What Hope Looked Like
I am a child of immigrants, born and raised in the United States. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I absorbed an unwavering belief in certain truths about America. I believed the country could always be improved. I believed Americans worked together to make that happen. I believed our commitment to democracy, plurality, and accountability was unshakable. I believed the rule of law came first, and that improving the systems delivering transparency, value, and accountability was our governing focus. These weren’t abstract political concepts. They were the foundation of what it meant to be American.
It wasn’t until I traveled to my parents’ home country of Sri Lanka as a young person that I understood how unusual this confidence was. The lifestyle differences were striking, but what affected me most deeply was encountering a settled hopelessness I had never known in America. Not just poverty or political instability, but something more fundamental: a resignation that the system was what it was, that ordinary people were not its authors, and that the distance between the governed and the governing was simply a fact of life. People survived. They adapted. But they did not, in any widespread way, seem to believe they could change the architecture of their own societies.
America, by contrast, carried something I had not previously been able to name. Imperfect, contradictory, often frustrating, the country nonetheless embodied an active, almost combative conviction that it belonged to its people and that its people could reshape it. This was the American quality that struck me as genuinely exceptional, the one I had grown up inside without recognizing.
That quality was hope. Hope that carries an obligation to act.
In 2025, I felt like the country died. I felt I had been wrong about all of it.
For many Americans, that hope has eroded and evaporated. Understanding why matters more than mourning. American hope was never just a feeling. It was supported by systems: systems of governance that made citizen participation meaningful, systems of information that made informed participation possible. Those systems have broken down. And as they have broken, the hope they once sustained has broken with them.
This is my attempt to diagnose how that happened by examining the breakdown of civic infrastructure, the information and governance systems that once made democratic participation meaningful. I’ve written elsewhere about how 50 years of economic myths delivered Americans into technofeudalism. This essay examines the civic dimension of that collapse: how the systems that sustained hope in self-governance have broken down, and what rebuilding would require.
The Founding as Infrastructure
The American Revolution was an act of design, not just rebellion. The founders didn’t just declare independence. They built a system to make the relationship between citizens and government real and ongoing.
The Declaration of Independence, the 1776 document that announced America’s break from Britain, says governments get “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The Constitution that followed was how they made that consent more than words. It was the machinery to make it work in practice.
Take the First Amendment. Free speech, free press, freedom to assemble and petition the government – these weren’t decorative. They were infrastructure. They were the channels citizens needed to stay informed, organize around shared problems, and hold power accountable.
The founders understood protest not as a threat to order but as essential feedback infrastructure. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.” The right to assemble, to petition, to protest – these weren’t concessions. They were designed channels through which citizens could warn their government when it strayed from their consent. This is democracy’s feedback loop built into the architecture.
James Madison, one of the Constitution’s primary architects, understood that disagreement was inevitable in a free society. Federalist 10, one of a series of essays written to explain and defend the new Constitution, lays this out clearly: people will form factions, they will fight over competing interests, and that’s normal. The constitutional system was designed to handle that conflict productively rather than suppress it.
The checks and balances between branches. Representative democracy. Independent courts. These weren’t philosophical preferences. They were deliberate design choices meant to prevent any single interest from capturing government permanently.
Some infrastructure was built through precedent rather than written rules. When George Washington stepped down after two terms, the act was revolutionary – leaders simply did not voluntarily give up power. When John Adams lost the 1800 election and peacefully transferred power to his political opponent Thomas Jefferson, he established what would become foundational infrastructure: the peaceful transfer of power between rivals. This wasn’t in the Constitution. It became infrastructure through practice, through leaders choosing to honor the system over their own ambitions.
The system was also, from the beginning, built on compromise. The Constitution itself was a negotiated document: imperfect, requiring each side to give up something for a shared political life to be possible. The idea that a nation of profoundly different people, with different religions, different economies, different cultures, and different visions of the good life, could govern themselves together was never assumed to be easy. It was understood to be difficult, and the constitutional structure was the attempt to make that difficulty manageable. Pluralism – living alongside difference – was not an afterthought. It was the founding problem the entire system was designed to solve.
