Imagine if archaeologists dig up a typical American home a thousand years from now. They find a single chair at the kitchen table. Their conclusion: Americans stopped having families. The explorers took the chair home to illustrate America’s decline.

Or imagine if they excavate a school and find nothing but petrified laptop computers and smartphones, not chalkboards and playgrounds. It appears Americans stopped playing outside. The explorers lug the technology back to display to their own friends and family.

And imagine if explorers stumble on the remains of Washington, D.C., but there’s no Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument. All that’s left is row after row of soulless modernist concrete offices—the kind of filing-cabinet-buildings that took over the city starting in the 1960s. The explorers pick them apart and bring back a load of cinderblocks.

Sound crazy? Not really. We know this issue is all about America’s birthday, but what we’re describing is basically what our former British overlords did in the 19th Century.

Back then, it was all the rage in the aristocracy to have what they called a “ruin garden.” Patricians would devote a part of their estate to Roman monuments. Sometimes, the ruins were actual ruins—the remains of ancient statues and structures unearthed in England or bought somewhere else in Europe. Other times, the ruins were fake, manufactured to give the appearance of Roman times and tastes.

Either way, the ruin gardens evoked and celebrated one of the greatest empires in human history. The not-so-subtle implication was that the British Empire was the Roman Empire’s rightful heir.

Which got us thinking: What would a future aristocrat, from some wildly advanced culture, put in a “ruin garden” dedicated to America? (This isn’t to say America is in decline—this is just a fun thought experiment).

We hope a future patrician would discover ruins that speak to American ideals and American identity. They’d find things worth celebrating—and things worth emulating.

A piece of the Statue of Liberty could easily wind up in the garden. Maybe her torch, all 305 feet tall. Few symbols are more illustrative of how America has been a light to the world. We’ve burned bright with the promise of freedom and equality—a promise that didn’t exist in the world until America came along. Even as government has grown and liberty has declined, that promise remains at the heart of our national creed.

Maybe, in some corner of the ruin garden, there would be a fossilized newspaper printing press. More than any other country on earth, the American public has relied on the media to hold politicians accountable and shape a culture of vigorous yet respectful debate. No doubt, the media has declined in recent years, promoting ideology more than accountability. But the ruined printing press would still speak to a powerful part of the American story.

If this ruin garden had actual ruins, excavated from some long-forgotten American town, it would surely have a Christian cross. Maybe it was the old steeple of a local church. Maybe it graced the entryway to a graveyard. Regardless, the cross would speak to religion’s indelible mark on American society. The Christian faith—in all its many forms—has pushed our culture toward self-restraint and strong families. Such religious influence is also declining, which is both a shame and a danger.

Actually, the decline of these things—respect for liberty, an effective media, and religion in the public square—could affect what appears in the ruin garden. The tides of socialism and secularism could wash away the things that make America great. If we allow that to happen, a future civilization may find only the remains of a lesser culture. There would be nothing left of the America we know and love—an America that’s powerful and principled.

Instead, you’d get the sad scenes those explorers discovered at the start of this story. The empty kitchen. The playground-less school. The cinderblocks instead of marble masterpieces.

No American should want a ruin garden to memorialize such things. To the contrary: We should want a future civilization to stand in awe of what they discover. The objects that endure should speak to our patriotism, our principles, and our enduring commitment to family, faith, and freedom.

Then again, if we stand for these things, then America will never fall into ruin. That should be our goal as we celebrate the country’s 250th birthday: To stand by and for the ideals that gave America life and can keep America ever young and strong.

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E pluribus unum is the most famous Latin phrase inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America. It means, of course, “out of many, one.” But where did this aspirational idea really come from? And what does it mean, 250 years after the founding of a nation that now looks much different?

In its early association with the U.S., the phrase described the often precarious union of the original 13 colonies at war against the British. Its official connection with the cause of independence began in August 1776. Just a few weeks after the Declaration was published, a kind of design competition was commissioned for a seal that would accompany official documents published by the new government. The first draft was rejected for various reasons. Six years later, however, when a design could finally be agreed upon, e pluribus unum joined an image of an eagle clutching arrows in one foot and an olive branch in the other as the official seal of the Continental Congress.

Right from the start, “out of many, one” was as aspirational a motto for the new nation as it was descriptive. As the prolonged debate over the seal itself suggests, the 13 colonies were fractious and argumentative. Despite their differences, however, they knew they needed each other, certainly to win a war against the British Empire. “We must, indeed, all hang together,” as Benjamin Franklin famously said, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The existential imperative of correctly balancing unity with diversity continued to be a major theme of the Early Republic long after the fighting stopped. Following ratification of the Constitution, one of the first acts of the new Congress was to adopt the Continental Congress’s seal as the official Great Seal of the United States. Developed in wartime, its message was still needed in peacetime. E pluribus unum has appeared on the country’s official documents ever since.

