Despite the polarization and the self-destructive, hateful rhetoric of the current American political scene, there is one thing on which both parties seem to agree. The United States is the greatest nation on earth, or so one Republican and Democratic speaker after another hollered or proclaimed at the parties’ recent conventions.

What exactly does this mean? Is there some kind of scale, some Guinness or Forbes classification, to reach such a verdict that would cover all of the universe and all of history?

It is, of course, obvious and indisputable that the United States and its people have achieved great, amazing things in the past two and a half centuries. But I am afraid that such childish, self-reassuring, obsessively repetitive incantations as the ones that were heard in Cleveland and Philadelphia are a loud and tragic signal of a deep intellectual, economic, cultural insecurity. This is a troubling weakness that the so-called greatest nation on earth, the so-called leader of the free world, cannot afford and, frankly, it’s one that scares me.

Jean Lesieur

Cambridge