Politics & Power Quote by Paul Tsongas

“America” here isn’t a flag or a founding document; it’s a moving collage, stitched from millions of individual itineraries. Tsongas’s word choice is doing quiet, strategic work. “Sum” sounds mathematical and democratic at once: no single journey gets to stand in for the whole, yet each one counts. It’s an argument for pluralism disguised as common sense.

The telling phrase is “as we search.” He refuses the comforting fiction that the nation has already arrived at a settled identity. National community and national culture are framed as goals, not inheritances. That subtext matters in a country that routinely treats belonging as either obvious (for some) or conditional (for others). Tsongas flips the premise: the baseline condition is ongoing negotiation, and movement is not a threat to cohesion but the mechanism by which cohesion is created.

Context sharpens the edge. Tsongas, a Massachusetts senator who ran in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, was speaking in an era when globalization and post-Cold War uncertainty were rearranging the economic and cultural furniture. Immigration debates, deindustrialization, and a newly intensified “culture war” politics were pressing Americans to pick a story about who “we” are. Tsongas answers with a process story: the national “we” is built from lived routes - migrations, class mobility, military service, regional shifts, the everyday reinventions that define American modernity.

It’s also a bid to cool tribal panic. By describing identity as a shared search, Tsongas invites people to see difference as evidence of participation, not disloyalty - and to treat culture as something made together, not guarded like property.