You know, I‘m going to talk a bit more about that St Augustine quote that @JoeBiden used today.

What constitutes „a people“ in this passage tells us a lot about late antique political thought. It’s choice perhaps tells us much about the ideas of the new administration. 1/ https://twitter.com/calthalas/status/1351940707431428101

St Augustine stresses that 'a people' is not an ethnic concept. It’s an association by agreement. He discusses widely in the preceding chapter what is the crucial element binding people together. Rights? Interests? No, it’s what people choose to value, respect (‘diligere’). 2/

That ability to associate what a group decides to value is universal and not exceptional to the Romans. Every people has that right and Romans are in no way special in associating that way. The freedom to agree on the objects we value is universal. 3/

‘[...] what I say of this people [Romans] I must be understood to think and say of the Athenians or any Greek state, of the Egyptians, of the early Assyrian Babylon, and of every other nation, great or small, which had a public government’ writes St Augustine. 4/

But at the same time there has to be an acknowledgement of history, including its wrongs, for the agreement to continue, he adds (he remarks how he spent much of his work pointing that out). So you cannot just blindly look forward without accounting with the past. 5/

St Augustine finds himself at a tension point between the Christian theological dispute and the Roman political theory - he is fully capable of both. Agreement over the things that are valued is a most elegant compromise in this definition. 6/

But he also remarks that the measure of a people is *what* objects they value. Not all objects of the agreement are equal. It matters what a people decides to love. The higher the interests that bound it, the better it is. 7/

So: a common choice of what is valued, acknowledgement of history, denial of exceptionalism and the free choice to be a part of reasonable association are Augustine’s points about peoples here. 8/

I can’t say if this was the deeper intention in making that quotation in the speech, but I do hope it was chosen for more than just a catchy one-liner. Because this is as far from exceptionalism as it gets. And in a way contradicts the triumphalism of the American experience. 9/