debut: 2/16/17 9:58 AM
41,062 runs
The Death of America’s New Frontier
Perhaps all nations live by myths, and perhaps they must. But myths matter because they set expectations for one another. The New Frontier asked us to imagine government as a partner in human dignity and citizens as stewards of a shared future. If that myth is to die, it will not be because it failed to inspire. It will be because we chose a different story—one that measures success not by what we build together but by what can be taken and kept.
For decades, the myth and mandate of Camelot offered a lens through which Americans understood public life. It was never a perfect vision, but it was a powerful one: an ethic that asked citizens to give of themselves and a government to meet them in that effort. Now, nearing the close of President Trump’s first year of his second term, that lens has been deliberately dismantled. The language of sacrifice and service has given way to a blunt transactionalism. Where John F. Kennedy urged a generation to ask what they could do for their country, the present mood asks, with startling candour, what profit can be extracted from the country itself. Trump, who reported $600 million in revenue for 2024, has portrayed Kennedy’s promises as naïve at best and corrupt at worst—un-American in their insistence on public purpose. Symbols and legacies alike have been recast, from the paving over of the White House Rose Garden to what critics describe as a takeover of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts.
To be sure, Camelot was never the unblemished idyll that romantic memory sometimes supplies. The Kennedy years were complicated, and the New Frontier was contested even in its own time. But the mythology persists because it rests upon real accomplishments and a coherent moral argument about the role of government in a democracy. Kennedy argued that government should spend money on people: raising the federal minimum wage, investing in impoverished rural and urban communities, extending assistance in education, protecting the health and dignity of the elderly, and expanding support for mental health. He wrapped policy in a call to higher purpose—asking the nation to bring creativity, courage, and imagination to a common project of domestic and global uplift. Sixty-five years on, that invitation still shimmers: a reminder that the state can be a tool for collective flourishing.
The contrast with the present is stark. The “America First” agenda is an inversion of Kennedy’s internationalism. Programs of cooperation—most notably USAID—have been defunded or dismantled, dismissed as “wasteful spending that does not align with the America First agenda.” Refugee resettlement, once framed as both a humanitarian duty and a source of national renewal, has been halted. This shift lands with particular irony alongside the title of Kennedy’s final book: A Nation of Immigrants.
The divergence is just as clear at home. Where Kennedy sought to expand the social safety net, the current administration has championed the dismantling of the administrative state and the narrowing of public supports—promoting rigid work requirements for Medicaid and food assistance and policies that would strip health insurance from millions. Where the New Frontier cast science and exploration as a national horizon, today’s governing posture celebrates deregulation, embraces a strain of anti-intellectualism, and retreats from cooperative economic and foreign-policy agreements in favour of short-term advantage.
What may be most different, though, is the sound and feel of politics itself. Kennedy’s rhetoric, for all its youthful vigor, was an appeal to a shared moral core—to community, country, and what he called the nation’s better angels. The rhetoric of 2025 is confrontational and grim, a language of winners and losers that prizes individual gain over the common good. The image of a heavily gilded Oval Office, dotted with gold-plated, Trump-branded memorabilia, is more than décor; it is a thesis. It insists that “American Camelot” is not merely passé—it is dead.
The question, then, is not whether Camelot was ever real.
It is whether we still want the kind of country that believed it could be.
Sources
A Nation of Immigrants Paperback by John F Kennedy
The New Frontier by John F. Kennedy
Trump: America First by Corey R. Lewandowski, David N. Bossie
Sarge
Perhaps all nations live by myths, and perhaps they must. But myths matter because they set expectations for one another. The New Frontier asked us to imagine government as a partner in human dignity and citizens as stewards of a shared future. If that myth is to die, it will not be because it failed to inspire. It will be because we chose a different story—one that measures success not by what we build together but by what can be taken and kept.
For decades, the myth and mandate of Camelot offered a lens through which Americans understood public life. It was never a perfect vision, but it was a powerful one: an ethic that asked citizens to give of themselves and a government to meet them in that effort. Now, nearing the close of President Trump’s first year of his second term, that lens has been deliberately dismantled. The language of sacrifice and service has given way to a blunt transactionalism. Where John F. Kennedy urged a generation to ask what they could do for their country, the present mood asks, with startling candour, what profit can be extracted from the country itself. Trump, who reported $600 million in revenue for 2024, has portrayed Kennedy’s promises as naïve at best and corrupt at worst—un-American in their insistence on public purpose. Symbols and legacies alike have been recast, from the paving over of the White House Rose Garden to what critics describe as a takeover of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts.
To be sure, Camelot was never the unblemished idyll that romantic memory sometimes supplies. The Kennedy years were complicated, and the New Frontier was contested even in its own time. But the mythology persists because it rests upon real accomplishments and a coherent moral argument about the role of government in a democracy. Kennedy argued that government should spend money on people: raising the federal minimum wage, investing in impoverished rural and urban communities, extending assistance in education, protecting the health and dignity of the elderly, and expanding support for mental health. He wrapped policy in a call to higher purpose—asking the nation to bring creativity, courage, and imagination to a common project of domestic and global uplift. Sixty-five years on, that invitation still shimmers: a reminder that the state can be a tool for collective flourishing.
The contrast with the present is stark. The “America First” agenda is an inversion of Kennedy’s internationalism. Programs of cooperation—most notably USAID—have been defunded or dismantled, dismissed as “wasteful spending that does not align with the America First agenda.” Refugee resettlement, once framed as both a humanitarian duty and a source of national renewal, has been halted. This shift lands with particular irony alongside the title of Kennedy’s final book: A Nation of Immigrants.
The divergence is just as clear at home. Where Kennedy sought to expand the social safety net, the current administration has championed the dismantling of the administrative state and the narrowing of public supports—promoting rigid work requirements for Medicaid and food assistance and policies that would strip health insurance from millions. Where the New Frontier cast science and exploration as a national horizon, today’s governing posture celebrates deregulation, embraces a strain of anti-intellectualism, and retreats from cooperative economic and foreign-policy agreements in favour of short-term advantage.
What may be most different, though, is the sound and feel of politics itself. Kennedy’s rhetoric, for all its youthful vigor, was an appeal to a shared moral core—to community, country, and what he called the nation’s better angels. The rhetoric of 2025 is confrontational and grim, a language of winners and losers that prizes individual gain over the common good. The image of a heavily gilded Oval Office, dotted with gold-plated, Trump-branded memorabilia, is more than décor; it is a thesis. It insists that “American Camelot” is not merely passé—it is dead.
The question, then, is not whether Camelot was ever real.
It is whether we still want the kind of country that believed it could be.
Sources
A Nation of Immigrants Paperback by John F Kennedy
The New Frontier by John F. Kennedy
Trump: America First by Corey R. Lewandowski, David N. Bossie
Sarge
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