On the Fourth of July two years ago, reflecting on some comments made by Abraham Lincoln in 1858, I said:
At the present time, about 248 years after the beginning, the United States is a mighty nation of about 340 million people, and we own and inhabit somewhere near six percent of the world's dry land and an even larger share of the world's habitable land, having added Alaska, Hawaii, and various islands to its bulk, as well as having regularized some borders and territories that were still in flux in Lincoln's day. There were only 32 states in 1858, Minnesota having just been admitted in May. We are the world's fourth largest country by land area, the world's third largest country by population. We cover just under two percent of the entire earth's surface and have just under five percent of the world's population. We are by far the world's wealthiest country, having about one and a half times the total wealth of the second wealthiest country. We are an agricultural superpower, the largest agricultural exporter by monetary amount (about eight percent of the entire world market) and the second largest by tonnage; we are an industrial superpower, the second largest manufacturing exporter (about 16 percent of the entire world market). And, of course, nobody needs to be reminded that we are a military superpower.To which can be added many other things. We are the only nation to have put footsteps on the Moon, an extraordinary achievement that cries out for a national epic that has not yet been written. We made the airplane viable, industrialized the automobile, made personal computing successful, created the Internet, invented GPS. It has been a busy quarter of a millenium. May those who are alive in 2276 look back at something even more impressive than we have seen.
But all of this is in many ways secondary, because none of these is the greatest achievement of the United States. The greatest achievement of the United States is the United States itself. There is a core of who we are that stands on its own, and would still stand even if we were considerably less overwhelming, a set of ideas forged by fire and preserved by tradition and passed down from the generation of the Founders: popular sovereignty, federation, division of powers, natural rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness, civil equality, constitutional respect, unity of nation, pragmatic daring, republican vigilance for liberty, appeal to a higher and more moral law. The labels are abstract, but the actual working is very concrete. In the century in which the United States was born, the British Constitution was seen as the wonder of the world, a strangely impossible mix of balanced oppositions in a patchwork that worked so well that it seemed nearly miraculous. The United States is also very much a near-miracle. But of course the chaos of the British Constitution was not really a chaos; all of the apparent inconsistency was the complexity required to do justice to the one key original idea that the Englishman, even the ordinary Englishman with no title, truly mattered, expanded to the notion that free Britons never would be slaves. By happenstance and providence and very occasional clear sight, and despite all its mess and imperfection, it had built up in such a way as to make that idea breathtakingly visible. Much the same, I think, can be said of us.
We are certainly no Kingdom of Ends, but we are also no mere ideal in a philosopher's head. The difficulty in this world is to maintain a clear view of the importance of the person, both as individual and as in community, that doesn't flatten the person into a mere idea within a mere scheme. Attempts to build a society that can do this generally fail; the best successes are dim and wavering and muddled. But if there is one thing that I hope will still be true in another 250 years, it is that we still capture some of it. May it be!