line.
The relentless expansion of interconnected bureaucracies is accompanied by an absence of accountability. The result is experienced as diabolically dysfunctional: part panopticon, part circumlocution office.
The relentless expansion of interconnected bureaucracies is accompanied by an absence of accountability. The result is experienced as diabolically dysfunctional: part panopticon, part circumlocution office.
We recoil from “the invisible cage” that the Chinese dictatorship is imposing in the most populous nation of the world. We may be less attuned to the ongoing bureaucratization in the U.S. It’s so sprawling and knotted amid government and non-governmental actors that it’s difficult to discern.
The result brings to mind a prophecy of Alexis de Tocqueville. After surveying governments through history, he foretold that “if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day…it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.”
This would be a “regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude.” It “could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom.”
Tocqueville discerned the proclivity of citizens to yield their freedom of action in a piecemeal fashion:
The sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Four, Chapter Six, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.
The bureaucratization of everything goes further than Tocqueville could have imagined in the early nineteenth century. It requires a cadre to operate it.
—Emergence of a Meretricious Meritocracy. The postwar Roosevelt settlement spawned a series of subsidiary trends. One was the rise of what came to be called the “meritocracy.” The goal was to identify untapped talent from across the country. Intelligence and enterprise would be cultivated and placed into service, beginning with competitive admissions to traditionally elite, regional universities.
The institutionalization of meritocratic values has fostered an upper-middle-class ethos. It has given life to the notion of the professional class foretold by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution in 1941. Michael Lind has elaborated Burnham’s concept in his brilliant book, The New Class War.
The professional, managerial elite has emerged as the vanguard of the upper middle class. This latter group—variously estimated at between 15-20% of the population—is the praetorian guard of the oligarchy.
The professional, managerial elite has emerged as the vanguard of the upper middle class. This latter group—variously estimated at between 15-20% of the population—is the praetorian guard of the oligarchy. Its members and aspirational adherents hold outsized power and influence in politics, government, finance, NGOs, academe, the professions, journalism, indeed, the entire range of bureaucratic organizations in all sectors.
Members of the meritocracy brandish formal education credentials as emblems of entitlement. They constitute a cognitive elite, culled for conscientiousness and conditioned into compliance and conformity. In recent decades, colleges and universities, increasingly in lock-step, imbue so-called “critical” theories. At the same time, they are displacing the ideals and practices of traditional liberal arts education. Development of critical thinking skills is neglected.
This is not solely an American phenomenon. Corresponding developments are seen across the developed world. Many argue that meritocratic elites exhibit greater affinity toward their confreres in other nations than their fellow countrymen.
Members of the meritocratic overclass seek to be seen as virtuous, serving the nation. Yet, as Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution has observed, their political participation is marked by definable class consciousness. They may rationalize what others recognize as self-interested actions to accrue wealth and status. When political issues arise that directly affect them—such as tax subsidies through deductions for their home mortgages or state and local taxes, or student loan debt forgiveness—they rise as one.
As illuminated in the “varsity blues” college admissions scandal, those at the apex of the meritocracy are transmogrifying into a caste, a self-perpetuating aristocracy. They’re largely unaccountable. They’re notably unburdened by a sense of obligation to the nation of which they’re a highly privileged part.
The same people benefitted mightily from the unprecedented “easy money” and artificially-low interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve over the course of the past three decades. Their assets—especially homes and stock—have been massively inflated amid repeated, engineered financial bubbles. The great majority of their fellow citizens, outside the magical meritocratic circle, have been disadvantaged. Those left out include many among the young, the old, the middle- and working class, and new immigrants. The upper-middle-class mindset reaches so far into the political and journalistic communities that this extraordinary state of affairs has gone largely unremarked in public discourse.
—The Public Square Under Threat. Our First Amendment guarantees of free speech are unprecedented and unequalled. They are central to our national identity and institutions. At a hinge moment in history, our public square is under challenge.
