At 250, America’s fate is wonderfully unwritten

America has a habit of bringing ideas — sometimes others’ ideas — to life. This habit breeds a certain culture of meritocratic, independent superiority, understood by self-made elites and commoners alike, that ideas are a dime a dozen: If you don’t get out there and actually do it, you’re just another dreamer.

I think the most powerful example of this dynamic, and its enduring resonance today, is found in a single line from a single film. In the smash hit 1962 epic “Lawrence of Arabia,” our hero sums up the Western ethos of the ennobled individual will by refusing to let his Arab ally die. Confronted with the dismissive, fatalistic belief that the man’s seemingly inevitable death in the desert is foreordained by God, Lawrence famously