Starting today, we must . . . begin again the work of remaking America.1
—Barack Obama, inaugural speech, January 20, 2009
The American Era, 1945–2016. This could well be the title of a chapter in a history book a generation or two from now. A future historian, contemplating the American era, might express surprise that a nation so young and robust, a nation whose power and prosperity was without rival in the history of the world, lost its preeminence so quickly. Previous great powers did much better. The Roman era, for instance, lasted nearly a thousand years; the Ottoman era, several centuries; the British era, nearly two centuries. Who would have guessed that America, the last best hope of Western civilization, would succumb this easily, pathetically, ignominiously. For future historians, the most incredible fact might not be America’s decline and fall but the manner of it. Ultimately, history may show, this fall was achieved purposefully, single-handedly. It was all the work of one man, a man who in two presidential terms undid a dream that took more than two centuries to realize.
I believe in the American dream. Born in India in 1961, I remember sitting on the floor of our verandah as a boy, thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica, reading about the great empires from the dawn of history. In every case there was a rise and a fall, as the Romans, then the Ottomans, then the British, and finally and ironically the Soviets all ended up on the ash heap of history. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 poem Recessional , “is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” But there was one exception to the rule, or so I thought, and that was America. America wasn’t so much an empire as it was an ideal, an ideal of freedom and prosperity and social decency, a dream that “all men are created equal” and entitled to a “pursuit of happiness,” a universal dream, one that even a boy in Mumbai, on the outskirts of world power, could aspire to. And thus I conceived my own dream, the dream of coming to America. I wanted to move from the margin to the center, to be close to, if not involved in, the great ideas and decisions, the decisive movements of history. When I served as a policy analyst in the White House, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong aspiration. Finally, I thought, the dream is becoming real in my life. And it has been.