Imagine the reaction of early twentieth-century America had John D. Rockefeller purchased the most significant newspaper in Washington, D.C. It surely would have been seen as an outrage, a brazen attempt to attain undue influence over our governing institutions.
Today, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
With the rise of social media platforms, private-sector enterprises are de facto proprietors and operators of much of the public square. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram are among the primary means by which citizens communicate with one another. Each of these platforms combines three unprecedented capacities: instantaneous expression made universally available; eternal preservation of communications; and centralized control of data surrendered by consumers—most of whom don’t comprehend the transaction or the relationship.
The technology companies in the social media space are at the junction of other trends mentioned, including the rise of oligarchy; free-market fundamentalism; financialization; bureaucratization; meretricious meritocracy. As a result, public accountability is, to put it gently, attenuated. We, the People are reduced to cheering on or opposing one billionaire or another to protect our online interests.
Because the social media companies are in the private sphere, they are largely outside the constitutional guarantees of free expression. The First Amendment is a limitation on government power of censorship.
There have been instances of public officials attempting to intervene in the practices of social media companies. Members of Congress and presidential administrations have urged controls over online speech. Their definitions of “disinformation” tend to align with their preferred perspectives.
For the moment, social media realities remain far removed from initial, optimistic hopes for a reinvigorated public square. Expression is self-censored. Speech is worn down by caution, calculation, tentativeness, and timidity. People are understandably averse to risking their livelihoods or community standing because of an errant “tweet” or a “like” on a controversial item. Online gangs engage in search-and-destroy missions. At their most egregious, they’re the digital descendants of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA) or Mao’s Red Guards.
This is not entirely an American or contemporary phenomenon. George Orwell diagnosed it in the first half of the twentieth century. In an essay originally intended as the preface to Animal Farm, he observed:
The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves….
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
Our current circumstances include a new wrinkle: an absence of accountability for safeguarding and policing the public square. Through new communication technologies, influence and control course through shape-shifting networks of individuals and institutions. This privileges those who would use power to impose dogma rather than engage in the messy give-and-take of persuasion.
—Decline of Fellow-Feeling. Theodore Roosevelt saw excessive individualism as a grave threat to the solidarity of the American nation. He was moved to indignation by the riot of materialism rampant in the first Gilded Age.
Roosevelt spoke of the importance of what he called “fellow-feeling”:
Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our national nor or local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object.
As chronicled by journalist Bill Bishop, the contemporary breakdown of solidarity is a cause and effect of the self-sorting of Americans, based on political and cultural affinities. It’s a factor in the decline of competitive elections in many states and localities. Partisan affiliations are increasingly predictable by zip code. Those who are out of sync may feel isolated, even unwelcome.
The lack of fellow-feeling is experienced in mundane interactions in public spaces. In coffee shops, or in common areas in airports, or train and bus stations, in parks, or sidewalks and streets, lack of consideration for others abounds. How often do young or healthy people yield their seats to those with evident physical challenges? How often do individuals heedlessly occupy additional seats or impose noise on others in crowded conditions?
These are surface manifestations of far-reaching fissures. For example, political scientists have identified what they call “lethal mass partisanship.” In 2019, fully 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans acknowledged having harbored the thought that the United States would be “better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Unsurprisingly, many of those respondents were also open to the prospect of violence in response to election defeat.
—Alienation from American History. Foremost among the sources of American solidarity—fellow-feeling—is our shared national narrative. It’s not an accident that many of our most significant leaders have been amateur and professional historians.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the “Use & Abuse of History for Life.” In a timeless admonition, he drew attention to:
The condition of a people which has lost faith in its ancient history and has fallen into a restless cosmopolitan choice and a constant search for novelty after novelty. The opposite feeling, the sense of well being of a tree for its roots, the happiness to know oneself in a manner not entirely arbitrary and accidental, but as someone who has grown out of a past, as an heir, flower, and fruit, and thus to have one’s existence excused, indeed justified, this is what people nowadays lovingly describe as the real historical sense.
