Make America Young Again

(February 2024. Mojave Desert. Beautiful two-page essay on the essence of America & rediscovering America’s youth. This will form the new intro to ‘Refind, Refine, Redefine, Refound America’ (https://beatinpaths.com/2023/04/30/refind-refine-redefine-refound-america/), written in Fall 22′ & Spring ’23. Stands wonderfully on its own.)

Make America Young Again

Once, America was a child, a new story which imagined no past at its back and a future of infinite possibilities ahead. It was open to anything, endlessly creative and adaptable, ready to become anyone. America represented the right to recreate oneself. We declared independence from the past, throwing off the weight of history to make our own destiny. America embraced change, experimentation, novelty, progress. The essence of America was the ever-springing Fountain of Youth.

But these days, America feels old. Everyone can feel it. It’s not just because the hands on the levers of power all seem to be elderly, and it’s not just because More than 1 in 6 Americans now 65 or older as U.S. continues graying. America’s sense of senescence permeates across multiple levels of metaphor. Our culture, our government, our institutions feel old, enervated, ossified. This is not necessarily a function of mere years— many elders can preserve a childlike spark of curiosity in their hearts. To become truly old is to become stuck in our ways, path dependent, the narrowing of water into well-carved ruts. 

Paths of experience carve most deeply into human psyches during times of trauma and crisis. Thus, the man who tells the same stories of his youthful struggles over and over, a man who hasn’t been able to kick most of the habits he formed in his 20s and 30s. His adaptations to the old world worked well enough, so his mind no longer feels the need to adapt to the ever-new world. The FDR era of the Depression and Second World War was our last true crisis; America recreated itself to overcome the adversity, a New Deal was struck, and we have been stuck with those institutions, expectations, and ways of being as a nation ever since. 

For the last 80 years, America’s debates have been confined— politically, culturally, imaginatively— within the invisible parameters left behind by this era: the right pushing back on some of the promises of the New Deal, the left struggling to expand or merely maintain it. The metal, heated by crisis, cooled into a strong shape. That sword stayed sharp for the first couple decades after forging, but now it is rusty. Those who wielded it are gone, and it is no longer the right tool for the task. We’ve settled into a false sense of a ‘permanent normal’— that history is over, that the institutions our grandfathers built are final.

Here’s the thing about the world: it always changes. But aging people tend to more and more stay the same. Humans have a lifespan of forgetting and remembering, a trade over time of fluid intelligence for crystallization. While every individual who makes this deal inevitably dies, tribes can be forever reborn. This is why children are precious. To be a child is to see a new world. To be a child is to be a new world.

The true genius of America is that childlike spirit, which the Founders were wise enough to build into the very DNA of the nation they were birthing. The Constitution is a living document, a self-improving government, the first of its kind. We are expected to edit it. Certain Founders believed that every generation should rewrite the Constitution for themselves to adapt to the needs of the time from fresh points of view; only then, they reasoned, would people truly be self-governed by the living, not the dead; ruled by reason and right rather than power and the past. This was truly revolutionary. But left untended, the inertia of history regains the upper hand. Can you name off the top of your head the last time we added an amendment to the Constitution?

The essence of America worth preserving is precisely this declaration of independence from the past. Thus, paradoxically, genuine American conservatism and genuine American progressivism converge. The true American conservative conserves the torch of progress lit by our ancestors; the fire is always the same fire, different. Fuel must be added; old things must change to stay truly themselves. 

America is a living thing, a child always growing. Our Founding fused the principle of Experience (laws, institutions, a written Constitution) with the principle of Innocence (openness, reshaping beliefs in the face of reality, embracing one’s own folly and imagination), and the result is this magical superorganism that can recreate itself. And, just as with a hypothetical self-improving AI, the sky’s the limit for an autopoietic America that remembers how to be young. We are like a tree that can prune and water itself. Individuals, psychologically, must water all rings of their tree; to be authentically myself, I must integrate and honor my baby self, my 5 year old self, my 10 year old self, and so on up through the rings of this aching 25 year old spine. So, too, with nations. America grew up too fast. We have remembered too many things, and forgotten what’s most important. To make America young again is to honor the spirit of the seed: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” 

That is another sense in which America is a child— we are, in part, responsible for raising it. In democracy, we are all each other’s children. To love our neighbors as ourselves is to see the child in them, to recognize the same child in us. This is the way to weave a more perfect union.

An invisible halo of light radiates around the head of every human baby; this is the shine of the future. The bell of the universe is forever ringing with the pure laughter of a playing child. To hear it is to realize we are already saved. The sequoia seed of who we are has been replanted. It is already a New World.

America will be young again.