The problem of forging an “unum” out of so much “pluribus” has only become greater in time. The original draft of the seal—the one discarded back in 1776—attempted to give representation to all the 13 colonies and even the nations of origin that most of the colonists had emigrated from. These symbols of representation included the lion for England, the harp for Ireland, the fleur-de-lis for France, and so on.

Today, of course, no such attempt at representation could even be made, as Americans’ nations of origin are as numerous as the nations of the earth. Instead, we must be content with the imagery of diversity, given to us by history, as it appears on the seal, and extend its symbolic value to cover contemporary circumstances: 13 olives, 13 arrows, 13 stripes, 13 stars, and 13 letters in the phrase e pluribus unum. These are the symbols that today represent three hundred forty million people living across three and a half million square miles.

The “unum” of the United States has regularly been tested throughout our history, most terribly, of course, during the Civil War. Likewise, each major wave of immigration has been accompanied by periods of upheaval and unrest. Economic strife, cultural change, war—all of these have seemingly given the lie to, or at least encouraged cynicism about, notions of unity amidst diversity.

One of the enduring questions of the USA’s 250^th anniversary is: Can the one survive with so many? And another is: Can the many be respected even as they become one? So far into the American experiment, these remain live questions—questions each subsequent generation of Americans must ask and answer anew. These are challenging problems and our answers have often been messy.

But part of the greatness of the country is that we keep striving toward the answer. For the entire history of the United States, we have lived within the inherent tension—often excruciating tension—of reconciling unity and plurality. Injustice, violence, exclusion, and degradation have been perpetrated by advocates on either side of the equation. So have justice, peace, inclusion, and collaboration. This tension is a distinctive feature of the American system, not a bug.

Tension, even painful tension, can be a powerful source of creativity and dynamism. The success of the United States in integrating so many different peoples while becoming so prosperous and powerful is a case in point. Working out the tension of E pluribus unum is one of the major projects of the United States of America. At times this project has been the source of pain and national shame; more often, however, it has been the very catalyst for so much that has made us great.

Forging a workable national culture from extraordinary diversity is the impossible homework assignment given to us by the country’s founders. For 250 years, we haven’t stopped trying. That’s made all the difference.

Caleb Whitmer is a project manager at the Acton Institute’s Center for Social Flourishing and a co-producer and writer for the forthcoming documentary film Poverty Trap: How Big Plans to End Poverty Broke the Promise of America. A graduate of Hillsdale College, he lives outside Grand Rapids, MI with his wife and children.

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On Memorial Day in Granby, Massachusetts, near the former town hall and fire station, people line up. The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, American Legion, and others march down the town common to the Old Public Library, a Carnegie-funded neoclassical building painted white, and lay a wreath near a veteran’s memorial. Then they walk to the West Street Cemetery. At each stop, a state representative, a local pastor, a priest, or veterans’ group representative offers a prayer or a short reflection. These simple scenes are reenacted year after year in the small town where I was raised.

Before we sell America, we need to identify exactly what we are selling. A current debate on American history goes something like this: Is the true America a set of abstract ideals such as freedom, democracy, and equality, or a specific people, place, and history that together form a distinct culture? The Memorial Day parade provides a concrete both/and answer to this question. Yes, these citizens are celebrating a broad set of American ideals, recognizing that the freedom we now enjoy is a product of sacrifices over many years. But they celebrate those ideals in a specific place, with specific people who have lived through specific events. The general is honored through the particular; the ideals essential to the American experiment are best borne out through the concrete institutions of American life.

But that particular form of patriotism is at risk.

As we reflect on the 250^th anniversary of our independence, we feel a sense of unease at the state of the American project. Our political slogans reflect it. Both Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”, and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” register dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs; the rejoinder, “America Was Never Great”, displays an even deeper mistrust of the American experiment itself. The same impulse shows up, on both right and left, in the constant insistence that we should copy European models. We are experiencing a great loss of imagination; we cannot envision the relevance our American ideals might have on the problems of today.

The patriotism we need is most properly expressed through local pride. And such local pride is the result of trusted institutions that provide the backbone of community life. These institutions include families, churches, and the many clubs and free associations that have famously dotted the landscape of American cities and towns. But associative pride, whether in the Elks, Lions, or Rotary Club, now seems quaint, relevant only to a bygone age of old boys’ clubs and tasseled Shriners. Still, the health of our body politic rests in the health of our thousands of local cities and towns.

To defend American ideals in the abstract requires us to show what they actually look like in practice. If the skeptic saw community institutions at work, his loss of faith would dissipate. We must rediscover the ethos of the American builder. The rich fabric of American institutions that we take for granted had to be built at some point, often at great personal sacrifice and always to address a specific problem. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of American life, drew insights from over 7,000 miles of travel and observed that whenever Americans face a problem, they form an association to solve it.

