The golden age of America
The founding of the United States of America is in the future, not in the past.
America is pursuit.
And pursuit, by nature, is about the future. It is about what could be.
The Founder and Framers knew this. They drew up a crude blueprint and a rough sketch. They admitted that what they designed was imperfect. Incomplete. Unfinished.
But they were OK with this for two reasons.
First, they wanted to give the generations that followed the best chance to keep up the pursuit.
The pursuit of what?
An idea.
Liberty and justice for all.
The Founders and Framers knew that those who came before them and that their own generation failed to live up to that idea. They knew that it would be up to future generations to find a way to live up to the American idea.
Second, the Founders and Framers were OK with leaving us an incomplete and imperfect blueprint because they feared that future generations would look too much to the past. The Founders and Framers saw the past as a long, sad story of the human race failing to live up to the idea of “liberty and justice for all.” While other nations gilded and glorified the past, the Founders and Framers wanted Americans to always look to the future for inspiration.
In sum, the Founder and Framers hoped not to build monuments to the past, but to be the first heat in a generations-long relay race in pursuit of an idea that would always be ahead of us.
For this reason, I can say that America has no “golden age” in its past. The Founders and Framers would say that our golden age must always be in our future. That is because “liberty and justice for all” is an idea that must always be pursued and worked out with each new generation. We have not yet come close to perfecting that American idea. That is the mission set before us as Americans. Not economic prosperity. Not military might. “Liberty and justice for all.” That idea applies as much to the world beyond our borders as it applies to everything inside them.
As Americans, we must be suspicious of leaders who say that our future should look like our past. Those leaders misunderstand the idea of America. They mistake America for an established and finished fact to be found someplace in history. The Founders and Framers would warn us against leaders such as those.
As Americans this Independence Day, let us look to the future. Let us commit ourselves once more to the pursuit. Let us join hands with each other and look each other in the eye and make a promise–the promise our Founders and Framers hoped we would make: We will believe in the future. We will keep exploring the frontiers of the ideas that made America. Together, we will keep straining and working to make a “more perfect union,” a nation that is “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”