Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

I agree with you about the enduring value of these ideas, @BretStephensNYT. I'm not as sure as you are that they will endure in America. But I'm certain that because America existed, America will endure.
nytimes.com/2018/08/31/opi…

Whatever happens now, we've already made our point: a country based on these ideas can exist. It's not a Utopian fantasy. The US, for all its imperfections, was overall an astonishing success.

You're right that billions of people around the world now aspire to these ideals, even if many no longer believe that Americans themselves do.

So whatever happens to America now, even if we succumb to every last one of our corrupt and authoritarian impulses;

even if we decline into complete global irrelevance, the Founders' ideals will live on. They were ideals before the US was founded. They always will be, because they're universal yearnings. What we proved was that they could *work.*

They could work in a vast, multiethnic country--and that country could be, for a long time, the most dynamic, creative, prosperous, and powerful country in all of human history. We proved there was really something to those ideals.

And we proved to the whole world that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could indeed long endure--for more than two centuries, in fact. And yes, billions of people around the world want what we had. .

Everywhere I've been, I've found that even people who loathe America nonetheless want, for their own country, "the good parts" of America--they want freedom of expression, equality; they want the rule of law.

That human beings were capable of inventing America can no more be forgotten than the knowledge that we're able to walk on the moon. No matter how badly we screw it up now, we will never undo the knowledge that there was once a country founded upon those ideals--and it worked.

So even if the US now sinks into tyranny, or descends into a swamp of cynicism and global irrelevance, people will never forget what we managed to achieve since 1776.

No one will ever stop thinking, "If the Americans did it, why can't *we* put those ideals into practice? Why not? What's stopping us?"

"America" isn't American blood and it isn't American soil. It's the ideals.

If Americans themselves come to think it's all about blood and soil, it will be a tragic end to *this chapter* of the American story. But other people, inspired by what we once did, will put our ideals into practice.
And then they'll be America. And America will live on.