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American Political Dreams

Americans are children of the dream. The dream lives when Dr. Martin Luther King tells a million followers on the Washington Mall, “I have a dream”. When Senator Ted Kennedy, after the death of his brother, the fallen American President, says that “The dream lives on: the dream shall never die”. When a young Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, writes of the “Dreams of My Father”. The American dream is the dominant political narrative, the secular national religion. It interprets the meaning of political lives. America’s political identity lives in the dream. The dream begins with a story of virgin birth of a great nation in a “new world”, a wilderness waiting to awaken at the touch of the redeemer. American heroes begin an epic journey, settling first the shores and then the interior of a great new continent. Explorers and colonists seek new lands. The Founding Fathers follow. They are the secular saints, the magic people of a new democracy.

Thomas Jefferson writes a Declaration of Independence that tells Americans that they are citizens of a great nation, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Founding Fathers craft the Constitution of political genius that embeds those rights in larger vision of institutional democracy. They bequeath to their less political heirs the blessings of freedom. Later generations shape a more perfect union and extend the blessings of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, recalls that “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He resolves that “this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Statue of Liberty welcomes later refugees. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the inscribed Emma Lazarus poem exhorts, “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me”

The dream of America also extends a story of peace and prosperity to American foreign policy. The United States does not seek foreign adventures. George Washington in his farewell address famously warns against entangling alliances. And President Monroe’s doctrine extends American protection from foreign rulers to all of the Americas. The United States fights the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American War against imperial Britain and Spain. US purchases of Louisiana and Alaska bring new lands into America from French and Russian sovereigns. The Mexican war pushes back against imperial ambitions, later articulated in the reign of Maximilian I of Austria.

American Political Shadows

The American political dream is a searchlight. It illuminates the brightest political aspirations and successes of Americans’ best selves.  It is the warm story that about the sunny uplands of a magnificent continent, America the beautiful.

In the dream, Americans are children of light. Yet shadow stories recount that they are also children of darkness. The light shows the beauty in political lives, but also highlights the dark, cold valleys. It shows the way, but also illuminates failures. There are ugly hollows in the national political landscape where the world is not reborn anew, but the present and future repeat the cruel experiences of older worlds. Life is disrespected, liberty caged in, and the pursuit of happiness a mirage. If the dream exists, it is far and faint. The best leaders and the best natures call those who hear them to the dream, and they may respond, but the dream itself does not always and everywhere answer back.

Sometimes Americans see themselves as depicted by the dreams; at other times, darker, shadow selves appear. In Oliver Stone's film Nixon, President Nixon, on the eve of his resignation, wanders around in the White House. He ends up in front of Kennedy's portrait, remarks: "When they look at you, they see themselves how they'd like to be, and when they look at me, they see themselves as they are."

The dream of American democracy begins in the self evident truths of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The shadow account of America recalls that the new world was not terra nullia, an empty land without inhabitants. The dream world masks America’s dark origins in worlds of........

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