Is America Still the ‘Shining City on a Hill’?
A shining city on a hill. Ronald Reagan loved the phrase. He used it over and over again, perhaps most notably in his 1989 presidential farewell address.
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
Reagan usually clarified that he had not originated the “city on a hill” phrase, that it derived from a 17th-century Puritan sermon. But Reagan made the phrase his own, imbuing it with his vision of America as an example to the world.
That was a different and more self-assured era. The latest leader of Ronald Reagan’s party emphatically and repeatedly repudiated the idea of America as an example to anyone. In a 2014 interview, Donald Trump explained that he did not like the phrase American exceptionalism, because it offended Vladimir Putin: “Well, I think it’s a very dangerous term in one way, because I heard Putin saying, 'Who do they think they are, saying they’re exceptional?’”
[Read: The souring of American exceptionalism]
Trump often repeated the point in, he , less as national self-criticism and more as an expression of his self-image as a ruthless player in a world of ruthless players.
