Greatness
A nation adrift needs ambition and purpose.
The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, when I was a few months into first grade. I think I remember seeing people standing on the wall and cheering on the nightly news, but that could be a later memory spliced in. I’m sure I didn’t understand the event’s significance, but I do remember hearing my parents and their friends and my teachers talk about it, and the feeling of awe and celebration. Even at that age, I could tell that something big had happened, and that we were on the winning team.
That wasn’t surprising. As far as I knew then, America always won.
Like many Americans, I was blindsided by Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. How could half the country have chosen someone so manifestly unfit for the office, so saturated with scandal? It made sense to me when he lost in 2020, and I was foolishly unprepared again for his victory last year. There is nothing redeeming about him or his presidency, but that’s not true of the people who chose him—they’re people I grew up with, people I get along with, often people I like. What do they see in him?
We’ve been given answers to that: racism, sexism, xenophobia, grievance. Those factors are absolutely real, and many of the President’s supporters adopt them expressly, but I don’t believe they’re enough to win a majority of the country.
Similarly, I believe that rising costs were a deciding factor in 2024, as every poll tells us. But, they explain how the balance tipped in Trump’s favor, not how a candidate with his record got close enough to win. Inflation is not new and has never led Americans to abandon democracy before. 51% of Americans didn’t choose a twice-impeached felon who tried to steal an election and promised to rule like a dictator because of the price of eggs.
In the months since November, I’ve started to believe in a different answer, one that was always in plain view: Trump appealed to Americans’ longing for national greatness. That appeal is easy to dismiss, as I have, as at best an empty slogan on a hat and at worst nostalgia for a time when the country was less free and less fair. But it touches something deeper than that.
In the twentieth century, America was ascendant. We defeated autocrats, beat a depression and built a strong middle class, surged ahead in science and exploration, and dramatically expanded freedom and equality at home. Much of that progress came through deep and divisive struggle, but we learned to celebrate that too. I grew up learning about my country’s achievements, proud that we were always striving to be better and always ready to lead.
We’ve lost our way in this century. It’s easy to name our shared traumas—September 11, decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, the opioid epidemic, COVID-19. It’s hard to name our shared victories—what’s our “I have a dream,” or “One giant leap for mankind,” or “Tear down this wall?” We live in the shadow of past accomplishments. At the same time, we see power and wealth consolidating for a few, while opportunity, security, and health are increasingly out of reach for the rest. The building blocks of an upwardly-mobile life—college, home ownership, childcare—are impossibly expensive, and so we are drowning in debt. We’ve enjoyed remarkable technological advancements, but they’re complicated by everything from digital addiction to the threat of automation-driven job loss to the enormous wealth and unaccountable influence of their creators. Democracy is in retreat around the world, our adversaries are rising, and problems like climate change seem beyond our capability. That feeling I had as a child, that I shared with millions of Americans, is gone.
What happened? That’s an enormous question, but I’ll offer a partial answer. When the wall fell, it felt like the height of the American era. Instead, we were nearing the end. Global struggle had motivated so much of our effort, and we emerged from it without a mission. We collapsed into stagnation and polarization, and our accomplishments have been swallowed by the divisions between us.
For many Americans, and certainly for me, this country is more than a government, a homeland, or a shared history. It is a source of identity, and even something like faith. We’re proud when our country is striving for greatness, and restless when it is adrift. Americans feel the pain of a lost job or high prices at the grocery store, but on top of these private worries is the sense that they reflect a broader, national failure.
The President’s era-defining intuition was that Americans wanted so deeply to reverse that decline that we would risk anything, even our democracy. He spoke to that feeling, and mainstream Democrats didn’t, and still haven’t. Voters chose the candidate with the wrong solution over a party that couldn’t see the problem.
Democrats can’t win until that changes. Americans voted for transformation and for the promise of broad national renewal, and that’s what we need to deliver if we want to win them back and end this era.
Instead, we’re narrowing the party’s focus to affordability, and specifically to healthcare, since it’s the issue where voters already trust us. This is political austerity. In a transformative moment, after bleeding support for a decade, we can’t afford to hide in a safe and familiar platform, but Democrats—from career politicians to confrontational outsiders—are doing exactly that. This administration is reckless and cruel enough that we may still eke out a partial victory in 2026, but we’ll show up to 2028 as the party of the past, still missing the point.
We need Americans to trust that we will make daily life better, but also that we see the bigger picture. We should promise lower costs and better services, but also inspiration and a sense of possibility.
My platform, a New American Century, is my effort to do that. I want to accelerate innovation and growth, lead the fight for freedom around the world, and expand care for everyone, not only because they’re the right things to do, but because they can reignite our shared purpose. I want my country to be ambitious—not as a candidate, but as a citizen and a father. I want my children to live in a world where progress seems possible and where they have the conviction, as I did at their age, that their country is pushing with all its strength toward the future. I want them to learn in school about our accomplishments, not just those of past generations, and to inherit a country that lets them make their own.
That’s the kind of platform we need if we want to rise to the moment, turn around our sinking approval ratings, and put the country back on track. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy sell to Democrats today.
For one thing, putting greatness at the center of a campaign sounds like the nationalism we abhor on the other side. I agree, but only because we’ve let them claim patriotism and national ambition. The President has twisted the idea of American greatness into bigotry and division at home and amoral opportunism abroad, and I want it back. The New Deal, the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the Peace Corps, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts: our country is greatest when we are broad-minded and generous and when, as individuals and as a nation, we support the success of others.
To many Democrats, greatness will be too abstract a goal. There’s a patronizing assumption there: people, and particularly the working class, only vote (or should only vote) for their material interests. In the last few months, I’ve heard countless Democratic politicians say that people won’t care about big ideas until their basic needs are met. If that were true, only the wealthy would be at church on Sundays. It’s precisely when daily life is precarious that we most need hope and greater possibility, and a narrow, incremental agenda can’t deliver.
Similarly, Democrats love to demand greater specificity. Of course we should be specific, but a lack of specificity is not why we lose. In fact, it’s the opposite. We lose because the other side offers a simple, forceful idea and we offer an eighty-page PDF. I am not worried that we’ll fail to offer specifics, since there is a network of outstanding academics, think tanks, and staffers working on them every day. I’m worried we don’t have an idea at the center.
How do we imagine the future? Is it the long era of democratic decay and national decline that this administration promises? Is it a return to the pre-Trump normal of crisis management and incremental improvement? Or is it a period when we achieve breakthroughs, advance the human condition, and find shared purpose again? We have to fight for that future—not because we believe progress is assured, but because it can’t happen without a sense of possibility. We have to fight for American greatness.