As I explored in The Politics of Stakeholder Society, this battle over who deserves stakeholder status has been woven into American society from the very beginning. The most fundamental expression of this divide was slavery, which represented the starkest possible version of conditional stakeholding: human beings categorically excluded from any form of social membership based on race. The founding generation’s compromise with slavery embedded conditional stakeholding into the Constitution itself. This foundational contradiction, between universal principles and conditional practice, has never been fully resolved.
The founders understood something essential: you cannot teach every citizen to think deeply about governance, but you can build that thinking into systems. The constitutional structure embeds their hard-won insights about competing interests, power, and accountability into systems that any citizen can use. You do not need to reinvent the wheel every generation. This is why they built infrastructure rather than just writing philosophy.
This is the infrastructure of hope: the systems that make action meaningful. Functioning systems give citizens reason to believe engagement matters. Broken systems take that reason away.
Hope in Action: What Functional Systems Looked Like
American history shows that sustained collective action has repeatedly achieved outcomes that seemed impossible when they started. But these achievements did not happen in a vacuum. They happened within a context where the basic infrastructure of self-governance, however imperfect, was still working.
The abolition movement succeeded in part because it could organize publicly, publish freely, and build coalitions across state lines. The information environment, for all its biases and limitations, allowed activists to make their case to a broad public and shift opinion over time. Women’s suffrage advocates sustained their campaign for decades, building organizations, publishing newspapers, and lobbying legislators, all within a system where those activities could add up to political change. The labor movement secured workplace protections through strikes, organizing, and political advocacy that connected directly to getting laws passed.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when Black Americans organized to end legal segregation and secure equal rights, provides the clearest example. Activists used sustained campaigns of protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and civil disobedience. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a year-long refusal to use segregated public transit in Alabama, became a defining moment. The sit-in movement spread to dozens of cities. Freedom Riders, activists who rode interstate buses into segregated Southern states to challenge segregation laws, faced brutal violence.
But critically, these actions were visible. Television brought the violence of segregation into American living rooms. Newspapers carried the moral argument. The connection between citizen action and public awareness was intact: imperfectly, unevenly, but it worked. That visibility is what created the political pressure that made landmark legislation achievable: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
Each of these movements succeeded, and they expanded the circle of who belonged to the American political project. They did not shrink the country. They made it larger. And they did so through the very mechanisms the founders built: citizens organizing, petitioning, protesting, and demanding that the gap between stated ideals and lived reality be closed. The systems worked, not perfectly, but well enough to translate sustained collective will into political change.
This same framework of economic security enabling political action remains central to any path forward. As I argue in Introducing Opportunity Economics, when people have healthcare, education, housing stability, and baseline income security, they’re freed to take meaningful risks: start businesses, pursue education, build community, or engage in sustained political action without being forced into survival mode.
The Break: How the Infrastructure Came Apart
The systems that once supported American civic engagement have not disappeared overnight. They have degraded through a combination of technological disruption, institutional erosion, and the deliberate actions of interests that benefit from a less informed, less engaged citizenry. Understanding this degradation is essential to understanding why so many Americans have lost faith in the possibility of political change.
The Information Environment
The pre-digital information landscape was no golden age. Yellow journalism (the sensationalist, often misleading newspaper reporting of the late 1800s), propaganda, and the gatekeeping power of wealthy media owners were all real features of American public life. But the structure of information created a rough shared reality that digitalization shattered.
A citizen reading a newspaper in 1960 might encounter bias, but they shared a common set of facts with their neighbors. Disagreements were about what those facts meant, not about whether basic realities existed.
The internet shattered that structure. Social media platforms did not simply add new channels for information. They changed the rules of the game entirely. Algorithms replaced editors. Clicks and shares, not accuracy or public value, became what mattered. The business model rewards content that provokes strong emotions: outrage, fear, tribal loyalty. The result is an information environment that actively works against the kind of shared facts that informed citizenship requires.
I detailed this dynamic extensively in The Parasite’s Dilemma, which examines how digital platforms, the creator economy, and AI are eating away at democracy’s knowledge foundation. The systems that once turned research and reporting into reliable public information have been dismantled by wave after wave of digital disruption.
