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"We have it in our power to begin the world all over again," proclaimed Thomas Paine, the lyricist of the American Revolution, and his melody has underscored our politics ever since. From the New World to the New Deal and the New Frontier, American progressives have rejected ancestor worship in favor of faith in a better future — a faith, they argue, that gives the U.S. an edge over old Europe and binds together a nation with no common ethnic or religious bonds.

But every so often — actually, at fairly regular intervals — there comes a call to look back. Too much of that Hopey Changey Thing yields a desire for restoration, to move forward by turning back. What's striking about the current revival is that it's led by our most emphatically modern master of the cross-platform political-celebrity mashup, Sarah Palin, as she calls for "not transformation but restoration with a 'Great Awakening' that we already feel emerging across America."



The pedigree of Palin's message is impeccable. Democrats have generally favored the transformation theme, given their faith in the power of government to make the world better. There is a natural foreign policy corollary: those who see America as a work in progress are less likely to view it as exceptional. Those who invoke restoration, on the other hand, echo Richard Land, author of The Divided States of America?: "America hasn't been perfect, but God help the world if it had not been for the United States in the 20th century." Transformers view the Constitution as a supple, living document; restorers view it as sacred text and must, as the new GOP Pledge to America affirms, "honor its original intent" — not that we've ever agreed on what that is.

Politicians, however, being political, reserve the right to strike the chords that suit them. George W. Bush's humble foreign policy became a vow to transform the Middle East into a cradle of democracy, even as he expanded entitlements and created the biggest new government bureaucracy since Lyndon Johnson. Democrats spent much of the past decade promising to "take back America," as they called their 2006 agenda, with the implied "from the GOP."

This was her message at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally in August, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (one of the greatest calls for transformation in the nation's history), and she has sounded it steadily since. The country needs "a restoration of all that's good and exceptional about America," she told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Nov. 22, "vs. the transformation of America that presently we see coming out of the Oval Office." Restoration. Exceptional. Not transformation.

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