For the United States, history is a national security issue. As John Dos Passos wrote, “In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger…we need to know what kind of firm ground other men…have found to stand on.”
For the United States, history is a national security issue. As John Dos Passos wrote, “In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger…we need to know what kind of firm ground other men…have found to stand on.”
TR viewed history as a vital part of citizenship in a democratic republic. He advocated thinking of history as literature. He likely would have welcomed T.S. Eliot’s expression: “The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”
The absence of an historical sense is at the root of many of our current challenges. It fosters excessive individualism and isolation. In turn, this incubates a lack of gratitude. It can yield contradictory, immobilizing sentiments. Those who believe they can comprehend the world largely through their personal, lived experience are operating without the maps on offer from prior generations. They are hobbled by a curious combination of hubris and helplessness.
By contrast, applying history can connect current generations with our ancestors and descendants. It can impart a sense of stewardship for institutions. It can steady us to find our footing when institutions require reconsideration, reform, or replacement.
Civic education can help overcome the tendency to “presentism.” This refers to the error of holding past generations to the standards and knowledge of our time. Otherwise, extraordinary misjudgments mount. Evocative of our unmoored moment, the National Archives is labelling our historical documents with explanations and “warnings” of content they view as unsettling to contemporary sensibilities. Apparently there is no confidence that the Americans they ostensibly serve possess sufficient historical education to judge such things for ourselves.
Our national ideals are subject to rhetorical inversion. Many critics no longer revere and safeguard them as the ultimate source of our national identity. They are reconfigured through the narrowed, distorted aperture of our current moment. That ideals are not fully achieved—which is the definition of ideals—is perversely said to render them illegitimate. One might as well argue that the Ten Commandments be abandoned because they are not always followed.
From there it's a small step to imparting shame in our history. Thus, a public university admonishes that the term “American” should be avoided. Even the removal of controversial monuments may be insufficient in today’s agitated climate. A neo-classical statue of Theodore Roosevelt, dedicated in 1941 (and reflective of its time rather than our own) was taken down from the Museum of Natural History in New York in 2022. Arrangements were made for its transport to a presidential memorial in North Dakota. A group of activists objected, referring to the work as “toxic cultural waste” that must be destroyed.
It’s suggested that a statue honoring the twentieth-century Anglo-American leader, Winston Churchill, be buried to the waist. This proposal distills the self-referential essence of presentism. It expresses the condescension toward heroic figures of history in the most coarse, physical terms. Far from recognizing that greatness in human endeavor is inevitably intermingled with human flaws and limitations, it conveys contempt. It seeks to pull down, even vandalize Churchill’s example. And yet, for all that, it would not enable us to raise ourselves.
—Sunset of Citizenship. Some truths are so commonplace—so essential—that their expression can become drained of power. So it is with American notions of citizenship.
The essence of the American experiment is the assertion of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. Through history, to the present moment, the vast preponderance of the people of the world have been subjects of various kinds. Citizens, by contrast, are entrusted with self-governance.
Each of our three foundings has been conceived and accomplished with renewed understandings of the rights and responsibilities of of We, the People. Thus it is that Theodore Roosevelt’s most quoted speech, the culmination of years of thought and action, is “Citizenship in a Republic.”
A democratic republic such as ours—an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil…..The question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme…. The main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
We have neglected tending to citizenship for decades. Anemic civic education has yielded generations who are woefully ill-informed about the basics of government. Most native-born Americans would likely fail the test administered to new citizens. Many of our oldest educational institutions instruct students to be critics, to deconstruct existing arrangements, without a foundation of history. Such curricula may focus intently on our rights as Americans, yet not direct attention to accompanying obligations.
