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Some years ago, I was greatly honored to give a commencement speech to the master’s degree recipients at my alma mater Johns Hopkins University. Part of that speech discussed what has made the United States great. I referenced Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”—the idea that the constantly westward-moving frontier and the Americans who pursued it were instrumental in the creation of our democracy and the ideas of freedom and egalitarianism that underpin it. I related that to President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” an effort to excite Americans about their country’s opportunities and to show people how they could participate in them. I illustrated it with a cartoon of a long-haired, bearded hippie hitchhiking with a sign that simply said, “Further.”

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