That observation could be true once more.

Those who build must acknowledge that the problems we face today are different than those faced by the builders of the 19^th and 20^th century, which resulted in many of the blue-chip associations that have been most prominent in our civic life. The problems of today include erosion of family units, technological change, mental and psychological illness, homelessness, political violence, and the list could go on.

New forms of association must address those problems to revive the American ideal. Merely strengthening community for its own sake or other vague notions of the good of community will fall short. Although belonging is a good in and of itself, it alone cannot sustain the type of long-term investment which must establish and sustain institutions.

Early signs of a rise in religious interest show the appetite for change, but they do not show where that interest will be channeled. They will just as likely flow toward a vague spiritualism as traditional organized religion. Churches must embrace exactly what makes them unique among voluntary associations. They cannot become glorified community gathering spaces or forums to air political grievances. Congregations which are growing share a common commitment to historic doctrines which have defined the faith over centuries. In the religious landscape, building anew requires embracing the old.

Like the parade that makes its way through town each year, the answers may be simple. If we could recover a clear picture of what we are working towards and see concretely what those plans look like in action, we would see a shift in our trust in the American project. But it will require those who are willing to build.

Noah C. Gould is the Alumni & Student Programs Manager at the Acton Institute and a Contributor at Young Voices. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Law & Liberty, and The Washington Free Beacon. He is a graduate of Grove City College. Follow him on X @NoahCGould1

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How Capitalism Channeled Masculinity

John Tillman argues that America’s free enterprise system channels ambition away from power and toward innovation, turning human drive into opportunity, progress, and service to others…

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17 days ago · John Tillman

The classic book that taught us how to Believe!

Believe! is a timeless expression of American principles, reintroduced in this 50th anniversary edition for a new generation. As we approach America’s 250th, its message speaks to both personal renewal and the opportunity for a broader national comeback.

If the book has resonated with you, we’d be grateful if you’d consider leaving a review on Amazon.

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What is America’s greatest gift to the world? This question is widely asked as our country is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. My answer: America has decisively shown humanity how to deal with toxic masculinity.

Hear me out. The concept of toxic masculinity is, by and large, a liberal trope that’s largely unhelpful to our national discourse. Ideologues use the phrase to decry perceived injustice and demand a broader societal restructuring—naturally, along far-left lines. But for all its partisan baggage, the concept speaks to a problem inherent in human nature.

Since the dawn of time, talented men have used their gifts to dominate and destroy. The Roman emperors were almost entirely awful men. Genghis Khan was the worst kind of guy. You don’t kill at least 10% of the world’s population without giving into your toxic masculinity. But it wasn’t just those at the top of the food chain. For virtually all human history, survival was usually synonymous with brutality. That was simply how the world worked, and with few exceptions, men did the brutalizing.

Obviously, America has had—and still has—its fair share of such men. But if you honestly look at our country’s history, it’s clear that we’ve largely channeled men’s abilities and ambition into empowering others, not oppressing them. That’s especially true for the most talented among us.

Consider a man like Elon Musk. At the risk of inviting a fire-and-brimstone lawsuit, it seems to me that Elon would have been a dictator in a previous age. His intelligence, his ego, his intensity, his appetites—he has the combination of characteristics that would surely have vaulted him into unfettered power, circa 1000 AD. But in the 21^st Century, he’s an entrepreneur who founded a truly innovative electric car manufacturer and a space business that literally catches reusable rockets in robot arms. The real destruction Elon Musk wreaks is creative destruction—the kind that generates jobs and wealth.

That’s not to say that Elon Musk is perfect—far from it. He has plenty of critics, but they’re largely shaking their heads at his antics, not quaking in fear at the mention of his name. The same goes for other titans of our time—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos—and the barons of yesteryear, like Morgan, Rockefeller, and Astor. Yet they broadly applied their masculine drive in beneficial, not toxic, ways. Andrew Carnegie built steel mills when he probably could have ruled an empire with an iron fist.

How did America break the historical trend? In 1776, across the world, brutality was still the norm. Ambition and ability had next to no outlets except the pursuit of oppressive power. But our founders created the first country in history dedicated to the proposition that the mighty should not oppress the many. They deliberately created a constitutional structure and cultural system that channeled brutal and tyrannical impulses to the betterment of others. While plenty of people have tried to arrogate power to themselves anyway, more have applied their prodigious talents in productive ways that benefit the American people.

In other words, toxic masculinity has met its match in our system of free enterprise. The strong, the smart, and the ambitious have largely devoted themselves to building businesses and improving lives through innovation. Of course, countless women have contributed to America’s economic progress, too—they are every bit as creative as men. But in the sweep of history, men’s brutality has been the issue. America has shown how the men most at risk of holding humanity back can instead channel their abilities to move humanity forward.