The scale of extraction is staggering: Google and Facebook together captured approximately 60% of all digital advertising revenue by 2020, while newspaper advertising revenue fell from $49 billion in 2000 to under $9 billion by 2020. Newsroom employment dropped by more than half over the same period, from roughly 71,000 journalists in 2000 to around 31,000 by 2020.
The consequences are not abstract. Pew Research Center has documented a widening gap in basic factual knowledge between Americans who consume information primarily through traditional versus social media channels. Research from MIT’s Media Lab found that false news stories spread on social media six times faster than verified ones, and that the most viral misinformation tends to be emotionally charged political content.
Americans increasingly inhabit separate informational realities, not just holding different opinions but encountering different facts. When citizens cannot agree on what is true, they cannot meaningfully deliberate about what should be done. And when deliberation breaks down, the feedback loop between informed public opinion and responsive governance is severed.
Evidence and reasoning are not abstract intellectual luxuries. They are the decision-making tools that make democratic, diverse, inclusive societies possible. As I wrote in The Parasite’s Dilemma: “In diverse societies where people hold different values and competing interests, evidence-based reasoning provides the essential common language for productive disagreement and collective problem-solving.” This epistemic infrastructure – the foundation for knowing what is true – is what we are losing.
Governance Systems
The decay of government systems has been slower and less visible than the collapse of the information environment, but it matters just as much. Several failures have accumulated over decades to produce a system that feels, and in many ways is, less responsive to ordinary citizens than it once was.
Gerrymandering, the practice of drawing voting district boundaries to favor one party, has distorted democracy at the state and federal level. It allows politicians to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. The result is a legislature that systematically underrepresents large portions of the public and overrepresents narrow interests.
The influence of money in politics has deepened since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns. The practical effect is that candidates increasingly shape their positions around what donors want rather than what voters need. Lobbying spending has grown enormously, and the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they are supposed to oversee has made genuine oversight hard to sustain.
The cost of running for office has risen to levels that effectively exclude anyone without access to significant wealth or well-funded networks. This narrows the pool of candidates and, with it, the range of perspectives that enter governance.
The process by which laws get turned into actual rules has become opaque. Citizens affected by policy decisions often have no practical way to understand how those decisions were made, who influenced them, or how to challenge them.
The Loop
These two failures, in information and in governance, do not operate independently. They reinforce each other in a cycle that produces exactly the helplessness and disengagement we now observe.
When information is fragmented and unreliable, citizens cannot accurately assess how well their government is serving them. Without accurate assessments, they cannot make informed demands for change. Without informed demands, government becomes less responsive, not necessarily because officials are corrupt, but because the signal from citizens is too noisy to act on. And when government becomes less responsive, the belief that participation is futile deepens, which reduces participation further.
This loop attacks the very foundation of how we know what’s true. The information systems I described in The Parasite’s Dilemma once maintained the shared facts that democracy needs. Without reliable ways to tell solid evidence from clever manipulation, democratic societies lose their ability to make decisions based on reality.
The internet did not cause this cycle. But it accelerated every part of it. It destabilized the information environment. It amplified the voices of those who benefit when citizens check out. And it provided a convenient substitute: social media outrage, viral commentary, political identity as performance. These things feel like participation while actually replacing it.
The Consequence: Victimhood, Pluralism, and Civic Illiteracy
Understanding these structural failures changes how we interpret today’s political landscape. What looks like a widespread embrace of victimhood is actually a result of broken systems. When civic engagement stops producing results, people stop engaging. That’s predictable, not a character flaw.
When systems fail to deliver, people stop believing in them. That’s rational.
As I explored in 50 Years of Economic Myths Have Delivered Americans Into Technofeudalism, this creates what I call the “downward political cycle”: economic insecurity makes people politically exploitable, which leads to worse conditions, which creates more economic fragility, which makes people even more politically exploitable. The spiral continues toward what can only be described as modern serfdom.
Citizens who have watched their participation produce nothing will eventually conclude that engagement is pointless. The information they relied on was unreliable. The government they tried to influence had already been captured by other interests. The connections between action and outcome have been severed. The victimhood narrative and the helplessness that now pervade American political life are predictable outcomes. They are what happens when the infrastructure stops working and no one repairs it.
