Humbled to Be an American: A Hopeful Exile at 250

As my country turns 250, I feel both inspired and disillusioned, much as I did two decades ago navigating an undergrad major in political science.Political theory inspired me. I marveled to see how science and philosophy had led to the late eighteenth-century experiment that came to be called the United States. An attractive idealism informed the Declaration of Independence in 1776; an even wiser, hard-knocks Constitution arose in 1789. Poli-sci wasn’t simple, but lessons could be gathered from