This piece was written in September, three months before the author’s death on December 8, as the afterword to the forthcoming paperback edition of his autobiography.
By the late summer of 2018, it was already clear that the US and the world order it had helped establish during my lifetime were facing deep-seated political, economic, and cultural challenges.
Nonetheless, I drew reassurance from my mother’s reminder that the US had endured a brutal civil war, two world wars, a great depression, and still emerged as the leader of the “free world”, a model for democracy, open markets, free trade, and economic growth. That was, for me, a source of both pride and hope.
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