This learned helplessness is not irrational. As I wrote in Technofeudalism: “We can’t recognize that our economic fragility is being systematically manufactured because politicians from both parties have conditioned us to accept the same limiting beliefs about what’s economically possible.” Both Republicans and Democrats operate within a framework of economic myths, deficit reduction mythology, hard money deception, “crowding out” fiction, that constrain our imagination about alternatives. The bipartisan nature of this conditioning is what makes it so effective and so difficult to escape.
The Deeper Problem: Civic Illiteracy
But there is a layer beneath the systemic failure that deserves honest acknowledgment.
A significant number of Americans, most visibly on the political right but not only there, never learned that living alongside people different from themselves is a core American value. They were not taught it as such.
Civic education in America has long been shallow, focused on the mechanics of government: how a bill becomes a law, how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. What it has failed to teach is why: why a nation of profoundly different people agreed to be governed together, and what that agreement demands of each of them. The result is citizens who can recite the structure of government but cannot explain why coexistence with people unlike themselves is a requirement of the entire project, not a grudging concession.
The framework I developed in The Politics of Stakeholder Society helps explain why this matters so deeply. American politics today is a battle between two competing ideas about who belongs. One view says everyone affected by our collective decisions deserves a voice in making them. The other says belonging must be earned by meeting certain requirements.
When people do not understand that pluralism is foundational, any expansion of who counts feels like a loss. More voices in the public square become a threat rather than the system working as designed. As I wrote in Stakeholder Society: “Neither side sees itself as ‘exclusionary.’ Each believes they’re protecting inclusion, just different versions of it.”
The country, in this framing, is not a shared project but a possession. Any change to its composition is experienced as dispossession. This is not victimization. It is the experience of sharing space, misinterpreted by a citizenry that was never taught why sharing space is what America is.
The Civil Rights Misunderstanding
Among those in my generation who became conservatives, some view the Civil Rights era as a mistake outright. But even those who do not oppose it seem to have absorbed it as a mechanical, transactional event that simply happened, rather than understanding what it actually was: people demanding the ability to share space, to live their lives in a system that treated them the same way it treated everyone else, and the decades of work that followed to integrate them not as special cases but as ordinary citizens.
This misunderstanding is revealing. If you see the Civil Rights movement as just something that occurred in history rather than as a demonstration of how democratic participation is supposed to work, of course you will not recognize that same process as legitimate when it happens now. The work of organizing, mobilizing, and demanding change looks like disruption rather than democracy in action.
What the Conversations Reveal
I have had conservatives describe, with genuine frustration, how they dislike when people come to this country, don’t assimilate, and then use “the machinery of democracy” to advocate for changes that support their desires and views. When I pointed out that what they had just described is how democracy works, that this is what the country is, the response was not recognition but resistance.
Those conversations revealed something uncomfortable: many contemporary conservatives, particularly within the MAGA movement, don’t actually object to authoritarianism. They embrace it as a way to preserve their comfort and privilege against people they see as interlopers. They want their preferred outcomes without doing the hard work democracy requires – the organizing, mobilizing, and persuading that those “other people” actually did. They skip the effort and reach straight for authoritarian tools.
This is not a fringe position. It is a widespread misunderstanding of what democratic pluralism demands. It reflects a civic education that never taught them that the discomfort of coexistence and the labor of persuasion ARE the system.
The Reinforcing Dynamic
This civic illiteracy did not exist in isolation. It was sustained by an information environment that, for all its flaws, at least operated within a shared factual framework. The internet has replaced that environment with one that actively fragments understanding. It sorts citizens into information bubbles that confirm what they already believe, isolates them from challenging perspectives, and rewards outrage over comprehension.
The civic illiteracy and the broken information systems are mutually reinforcing.
Condemning Americans for losing faith in a system that has stopped working misses the point. The real question is: what would need to change for engagement to feel, and actually be, worthwhile again?
The Solution Path: Rebuilding the Infrastructure
If the problem is structural, the solution must be too. This is not about attitude adjustment or civic virtue campaigns, though both have their place. It is about rebuilding, or building for the first time, the systems that make self-governance possible. The path forward is not a single policy but a set of connected demands addressing both how we get information and how our government works.
