In recent decades, the changing of the guard at the White House, either from Democrat to Republican or vice-versa, has seldom meant any real, substantive changes for America, despite all the hope and talk of change spoken of every four years. If, for example, I were to ask the average person about the legacy of President Obama, they likely would respond by mentioning Obamacare, being the first African-American president, or the numerous foreign policy incidents he oversaw in the Middle East. If I were to ask the same about his predecessor President Bush, it would be the War on Terror, Wall Street bailouts, and maybe No Child Left Behind. For Clinton, it would the Lewinsky Scandal, balancing the budget, and our involvement in the Bosnian War.

A litany of answers in a similar vein likely would follow for every president until Lyndon Johnson—the architect of the War of Poverty suite of government programs—all being characterized either by scandal or some other aspect of the president’s personality, reactive foreign policy, some reshuffling of the government’s balance sheets, or some combination thereof. Compare that to the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt, who launched the New Deal and created a new world order off the heels of world war, or Kennedy, who inspired a nation to get to the moon. Even President Arthur, often relegated to the footnotes of American history, sought to reform and modernize the federal bureaucracy from the ground up.

What unites the legacies of these men is ambition: they had great, big dreams for America and set all their energies toward bringing them to fruition. Unfortunately, it has seemed as if the greatest dreams that our leaders today can muster either consist of throwing money at an issue if the Blue Party is in power or cutting taxes if the Red Party is in power. Most recently, we’ve seen this in how the Inflation Reduction Act and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have been among the most touted achievements of the Biden and first Trump administrations, respectively. If you understand that the reactionary foreign policy moves over the last couple of decades do not truly qualify as a unique vision for one’s country, but are instead necessary responses compelled by duty, you will quickly see that this pathetic phenomenon is what has been truly defining our politics for the last 50 years. This pathetic phenomenon is what, in practice, the conflict between modern American Left and Right looks like, a conflict that, yes, explodes like a powder keg in our political discourse, yet one that seems to be anything but inspired on the ground in Washington.

What I think greatly accounts for this is the principle found in Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article “The End of History?,” wherein he argued that liberalism was the apotheosis of political development and, thus, all that would be left for mankind to do is “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of consumer demands.” Our politicians, be it consciously or unconsciously, in recent decades have come to believe that our system likewise has fundamentally reached its apotheosis and, thus, is only in need of periodical albeit “endless” fine-tuning of tax rates and budget allocations.

But even Fukuyama understood how something about this mentality—that we had “arrived,” so to speak—was inherently dissatisfying, prompting him to proclaim that “the end of history will be a very sad time.” In our case, this sadness has less of a depressive connotation than it does a pathetic one, to borrow a term from before. Further describing this time as one lacking “courage, imagination, and idealism,” he ends up explaining why our time is inherently dissatisfying, for no one desires a government that is diffident and stale. Even in our own lives the need and desire for self-improvement is always there. It is only in the unhealthiest among us in whom we see such a drive absent. Political history at large, as Fukuyama explicitly dealt with, and American governance operate analogously.

At this point, some might have noticed an apparent flaw in my reasoning. If having a stagnant, nonresponsive political order is so obviously dissatisfying, why have Americans allowed it to go on for so long by repeatedly electing the people who enable it? Not unlike a case of cognitive dissonance en masse, this discrepancy can be accounted for by the rather straightforward understanding that the people for much of this period seemed to broadly agree with the suppositions mentioned prior of the politicians they elected. From the late 1960s to about the Great Recession, the neoliberal—free markets and limited government intervention—consensus seemed to working well enough, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, that I imagine if we were to teleport back then and ask the average American if they would want the government to do anything significantly different, they would answer no. But just as with an unhealthy person whose symptoms take a while to appear, this cognitive dissonance reached a breaking point when the American Dream post-recession seemed to die for many, eventually contributing to the rise of Trump.

To be clear, the discontent I believe Americans have with the lack of political ambition from its leaders is merely an underlying factor that helps to provide a throughline between the many aspects of Trump’s platform that have resonated most with the public. In his first go around, we saw this particularly in his famous proposal to “build a wall.” But similar to perhaps the only other exhibition of political ambition in recent memory, Obamacare, constructing a glorified fence or instituting a glorified expansion of Medicaid pales in comparison to redefining the world order or telling a nation only 60 years into the history of aviation that it will go the moon (then actually doing it).

But this week, as Trump begins his second term, he has a chance to truly dream big, and, with ideas ranging from his Department of Government Efficiency and RFK’s Make America Healthy Again initiative to mass deportations and, more recently, his floating of a purchase of Greenland, he can end the era of American government merely being defined by a bunch of geriatrics endlessly toggling the levers of spending and taxation up and down. He can revive the era of American ambition.

Note that this is not necessarily an endorsement of any of these ideas. I happen to be supportive of most of Trump’s plans in principle but my goal here is merely to highlight the essence of what made the policy proposals of his 2024 campaign different than that which we have seen from any general election candidate in recent memory. This same analysis was the one, after all, that was able to identify President Johnson’s War on Poverty as having that similar characteristic of ambition, despite my many qualms with his program, both in principle and implementation.

Likewise, the goal here isn’t to imply that a politician having big dreams equals a politician advocating for massive government projects, for it could well be argued that not every moment in our history calls for this nor massive overhauls of our system. It also isn’t meant to imply that simple budgetary solutions are in themselves bad. Tax cuts and spending of course have their place and can do great good. On the contrary, ambition, as used here, should be read as dynamism. As it stands, the American government, as described, is a two-trick pony with a two-size-fits-all approach to the myriad of problems that face us. The nation’s children aren’t learning as they should? Throw money at it. People can’t afford their rent? Cut taxes. But even in the “little” things, as Vice President Vance demonstrated in his debate when he proposed that the government ought to subsidize mothers for caring for their newborns, ambition can be shown.

The next four years will be a test to see whether such ambition can truly take hold in American government today. For all those not wanting to see Washington continue as it is, we should hope that President Trump, at least in this regard, succeeds.