Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose’s line reads like a postcard from Civics 101, then twists into something closer to a raised eyebrow. “Trial by jury” and “Live wherever you can make a living” are plainspoken, almost homely freedoms: procedural fairness on one hand, economic mobility on the other. Not lofty promises of destiny or virtue, but practical guarantees that let ordinary people bet on themselves. That’s the seduction here. He reduces “principles” to two pieces of daily-life infrastructure: a fair shot in court, a fair shot in the marketplace.

The kicker is the last sentence: “How could a government based on such principles fail?” It’s not triumphalism so much as a test of faith. Ambrose, a historian who spent his career watching the American story lurch between ideal and reality, knows the answer is: easily. Governments fail despite good principles, sometimes because of how those principles are selectively applied. Jury trials can become instruments of bias. “Live wherever you can make a living” can turn into forced migration, precarity, and the brutal logic of boom-and-bust.

Placed in the late-20th-century Ambrose worldview - post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, in the long shadow of civil rights battles - the sentence works as both admiration and warning. The subtext is that America’s durability comes from simple freedoms that scale, but its vulnerability comes from assuming simplicity equals inevitability. It’s a dare disguised as a compliment: if we really believe these are the foundations, we have to maintain the conditions that make them true.