Rebuilding Information Systems
The first and most urgent task is restoring a shared basis in fact. Citizens need reliable information they can trust when making political judgments. This does not require suppressing speech or eliminating disagreement. It requires changing the rules and incentives of the platforms through which most Americans now get their news.
Platform accountability is the starting point. Social media companies make money by keeping you on their sites as long as possible, which means rewarding sensationalism, outrage, and division. We need regulations that force platforms to reveal how their algorithms decide what to show you and how advertising money shapes those decisions. This would let citizens, researchers, and lawmakers understand and challenge how information gets distributed. This is the same kind of accountability we require of other industries that affect public welfare.
Algorithmic transparency would let people see why they are being shown what they are being shown. Right now, hidden systems decide what political information you see, and those systems are designed to keep you scrolling, not to keep you informed. We cannot have meaningful democratic debate if we do not know how our information is being filtered.
Investment in journalism and civic media is equally important. The collapse of local news has left enormous gaps in what people know about how their local and state governments actually work. Social media stole the advertising money that newspapers used to depend on. Rebuilding local journalism, whether through public funding, nonprofit structures, or new business models, is not a luxury. It is civic infrastructure.
Media literacy education, embedded in schools and sustained throughout civic life, prepares citizens to navigate an information environment that will never again be as simple as it once was. Understanding how algorithms work, how misinformation spreads, and how to evaluate sources is as fundamental a civic skill as understanding how a bill becomes a law.
Rebuilding Governance Systems
The second task is restoring the ways citizens hold power accountable: making government more transparent, more accessible, and more responsive to the people it serves.
Independent redistricting commissions, already adopted in a number of states, take the power to draw voting districts away from politicians. This restores the basic principle that voters choose their representatives rather than politicians choosing their voters. This is one of the most concrete and achievable reforms available, and it works.
Campaign finance reform, whether through public financing of elections, stricter disclosure of who gives money, or legislative responses to Citizens United, addresses the unfair advantage that wealth gives in politics. The goal is not to eliminate money from politics entirely, which may not be achievable, but to reduce how much policy gets shaped by what donors want rather than what voters need.
Expanding access to civic participation means lowering barriers to voting and running for office. Automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and ranked-choice voting (where you rank candidates in order of preference, so voting for a third-party candidate does not help your least favorite win) all make participation easier without compromising election integrity.
Transparency in how laws and regulations get made, through open lobbying disclosures, public comment periods that are genuinely considered, and accessible records of how policy decisions happen, gives citizens the information they need to hold their representatives accountable. Democracy requires not just the ability to vote but the ability to know what you are voting on and why.
The Economic Foundation
What both rebuilding efforts require is a new way of thinking about what we can afford.
As I developed in Introducing Opportunity Economics, the real question is never “can we afford it” but whether we have the workers, materials, and know-how to build it. Politicians from both parties invoke “fiscal responsibility” to explain why we cannot have functioning civic infrastructure. But this is mythology, not economics. The federal government creates money when it spends. The real constraints are workers, materials, and organizational capacity, and we have all three sitting idle while our civic systems crumble.
Closing the Loop
These reforms are not independent proposals. They are components of a single system.
Better information enables more informed demands for governance reform. Better governance produces more responsive institutions, which give citizens reason to believe their participation matters, which sustains engagement, which sustains the demand for continued improvement.
This is the loop that digitalization broke. It is also the loop that can be rebuilt, but only if Americans demand its rebuilding. And that demand is itself an act of the engaged citizenship this essay has been describing.
The framework I outlined in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship provides a model for what demanding looks like in practice. The idea is straightforward: we need to make evidence-based decisions about what markets should provide versus what government should provide, understand the real tradeoffs of each approach, actively manage both to serve people, and demand the institutional quality that makes good decisions possible.
This means demanding Congress be active and accountable, demanding politicians explain rather than perform, demanding journalism investigate, demanding universities produce valid knowledge, and demanding science operate with integrity.
As I wrote in that essay: “Demanding is not separate from stewardship. Demanding IS stewardship. You can’t steward institutions you don’t demand quality from.”
Addressing the Bootstrap Problem
There’s an obvious tension here.
