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As Vice President Kamala Harris barrels toward the end of her bid to become the first woman, the first Black woman, and the first woman of Asian descent elected president of the United States, one of her oft-repeated refrains on the campaign stump is that she is running to fulfill “the promise of America.”
It’s a catchy slogan, to be sure. But it is also more than that.
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Like the aspirational goals of our nation’s deeply flawed founders (most of them were slaveholders, after all), “the promise of America” is about our never-ending quest to achieve our constantly evolving democratic ideals.
President Barack Obama calls it the “pursuit of a more perfect union.”
The perfection of this democratic experiment, of course, will never be achieved, but that’s beside the point. Instead, it’s the honest pursuit of what a multicultural and representative democracy can accomplish that should inspire us to live up to our visionary expectations.
What is at stake now, and beyond this presidential election, is whether we will continue that pursuit or turn our backs on all that we’ve managed to achieve.
All empires fade. And like humanity’s greatest empires, one day the United States, too, will be but one more memorable chapter in the human story.
But count me among the multitudes of my fellow citizens, and the countless immigrants who aspire to join our ranks, who want to see this thing called America live another day.
As deeply flawed as we are, I still believe this country represents something distinctly profound — a governmental system that has served as a foundation for a body politic that faces each day as if what we’ve accomplished so far has brought us one step closer to our noblest ideals.
To call that the “American Dream” is too facile, given that, for too many of us, the phrase has come to be defined by material gain or contrived social status instead of our principled democratic ideals and the need for basic human compassion.
Still, there is something to the idea that what the United States has achieved in its nearly 250-year history is unique. For better or worse, we are the single most powerful and wealthiest nation in human history whose election system, notwithstanding today’s flood of disinformation and misinformation, remains the envy of the free world.
America actually is great. Perfect? Far from it. But by almost any objective historical measure, this is a great nation.
The question is whether we can sustain and build upon all that we’ve accomplished.
I believe we can.
I obviously do not speak for all Americans. But I think I can speak for tens of millions of my fellow citizens who still believe “the Promise of America” is worth pursuing.
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