He has dominated the media landscape for decades, literally written the encyclopedia of politics, and even shown Europeans a thing or two about their history, so like the old EF Hutton ad says, when Michael Barone speaks, people listen.

Appearing on the Heritage Foundation’s The Kevin Roberts Show this week to talk up his latest book, Mental Maps of the Founders, Barone was asked to tackle a difficult question: What needs to change so that Americans are more hopeful about the future?

Barone, a historian and Washington Examiner columnist, found the answer easy. The public should appreciate their past luck and pay it forward.

“You ought to have a sense of nationalism and national pride, not because you’re wonderful, but because you are the lucky inheritors of a series of happy contingencies, a series of great leadership and great creativity on the part of a lot of people including people outside of government and politics, people that none of us have ever heard of,” Barone told Roberts, the president of Heritage.

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“We should have a sense of how lucky we are, and that luck confers responsibility,” he said.

“We stand at a place in history, hugely privileged,” he said, adding, “privilege means responsibility. For privilege means not just, you know, the enjoyment of pleasure but the performance of duty. And I think we have duties that are conferred upon us by the great deeds of our American past.”