Peggy Noonan, who has been a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal for nearly a quarter of a century, is publishing, November 18, a new book called A Certain Idea of America.
She published an excerpt from her book Friday on The Free Press. Here is a sample from that excerpt that is remarkably refreshing after all the doom and gloom we’ve heard recently about America.
She writes:
The famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs most happily translates as: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I first read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America.
What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history, I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance: How did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right, different but complementary gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.
We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, that where you start doesn’t dictate where you wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence, and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution. And in the forging through and the holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.
It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.
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