Let’s say you had to write something nice about America. Partly because somewhere deep down you believe it, but mostly because your friend of 35 years was the editorial director of Assouline, and the writer he hired for a coffee table book called “America: The Imagination of a Nation” disappeared, and he was sending the book to the printer in three days, and he offered you a bunch of money. Here’s a condensed version of what I typed, plus a few bad jokes because I got bored while cutting it down. Happy birthday. 
Ancient Athens: 186. United Kingdom: 194. Switzerland: 178. No competitive, representative democracy had ever endured for a quarter of a millennium. 
But our country has not merely endured for 250 years. It’s prevailed. Every year, Gallup creates the Potential Net Migration Index, asking people around the world if they want to leave their country and, if so, where they most want to go. The United States has always come in first. Even now. It almost always beats the next three countries combined. And the country in second place is soon going to be our 51st state. USA! USA! USA!¹ The United States has prevailed because there was a hidden feature embedded in democracy’s code. You could not only pick your leaders. You could become one of those leaders. Every kid is told they can be the president. We even tell this to girls.
This idea encompassed far more than politics. Abolishing aristocracy meant that anyone could own land. Or a factory. Or start a movement. Or write a novel, one that might be so important it would be called not only “great” and “American” but “The.” The American Dream shored up the weaknesses in our system. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison fretted about the poor voting to seize the rich’s property. What Madison didn’t realize was that his scenario would never happen because most Americans are sure they’re about to be the rich ones. A 2022 Harris poll found that 44 percent of all Americans believe they could become billionaires. That’s 43.99962% more of America than will become billionaires. But the American Dream isn’t really about money, as much as it seems like it is. We might use the phrase “Horatio Alger” as a shorthand for “rags-to-riches,” but his 1860s young adult novels were about how Ragged Dick improves himself from a homeless 14-year-old shoeshine boy to a well-respected middle-class clerk. Which is an amazing accomplishment for a guy whose name would keep him from being well respected in the adult film industry. The phrase “The American Dream” was coined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of America, in which he worried about the country surviving both the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe.
The American Dream isn’t even about attaining your fullest stature. The dream is process, not product. John Locke enumerated our natural rights as “life, liberty, and estate.” Sure, that’s a dream, owning a house and a yard. But as a slogan, “life, liberty, and estate” doesn’t inspire. Am I abandoning my extended family, my language, and my food with actual spices in it to get on a sea-sickening six-month boat ride for a house and a yard? No, but in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tweaked Locke’s “estate” to “the pursuit of happiness.” I’d ride across the Atlantic in a jet ski for the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson didn’t say Americans were entitled to happiness itself. Happiness isn’t inspiring. It doesn’t offer purpose. Happiness is a two-week beach vacation, max. The pursuit of happiness is active. It’s the chance to express yourself, to create, to be someone, be someone, be someone. 
The American Dream is about joy. It’s Elvis’s hips being uncontainable by network television. It’s moving fast and breaking things in Silicon Valley. It’s Nike demanding you “Just Do It” without caring what “it” is. It’s a little reckless, a lot of self-expression, and more than a little bit of selfishness. When Americans do come together, they do it with the cockiness of the American Dream. When Quincy Jones gathered the greatest group of musicians ever in one recording studio to raise money for the Ethiopian famine in 1985, he posted a note on the entrance that said, “Leave your ego at the door.” With a healthy dose of American ego, they gave their song a title that wasn’t altogether incorrect: We Are The World. Which is why we can’t find any other country on a map. We’ve mostly exported that joy through products that reflect our desire to move fast and alone: jeans, fast food, soda, rock and roll, cars, superheroes, the Internet. But hopefully, some people will hear our speeches. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded more than 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial that they “were guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And that pursuing that pursuit is a great purpose.
There’s a less important speech given in 1964. The Republicans asked the 53-year-old actor and corporate spokesman Ronald Reagan to tape a speech for their televised convention. He recorded a talk he’d been giving around the country so often that he just called it “The Speech.” The killer section, the one that launched his political career, went like this:
Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for a place not to need escaping from. It’s much longer for a place that people want to escape to.
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