“Starting over is the American way.”
— Brandon Peele
As the country marks its 250th year, I welcome back my friend and brother Brandon Peele for a conversation about what it might mean for our nation to begin again.
Rather than greet the anniversary with fireworks and nostalgia, Brandon spent the last fifteen months on something much more powerful: a month-long caravan pilgrimage across America to hold up a mirror to the nation and ask, honestly:
This is who we are; who do we want to become?
Brandon Peele is an author, facilitator, and democracy builder devoted to the maturation of American life; a body of work that moves between men’s work and inner development, purpose and initiation, and the civic structures that hold a people together.
His pilgrimage traced four movements through the threads of American identity: the Haudenosaunee birthplace of democracy in western New York, the Civil Rights South, the indigenous soul of the West, and the modern American century.
It closed on July 9th — the birthday, as Brandon frames it, of the Second Republic — with a national assembly whose citizen participants co-authored a single document: A New Moral Vision for Our Next 250.
Our conversation traces two births of this country and ask whether it’s time for a third. We wander through democracy’s often-forgotten or erased indigenous roots, the difference between a broken covenant and a broken contract, and Brandon’s provocation that the most American act of all is to start over. To let go of what no longer works and re-found something truer, carrying forward the best of what we’ve already learned.
It’s a conversation that holds both grief and possibility: the parts of us that are jaded and tired, and the parts enlivened by the chance to try again. And it lands on a quieter truth: that no new political structure will hold unless we also do the inner work of growing up, getting off our screens and back onto our porches, into the close-up, neighbor-to-neighbor work of becoming the people a democracy actually requires.
A New Moral Vision for Our Next 250
(as read by Brandon during the conversation)
We pursue flourishing. We promote and protect life, liberty, inner growth, peace, and our fundamental interconnectedness, so that every person might attain not just a comfortable existence, but a fulfilling life.
We ensure dignity. Every citizen shall have shelter, food, water, health care, education, safety, and belonging — not as rewards for merit or employment, but as inalienable rights. A nation’s greatness is measured by what it guarantees to all, not by what it grants to few.
We free ourselves from that which diminishes us. Prejudice and hatred have no rightful home here. We confront these forces continually without becoming them, for the means we choose shape the nation we become.
This is our promise to each other, renewed each generation.
What is your fiercest hope for the next 250 years?
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Show Notes
Bison Medicine Dispatch: Brandon’s weekly updates on this project, and where his docuseries The Call of the Nation begins dropping the first week of October.
Bison Medicine: Brandon’s book, and the subject of his first visit to the Wonder Dome.
Citizen University: collaborators on the pilgrimage and National Assembly.
Brandon’s previous visit to the Dome:
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