Politics & Power Quote by Ferdinand Mount

Mount’s sentence pulls off a deft rhetorical two-step: it concedes America’s “terrible faults” up front, then uses that admission as moral leverage to make a bolder claim. The “last, best hope of mankind” line deliberately echoes Lincoln, but Mount reroutes the grandeur away from destiny or virtue and toward something more unsettling: desire. America, in his framing, isn’t exemplary because it’s good; it’s exemplary because it’s legible. It “spells out so vividly” a template of happiness that people recognize as their own, even when elites, ideologies, or religions instruct them to want something nobler, smaller, or more self-denying.

The subtext is both flattering and accusatory. Flattering because it credits America with a kind of cultural honesty: it dramatizes aspiration in public, with fewer disguises. Accusatory because it suggests the magnetism of the American model lies in its compatibility with appetite - comfort, choice, mobility, entertainment, private fulfillment - rather than civic virtue. “Regardless of what they are told they ought to want” is the quietly sharp edge: it casts moral instruction as a thin overlay and implies that mass preference will eventually vote with its feet.

Contextually, the remark sits comfortably in late-20th/early-21st-century debates over American decline, soft power, and the export of consumer modernity. Mount isn’t ignoring U.S. hypocrisy; he’s arguing that hypocrisy may be less decisive than clarity. America’s influence, he implies, comes from acting out the dream in high-definition - and reminding the rest of the world that wants, not ideals, often drive history.