Make America America Again

 I offer an excerpt from a podcast The Four Narratives That Now Dominate American Life, which I cannot access but which is spot on with my thinking, except I disagree that this country has ever hit the mark set by our Declaration of Independence. For that reason, our greatness remains to be made.:

Andrew Keen: One of the chapters [in your book] is called “Make America Again,” rather obviously a play on “Make America Great Again.” What, in your view, was America? What captures its spirit, its uniqueness? What do we want to return to, or get forward to?

George Packer: That line actually comes from a Langston Hughes poem from 1935, and so I used it, yes, in order to make America great again. What Hughes meant was make America what it should be, not go back to anything because we’ve never been what we should be. To me, the core of America is the promise of equality, which is the first key word in the Declaration of Independence and which Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed in his great study of American democracy as the central driving passion in Americans. The thing we are most motivated by is a desire to be equal with others.