Politics & Power Quote by Archibald MacLeish

A lesser line would stop at “dream” and let the cynics have their tidy little victory. MacLeish yanks that victory away by agreeing with them twice - “They are right. It is.” - then flipping the term from dismissal into mandate: “It is the American Dream.” The move is pure rhetorical jujitsu. Dream, in ordinary political talk, is what you say when you mean naive. MacLeish treats dream as the only honest name for a project that can’t be proven in advance: “the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind.” He’s not promising delivery; he’s defending aspiration as a civic instrument.

The subtext is aimed at a familiar American posture: hardheaded realism that is often just fear of change wearing a sensible suit. By conceding the charge of unrealism, MacLeish preempts the debate over practicality and reroutes the argument toward identity. If you reject this “dream,” you’re not merely skeptical - you’re refusing the story America tells about itself, the one that links national purpose to mental freedom, not just material prosperity.

Context matters. MacLeish lived through the Great Depression, global war, and the ideological knife-fight of the Cold War; he also served in public cultural roles (including at the Library of Congress), where “freedom of mind” wasn’t a metaphor but a policy battleground. The line reads like democratic propaganda at its best: not cheerleading, but a reminder that the country’s most ambitious promise is, by definition, unfinished, contested, and therefore always in danger of being laughed out of existence.