Simultaneously, the longstanding failure to regulate immigration has resulted in millions living in a disordered twilight. This is regrettable not only for those would-be Americans who are conditioned as lawbreakers, bereft of legal protections. Improvised work-arounds blur the rights and obligations of citizenship generally.
At its best, American citizenship is essential to advancing our ideals. It enables us to effectively serve one another, and to serve the world.
At its best, American citizenship is essential to advancing our ideals. It enables us to effectively serve one another, and to serve the world. Conversely, our abandonment of a highly intentional practice of citizenship has consequences.
Consider the American nurturance of China in the past half-century. Administrations of both of the legacy political parties implemented policies that empowered and emboldened the Communist regime. Such support has been indispensable in China’s emergence as the sole peer competitor to the United States. Financial one-percenters and celebrities, as well as the professional class who serve them, have profited handsomely. Prominent companies combine a blind eye with an open checkbook, ignoring the brutality of the Chinese dictatorship.
In recent years, more and more of the so-called elite have taken a knee for Xi. Craven Hollywood executives routinely accede to CCP demands for censorship of films and other products. Some of the same executives self-righteously proclaim their courage and virtue as they punch down against fellow Americans who do not comply with their preferred cultural and political viewpoints. Universities and NGOs have been suborned. Rising generations might well question why successive United States administrations have not demanded a comprehensive, transparent, public investigation of the origins of the corona virus pandemic.
By contrast, another group of one-percenters sacrifices disproportionately: those who serve in the military, and their families and communities.
The American World Order in Transition
Franklin Roosevelt’s political settlement included what has become known as the “liberal world order.” Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, it has endured over the course of eight decades. In economics and finance it has yielded extraordinary global progress. Millions have overcome poverty. So, too, there has been an extended period of relative peace. The Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union was successfully wrapped up. Transnational institutions have taken root, bolstering hope that ruinous, self-destructive great power competition might be relegated to the ash heap of history.
Momentous events in the 2020s are shaking the world order to its foundational elements. The Russia-Ukraine war has awakened complacent elite opinion to the resurgence and reality of European armed conflict. The stress tests of the global pandemic and rising risks of climate disruption are further revealing the limits of international statecraft.
We might be forgiven for thinking that the current dispensation is beneficent and permanent. United States created the world order in our own image. When we survey it, we see our values in much of what is reflected back. Perhaps this is to be expected of a country that unselfconsciously calls our national baseball championship the World Series.
Other nations understandably believe that our preponderance mandates their enmeshment in arrangements that advance American interests. For all our protestations, others experience a Pax Americana, derived from and succeeding the prior Pax Britannica. The United States is not an empire in the textbook sense. We are not a colonial power. Nonetheless, we have adopted an imperial mindset.
As was said of the British Empire, those who rule the waves set the rules—and waive the rules when it suits them.
We’re the original post-colonial power. Our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted in response to our oppression by the British Empire. History and hard-earned lived experience alerted our founding generation to the dangers that imperial designs pose for a democratic republic.
This is an awkward state of affairs for the United States. We’re the original post-colonial power. Our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted in response to our oppression by the British Empire. History and hard-earned lived experience alerted our founding generation to the dangers that imperial designs pose for a democratic republic.
Everything changed after the Second World War. Americans experienced unprecedented security, economic, financial, and cultural preeminence. When the world changed and other nations rose in the 1970s and 1980s, many of our postwar domestic arrangements and expectations were shaken.
Likewise, our engagement in the world was altered. At some point, when we spoke of American leadership, we came to mean domination. When politicians call for U.S. leadership, odds are that troops and treasure will follow.
This is a long distance from the admonishments of Washington’s Farewell Address. It’s an unspoken yet unmistakable repudiation of John Quincy Adams’s elaboration of Washington’s vision, delivered in a speech on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
The United States has become habituated, by degrees, to a permanent National Security State. This facilitates the intermingling of wartime emergency powers with domestic institutions. The Constitution is stretched to the breaking point by presidents who wish to act abroad without requisite congressional deliberation or citizen participation. Militarization spreads into law enforcement, all the way to the local level. Official secrecy has become enshrined through the ineluctable expansion of intelligence agencies.
President Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of the “military-industrial complex” remain prescient. They are now backed by an additional half-century of experience. The National Security State has merged with the Special Interest State.
In our moment, the premises of the post-war world order are being challenged. Institutions—from the United Nations to the International Monetary Fund and many more—cry out for revision. The reserve currency status of the United States may be at risk. Our trade policies are unsettled.
Our security commitments are so extensive as to be unmanageable. The ever-expanding reach of a dog’s breakfast of public and private and non-governmental bureaucracies has occurred almost without connection to the effectiveness of the United States policies. Our recent record in military engagements—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya—underscores the urgent need for after-action analyses and disciplined reflection.
Looking ahead, the frame of debate set by Franklin Roosevelt, “internationalism” vs. “isolationism,” is no longer sufficient. The United States has no choice other than engagement. The question is what that engagement will entail.
The world order we established and maintain has become so complex as to be highly fragile. The disappointing statecraft of a succession of presidents, of both legacy parties over the past generation, indicates that the system requires a level of sophistication in executive leadership that is unlikely to emerge in our current political system.
The vast extent of our international presence is at once a reflection of our strength and an indication of its precarity. Will the United States lead revision of the liberal international order? Or will we hold things together with baling wire, awaiting the intervention of events and the initiatives of adversaries? Either way, it will require reconsideration of our intertwined domestic and international visions and institutions.
The Next Nationalism
As we seek to comprehend and transcend our present circumstances, there are promising if nascent efforts to recover nationalism. From the right, some advocate “national conservatism.” From the left, others advocate “liberal nationalism.”
These developments prompt the question of whether they take nationalism seriously, on its own terms. Or, recognizing the potential power of nationalism, do they seek to define it into a vehicle to advance their preexisting political agendas?
Each of the three American foundings yielded a new nationalism linked indelibly with the preeminent leaders of the time. George Washington personifies the First Founding; Lincoln the second; Franklin Roosevelt the third. Without question, these are historically consequential individuals who pursued their national visions and instituted them through a revised political settlement.
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to comprehend our nationalism as a top-down project. It’s best understood as an iterative process. Our political leaders negotiate with citizens, learning and adjusting amid kaleidoscopic tumult. Washington, Lincoln, and FDR navigated the ship of state through existential threats and universally acknowledged precarity.
The case of Lincoln is instructive. He is recalled, correctly, as a chief executive of exceptional decisiveness. He wielded his constitutional authority to the limit—indeed, he did not flinch from breaching constitutional bounds as necessary to preserve the Union.
For all that, Lincoln acknowledged that his achievements were not entirely, perhaps even predominantly, in his charge. On April 4, 1864, in correspondence with a Kentucky journalist, Lincoln wrote:
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected.
One can readily imagine Washington or FDR harboring such sentiments.
This history is relevant today.
As in the times of the first three foundings, the United States is at a hinge moment. Old institutions and ways of thinking are breaking down. In the evocative words of demographer Neil Howe, we are entering a “Fourth Turning,” a time of social and political upheaval and renewal amid generational change.
In our terms, Howe’s Fourth Turning may coincide with a Fourth Founding, yielding a new national identity, expressed through a revised political settlement at home and in the world.
In our terms, Howe’s Fourth Turning may coincide with a Fourth Founding, yielding a new national identity, expressed through a revised political settlement at home and in the world.
With our populace polarized and our politics paralytic, it’s easy to understand why people might avert their gaze from the daunting challenge of a Fourth Founding. Perhaps things will sort themselves out. Perhaps a great leader—as of yet unidentified—will appear.
Such wishes are not visions. And visions are not self-executing. The American experiment, from the start, has been built on active verbs: pursuing happiness, securing liberties. Staying in place, awaiting our fate is not an option for us.
