Nice article, partly about a book about the city on a hill thing. I didn't realise that John Winthrop was only a minor character in American history until his role was burnished by JFK and turned into a beacon by Reagan.
It's the combination of Reagan's perversion of the original protestant city on a hill idea to the shining city, and the combination of that with the notion of American exceptionallism, which is where America's view of itself changed. It went from being on a journey of its own to thinking it had arrived and was the exemplar for all mankind. In fact, of course, this was where it all went wrong.
Hope Biden can encapsulate a new image.
http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/is-america-still-the-shining-city-on-a-hill/617474/
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