This essay argues that citizens have disengaged because the systems no longer reward engagement, then proposes that citizens re-engage to fix those systems. This is a chicken-and-egg problem. You cannot wait for the systems to improve before demanding that they improve, because the systems will not improve without the demand.
That tension is the path. Look at what we’ve just outlined: platform accountability, independent redistricting, campaign finance reform, transparency in how laws get made. These aren’t abstract hopes. They’re concrete demands anyone who believes in self-governance can make right now, at every level of government. You don’t need to wait for the system to prove itself first. The bootstrap problem has an answer: start demanding.
Every reform movement has had to act before knowing whether the system would respond. Every significant reform in American history began with citizens acting before the system had proven itself responsive to their action, before the outcome was guaranteed, before the feedback loop was repaired. The Civil Rights Movement did not wait for the federal government to voluntarily dismantle segregation. The labor movement did not wait for corporations to voluntarily improve working conditions. They acted into the resistance, and the resistance eventually gave way.
The current moment is no different in kind. It is only different in the nature of the systems that need to change.
None of this is easy. Changing how social media works will face resistance from some of the most powerful companies in the world. Campaign finance reform will face resistance from those who benefit from the current system. These are not problems with clean, quick solutions. But the direction is clear. The alternative, accepting that the infrastructure of self-governance is permanently broken, is surrender, not realism.
Conclusion: Hope as a Demand, Not a Feeling
I return to where this essay began: the observation that hope was the thing that felt different about Americans. Hope as a posture toward the future carrying an obligation to act, not mere optimism.
That hope was never irrational. It was grounded in something real: a set of systems, however imperfect, that translated citizen engagement into political change. When those systems worked, Americans had reason to believe their participation mattered. When those systems began to fail, when information fragmented, when government became less transparent, when the connections between citizens and power were severed, the hope began to erode. Not because Americans changed, but because the ground they were standing on shifted beneath them.
Rebuilding that ground is the work of this moment: clear-eyed assessment of what is broken and concrete outline of repair, not sentiment or nostalgia.
The Americans who have lost faith in the system are not wrong to feel that something has gone wrong. They are wrong only in believing that the wrongness is permanent, that the systems cannot be rebuilt, that participation cannot again be made meaningful, that the country has passed beyond the reach of the people who live in it.
The path forward requires what I have elsewhere called “democracy deepening,” not just expanding who participates but transforming the quality of that participation. As I wrote in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship: “From ‘vote and hope’ to ‘steward and demand.’ From passive citizenship to active program management.” This expands middle class power, which is what concentrated wealth fears most.
It has not passed beyond our reach. But it will, if enough Americans decide that the brokenness is someone else’s problem to fix.
I am not naive about who this essay is for. Some Americans, the true MAGA enthusiasts, are beyond reach in my lifetime. They have abandoned the foundational values of self-governance, plurality, and democratic accountability. But there are many others who voted for President Trump, who feel betrayed by the current system, who sense something has gone fundamentally wrong, yet still believe in the governing philosophy that founded this country. They still believe in America’s role as an example of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as President Lincoln described it. This essay is for them.
The path forward is not about restoring America to some fantasy of global greatness. It is about building a country that is great for its people. A place where Americans can live lives that are free, safe, secure, prosperous, and comfortable. Together. Not as isolated consumers of personalized content streams, not as atomized individuals competing in rigged markets, but as citizens who share a common project of self-governance.
The framework for rebuilding exists. Opportunity Economics provides the economic vision: an economy where everyone has genuine opportunities to build wealth and control their economic lives, where economic security enables achievement rather than suppressing it, and where coalitions can form across traditional political lines around shared material interests. The political analysis in Stakeholder Society clarifies what is actually at stake: whether America returns to building systems that support human flourishing, treat everyone as equals, and cultivate tolerance and respect for difference, or continues down the path of authoritarianism, hierarchy, and fear. And Capacity Stewardship provides the model for what active citizenship looks like: citizens who understand how systems actually work, who demand quality from institutions, and who refuse to accept helplessness as the permanent condition of American life.
Hope is a demand, not a feeling. And the most American thing there is, the thing that has always set this country apart from the resigned and the governed, is the refusal to stop making it.
That refusal, when it moves from feeling to action, has a name. And it has always been the most difficult and most necessary thing Americans have been asked to do.