One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, America stumbles down a path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

America is under attack. Foreign adversaries are working to undermine our way of life. Domestic polarization is straining our community as a nation. American unity is at a premium. Americans urgently need to re-member our first principles which are set forth in the Preamble of the Constitution, the national purpose of the United States. As we re-member these principles and their purpose we are developing a dynamic Preamble 2.0 that is necessarily today's interpretations of yesterday's explanations for tomorrow's anticipations. The American Experiment is centered around the creativity of native and naturalized citizens whose ancestries come from around the world. America is the leading world nation on Earth, and a model for the global future of all 195 countries in the United Nations. This Model of America's Promise, the MAP of meta civics for America, is set forth here in the first principles and their foremost pursuits re-membered as Preamble 2.0.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.