In any event, the world will not allow it. After a century of driving international affairs, decline with dignity is not on offer from the hard men of Beijing, Moscow, and other restive, vengeful powers.
We face a moment of truth. We can determine to do the work of creating and instantiating the next American nationalism. Or, should we avert our gaze and ignore the hazards, we may become the executors of the fears of our founders.
America Against America
In Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin urged his fellow delegates to adopt the draft Constitution “with all its faults.” The convention had been closed to spectators, even journalists. As it concluded, Franklin was approached by a throng of citizens. Seeking to understand the unfamiliar, unprecedented provisions of the proposed charter, they asked Franklin what form government had been crafted. The elder statesman’s answer: “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s admonition is evergreen. It reflects his acute awareness of the precarity of the American project. The dangers were not only those arising from the hostility of Great Britain and the resistance of Indians.
The founders acknowledged that the new nation would be an experiment, in three senses. First, there was no historical precedent for a representative democracy of such a great geographic reach and diversity of citizens. Second, its operation would require an acceptance of trial-and-error as the demands of daily life of a growing, bustling populace were reconciled with the universal ideals it proclaimed. Finally, it would continue to evolve, subject to improvement and amendment. This was a persuasive rationale to many, including Franklin, who struggled with the alarmingly anomalous acceptance of chattel slavery.
Some founders, notably including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, foretold that succeeding generations would revisit the entirety of the constitutional arrangements.
Abraham Lincoln picked up their challenge. He responded thoughtfully to Franklin’s warning well before he was an elective politician.
On January 27, 1838, Lincoln was a rangy, twenty-eight-year-old. He spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum of his new city, Springfield, Illinois. His topic: “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Lincoln acknowledged the great gift of the “political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” He acknowledged the contributions of the founding generation—the “lamented and departed race of ancestors.”
He surveyed the threats to American project, including those posed by “some transatlantic military giant.” This was a familiar cause for concern. Europe had been riven by decades of internecine conflicts pulsing outwards from the throbbing trauma of the French Revolution. The United States had been invaded by the foremost naval power, Great Britain, in 1812.
Lincoln looked past such external menaces. The real threat was close at hand:
At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Lincoln’s America is an active verb, not a noun. Our ancestors bequeathed the institutions of a republic, but only citizens cultivating requisite virtue can keep it.
Lincoln’s America is an active verb, not a noun. Our ancestors bequeathed the institutions of a republic, but only citizens cultivating requisite virtue can keep it.
The young lawyer reminded his listeners that as great as the founders’ accomplishment was, it would always be “an undecided experiment.” Successor generations would not face the challenges of 1776. The most ambitious among them could not aspire to comparable distinction “in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others.” Nonetheless, our sense of gratitude to our ancestors and our obligation to rising generations enjoined that we emulate the sacrifice of our founders: “Let every American pledge his life, his liberty, his property, and his sacred honor” to the nation.
Lincoln strove to take up the standard of the generation of 1776. His contemporaries no longer shared “a living history” with the founders, so civic education was a matter of urgency.
Through a series of circumstances no one could have foreseen, citizen Lincoln would emerge as statesman Lincoln. He became the indispensable leader of the Second Founding.
President Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, explored several measures to bring an end to the chattel slavery that underlay the Civil War. The president declared:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history….We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows that we do know how to save it….In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free….We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. [emphases in original]
Lincoln’s calibration of the Second Founding remains resonant. His vision of serving the nation in order to serve the world is evergreen.
From the freedom fighters of Ukraine to the Uighurs of China, the world looks to America. We remain the last best hope of earth.
Will we do our part, forge the Next Nationalism? In the same Message to Congress, Lincoln urged relentless audacity in the face of remorseless challenges:
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Amid the chaos in our midst, we’re approaching a moment of truth. It’s not about America against the Soviet Union, as it was during the Cold War. It’s not about America against China.
