The English dramatist Micheál Mac Liammóir (1899-1978; born Alfred Willmore) who with his life partner, Hilton Edwards, founded Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1928, is reputed to have said that America was a country you cannot tell a lie about. In 1983, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntingdon wrote of the 1960s student radicals who he saw as part of a recurring tradition of American puritans, enraged that American institutions didn’t live up to the country’s founding principles:  “[They] say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”

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