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Utopia

Visions of a Perfect World

Debra Trione encourages American leaders to make their visions of utopia real.

The idea of ‘America’ is the idea of a perpetually perfectible world: “a more perfect union,” states the US Constitution; “a system approaching near to perfection” announced Benjamin Franklin; “the world’s best hope,” according to Henry Cabot Lodge.

Perfectibility isn’t an idea Americans invented, of course, just one we brought down to earth. If Heaven is reachable, it’s only after death. The Garden of Eden is ancient mythology; the Peaceable Kingdom and Never-Never Land are literary con structs; and when Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, the name he chose for his imaginary ideal island is Greek for ‘no place’. But Americans made the perfect-world idea pragmatic, and over centuries have built a national identity around it.

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