Politics & Power Quote by Ferdinand Mount

“What the world needs now is more Americans” is a deliberately provocative riff on a familiar plea for “more leaders” or “more compassion.” Mount borrows the cadence of a moral appeal, then smuggles in a cultural argument: that “American” is less a passport than a personality type - self-authoring, aspirational, impatient with inherited limits. The line works because it flatters and needles at once. It praises the U.S. as an idea you can export, while quietly daring the listener to accept the costs of that idea.

Mount’s second sentence sharpens the claim into a piece of national mythmaking: the United States as a purposeful experiment in choice. Not just a place where people can want things, but where wanting is treated as legitimate. The rhetoric is slick: “deliberately dedicated” suggests design, not accident; “choose” and “chance” translate freedom into consumer language, the right to want and the opportunity to pursue. That framing makes American liberalism feel intuitive and modern, a kind of operating system for ambition.

The subtext is more contentious. “More Americans” implies that other societies are trapped in fatalism, hierarchy, or resignation - and that the cure is a particular blend of individualism and mobility. It’s a pitch for American-style modernity dressed up as destiny. Coming from a British writer of Mount’s generation, it also reads as a postwar, post-empire admiration for the U.S. as the engine of reinvention - and a reminder that the “chance to get it” has always been unevenly distributed, even in the country that sells it best.