A quarter of a century ago, then presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche delivered this major policy address near Boston, Massachusetts. Like today, many Americans at that time believed that the idea of America's "Manifest Destiny" was somehow tied to imperial notions of territorial expansion through gunboat diplomacy and other forms of coercion. But, as LaRouche laid out, the actual notion of the Manifest Destiny of the United States was quite the opposite, namely a mission to expand a form of society which would allow all men and women to realize their full potential to do good..
In LaRouche's words, this meant nothing less than one's ability to "assimilate and cultivate in ourselves those qualities which define us as human; to absorb the gifts of reason from preceding generations, from history; to utilize those and preserve and defend those gifts of reason, to add something to that for future generations, so that when we pass on, we have retained a permanent place in the span of eternity...That is the right of every human being... to live in such a way, that they, in their own way, can have their powers of reason cultivated, can find something good to do for humanity, so that they can die with a smile on their face, because they die with the assurance that in the life they had, they have secured a permanent place, an identity for themselves, in the simultaneity of eternity."
The United States as a republic was born from a centuries-long struggle to bring these, the best ideas of Europe, to the New World "with the hope that on this ground, those ideas could grow up and flourish as they had not been able to grow up and flourish in the same degree in Europe... The struggle was always--colonize westward. Bring the best people from Europe, the best common people who believed in this idea; bring them to this land, develop this land, move westward, open the way to the west, keep moving westward."
Unfortunately, instead of heeding the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche 25 years ago, the American people allowed our corrupt institutions to engage in horrific crimes of preemptive war, torture, and extra-judicial assassinations of foreign leaders.
Clearly, it is now long overdue to make America good again.
Transcript of this speech available HERE.
