When a country starts putting up monuments declaring itself the greatest, it may be time to ask whether it is doing the things that actually made it great.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced last week that excavation will soon begin on a "Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck" between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
It will, Burgum promised alongside architectural renderings, be one of the "Great Pieces of American Architecture," something "befitting the most powerful Capital in the World."
But the most powerful capital in the world became such long before anyone thought it needed a triumphal arch to prove it. In fact, perhaps one of the greatest demonstrations of American power came in 1865, when the country was exhausted by four years of civil war and likely appeared at its weakest.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were dead, entire communities had been destroyed and the Union had survived its greatest existential crisis. Slavery, the gnawing contradiction between America's founding ideals and reality, had finally been destroyed.
Then President Abraham Lincoln, who had led a divided nation through its darkest crisis, was assassinated.
Months earlier, at Gettysburg, Lincoln had asked the living to dedicate themselves to the "unfinished work" of preserving a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," and to resolve that "these dead shall not have died in vain."
That is a very different conception of national greatness.
It requires constant self-governance, both from the citizens of the United States and from the leaders they elect. It asks Americans to preserve the ideals and practices that the country claims to represent, rather than simply proclaim them.
To build a monument as an act of national self-congratulation while so much of that work remains undone seems, at best, out of sequence.
The United States is in the middle of prolonged military conflict in the Middle East that has disrupted the global economy and destroyed diplomacy. The dollar is weaker than it was a year ago. National debt has topped $40 trillion and President Donald Trump is offering to buy Americans' votes.
Americans are frustrated by the cost of living, widening inequality and the economic disruption caused by artificial intelligence. Many worry that this 250-year-old experiment in constitutional government is more fragile than it looks.
There is cultural divisiveness. Mental-health problems abound. Our sense of civic purpose is muddled. Political movements on both the left and right increasingly test the limits of restrained, constitutional government.
There is no civil war. But there is plenty of reason to worry about the health of the American civic project.
We have been at moments like this before. What we did not have then was social media, where the symbolism of a golden arch could be endlessly advertised as proof of a greatness the rest of the world is supposed to recognize.
Washington is already filled with monuments, including some of the most beautiful and meaningful civic architecture in the world. The Lincoln Memorial does not proclaim that America is powerful. It asks Americans to remember what preserving the Union cost.
And it is a sight to behold. Lincoln asked Americans to embody American greatness, not advertise it.
There is nothing inherently offensive about building another monument. American exceptionalism is worth celebrating.
But the greatest monuments to American power are not the ones that boast about it but rather remind Americans of what we owe one another — and what we still have left to do.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Does a 'Great Triumphal Arch' define American greatness? | Buss