The World's Last, Best Hope 🇺🇸
07/04/26
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced.1
The USA is turning 250 today. Our country was a regional power immediately upon conception, rose to become a world power in just over a century, and ascended to a superpower after winning the World Wars. There has never been a more rapid climb to dominance in history, nor a more accomplished nation. Being an American is a singular, privileged joy. We have no peers.
However, this country is far from perfect. It possesses a gritty, sometimes brutal history. Our institutional founding doctrines were fundamentally flawed. Both our federal and state governments have committed irreconcilable sins. The Founding Fathers were often hypocrites, and our subsequent leaders have rarely behaved better. Injustice and suppressions of liberty are too common in our records. We have such deep scars for a nation still so young…
And yet it proves no matter how many mistakes we make, we can improve if we keep trudging forward. Inch by inch, amendment by amendment, person by person: we continue to build the last, best hope of Earth.
Our current institutional crises are far from the most difficult we’ve faced, and I am confident we’ll overcome them with time and diligence. We must - because this country’s impact far exceeds her borders. America is the oldest constitutional democracy in the world. If we stumble, the free world stumbles. But when we excel, prosperity follows.
America itself is an ideal - the dream of a land where all men are created equal and free. Our pursuit of these goals has served as an inspiration at times and a warning at others. But our failures serve as course correction, and ever onwards we march.
Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.2
We’ll get there.
If we continue to work for it.
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.3