Our moment of truth is America against America.
For now, our destiny is in our hands. We possess a degree of self-determination beyond any other nation—and surpassing that of preceding generations of Americans.
How will we diagnose and alleviate the pains afflicting our body politic? Are we experiencing America’s death throes? Or is a new nation struggling to be born?
The answer is unlikely to be found through the calamitous clarity and contingency of foreign war. And it’s unlikely to be delivered from on high here at home, by a leader as yet unidentified.
As with the generation of 1776, the Civil War generation, and the Greatest Generation, the American future depends on us, ordinary citizens bound one to another in an extraordinary, fateful experiment.
Image credits | Statue of Liberty Apocalypse, iStock; Hubble Telescope Arianespace, ESA, NASA, Canadian Space Agency, CNES, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Draft United States Seal, Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; American Progress, John Gast, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; Greek War of Independence v Ottoman Empire, The Sortie of Messologhi, Theodore Vryzakis, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; Broadside, Washington’s Farewell Address, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; Head of Statue of Liberty on Display, Paris World’s Fair, 1878, Albert Fernique, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, ca. 1859, Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Four Freedoms Inscription from Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, National Park Service, No machine-readable author provided, BanyanTree assumed (based on copyright claims), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; “U.S. Wars, Bases, and Expansion Abroad,” Map by Kelly Martin, kmartindesign.com for David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (University of California Press, 2020), used by permission from davidvine.net; “The spirit of 61. God, our country and liberty!!” Currier & Ives, 1861, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, No known restrictions on publication; Union and Confederate Veterans Shaking Hands Across the Stone Wall at the 1938 "Blue and Gray Reunion" at Gettysburg, National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; “One Country, One Destiny,” Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, No known restrictions on publication.
Quite a brilliant piece.
I like this: "Our elected officials are little more than fungible, frenetic, superannuated, special-interest sock puppets."
And this: "Polls reveal that many partisans are entirely misinformed about the views of those across the political divide. We’re not only divided; we’re cowering at the shadows of phantoms of our fevered, manipulated imaginations.”
This literally brought tears to my eyes because the writing is so beautiful:
"Our nationalism is something more. It’s a gift we did not earn. It entails obligations we cannot avoid. It’s first-person plural. It encompasses past-, present-, and future-tenses. It’s an evolving, negotiated narrative. It’s the foundation for a shared identity that fills the gaps and reconciles our ideals and realities of liberty and equality."
I would be lying if I said I felt any kind of optimism at the moment. I don't see how we survive with what forces we have that have overtaken our government. You lay it out brilliantly -- this idea that rich people are now more powerful than our government. I don't see leaders like that either, those three, that's for sure. But I do see war. They came out of war. I guess that will be the thing that finally breaks everything down to start anew.
James, I apologize for taking so long to respond to this "cri de coeur" that so eloquently summarizes many American's feelings about the current state of our political culture. With your permission, I would like to link to it on my New Nationalism website so my followers can read it as well.
I could not agree more with you that we are at a hinge of history and your summary of the previous foundings sets forth why we should still be optimistic. Even in the darkest times, America always finds a way to renew itself by building on its core values of liberty and equal opportunity. History suggests the leaders of the Fourth Founding will be found at the edges of our current political leadership. Lincoln served only one undistinguished term in the House and was a failed Senate candidate when he won the presidency in 1860. Theodore Roosevelt served only one term as governor of New York before he was nominated for Vice President. Dwight Eisenhower had no political experience when he became President in 1952. These three leaders, however, had one thing in common. In their own ways, they were the most famous men of their time because of accomplishments outside of political office. This is why I believe a leader of their vision and stature must come not from within the current political leadership, but from outside of it.
In the meantime, I agree we need to find a way to identify, organize and support such a transformation. Your piece may very well be the preamble to a new Declaration of Independence for such a new revolutionary founding. Thank you for taking the time to prepare it.