Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/With all the contentiousness in the U.S. today, I thought revisiting what a European immigrant, Peter Drucker, thought about the U.S. during the 1930s was worth some tweets. All that follows comes from his book "Adventures of a Bystander."

2/ "America was promises, said Archibald MacLeish in a poem of 1939 that sold by the thousands...what set America apart...was precisely that it was not a "country" but a "Constitution." The promises were political and social. The "American Dream" is an ideal society;

3/and the American genius is political...America was, and is, the only country that has a politician for its public saint: Abraham Lincoln...And one becomes an American citizen by swearing allegiance to abstract principals, to a "Constitution..." America is not a nation

4/like any other, not a "country"--it is a creed. It was the one point on which the New Deal and its enemies agreed...[not] over whether this or that measure was right but whether it was "American" or "un-American..." The American Creed can also easily degenerate into bathos,

5/ bragging, and populist ranting, and often has...But the American Creed is also Lincoln's "Last Best Hope." And it is the American Creed, of course, that again and again has attracted the European to this country. Only the European so attracted soon ceases to be a European.

6/[discussing American prejudice against blacks, jews, catholics, the Irish, and Italians, Drucker says] "It's sheer madness, I reported to one of my English publishers, Brendan Bracken of the Financial Times...No, said Bracken, it's not madness. It's worse.

7/There is recovery from madness. It's tribalism and it paralyzes society in the end."

Drucker's book demonstrates the greatness and the pitfalls of "the American Experiment" and as disillusioned as I am by the current political race to the bottom, I still believe that

8/as a people, we will somehow get it right.

And I will end with one final question: Why, with all the turmoil in American society today, do the best and the brightest minds of the world STILL want to live, work and raise a family here?

9/ It won't last forever. We need to get it together again and see if there is a greater strength in those things that unite us, rather than seethe about those on which we disagree.

10/ As Churchill is reputed to have said: "The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted."

We're exhausting all the other possibilities, time to shift gears.