In this year of celebration, Americans should recognize and applaud our country’s unparalleled success in giving men a positive outlet. But we should also recognize that we could easily revert to the historical mean, which still very much exists in large parts of the world. In our country, the constitutional framework and cultural foundations that ward off the mighty are under siege from across the ideological spectrum. The political left, which has long despised any restraint on government power, is a particular threat. Ironically, the liberals who most frequently warn against toxic masculinity are the ones most likely to unleash it on America, turning men from the pursuit of progress to the pursuit of power.

The danger is real. The warning signs are already flashing, as government expands and entrepreneurial spirit wanes. As Americans look to our country’s next 250 years, we must continue to push men toward a life of contribution through free enterprise. This is our country’s greatest gift to the world, and for the sake of human happiness, we must ensure it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project and Founder of the Hall of Giants.

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You can see the problem at a glance. The Shoeshine stand is too far off the beaten path. Specifically, it’s behind a broken ATM in Terminal 2 at SFO. The sign out front helps, but still, when your business relies entirely on foot traffic, you need to be where the feet are. I wandered back and took a seat, as a middle-aged man from another country tried to shine the rubber trim on the ugliest pair of tennis shoes I’ve ever seen. The owner of the ugly tennis shoes was a teenager who seemed grateful for the improvement. I arrived in time to hear the kid say, “Thanks very much. That’s SO much better. How much do I owe you?”

“How old are you?” said the man.

“Sixteen,” said the kid.

“Still in high school?”

“Yes sir,” said the kid.

“No charge for you,” said the man. “Come back again though, when you have a job.”

Next to me, a woman cursed at the broken ATM and stomped off, as the shoeshine guy turned his attention to me.

“Good morning,” he said. “Nice boots. Red Wings?”

“Wolverines,” I said. “Thousand Milers.”

“How many miles do have on them?” he asked.

“Couple hundred,” I said. “Maybe more.”

“Looks like it,” he said. “Have they been shined before?”

“First time,” I said.

As the man went to work, I learned that his name was Tony, and that he’d been shining shoes since 2011.

“You must be very good it by now,” I said.

“Not for me to say,” said Tony. “I like it, though, and have many repeat customers. Where are you headed today?”

“Palm Springs,” I said.

“For what purpose?”

“I’m supposed to give a speech to some very wealthy people about the meaning of the American Dream.”

Tony looked up from my boots, which were speckled with mud and some unidentified grime.

“I know about the American Dream,” he said. “I am Filipino.”

“I thought so. What’s your last name?”

“Alberto.”

“Well, Tony Alberto, are you living the American Dream?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I am here. My family is with me. I have two jobs and two children, but I lost one during Covid.”

“A job or a kid?” I asked.

Tony laughed, to my relief, and said “the job. But it’s no big deal. I can always get another job. Too late,” he said, “to get another kid.”

Tony had not yet begun to shine my shoes. He was still cleaning them with soap and wet rag. Then he applied some leather softener. The he worked out the scuffs and scrapes. Then he applied some more leather softener. Then, some polish.

“How many shoes have you shined today?”

“You are my second customer,” he said. “It’s slow for a Friday.”

“How many do you hope to do?”

“I would be pleased with ten,” he said.

Next to me, a man kicked the broken ATM.

“Why the hell doesn’t it tell me there’s no money inside, before it takes my card and asks me how much I want?!”

The question seemed rhetorical, so I offered no reply, as Tony’s radio played a song I didn’t recognize, with a lot of trumpets. I checked the time.

“Are you in a hurry?” asked Tony. “I can make your boots look like new.”

The plane was starting to board, but the gate was close.

“Take your time, Tony. Make ‘em look as good as you can.”

I was the last to board, but I made it, and now I’m thinking about what to say to a roomful of wealthy people in Palm Springs about the American Dream. To be honest, I’m still not sure what to tell them. Dreams are tricky things to nail down, especially when they’re preceded by the word “American.” I suspect I’ll come up with something. Either way though, my shoes will look great.

Mike Rowe is an Emmy Award-winning television host, bestselling author, and creator of Dirty Jobs, where he has highlighted the dignity and value of skilled trades across America. Through his mikeroweWORKS Foundation, he has awarded millions in work ethic scholarships and champions vocational education, workforce development, and the opportunities created by hard work.

We recently came across an amusing meme on Twitter that referred to today’s Americans as “fish swimming through the ruins of Atlantis.” While pondering how to work this premise into an editorial piece, a friend of the Journal stumbled into the office spouting kaleidoscopic observations about his day-to-day life in Los Angeles. He’s familiar with the fish meme, and has brought back a lucid report from Atlantis, which looks a lot like Downtown LA.

The foundation of my apartment building quakes. Flakes of plaster rain into my cereal bowl. The pounding upstairs is terrible. I put on my shoes and take the elevator to the third floor to investigate.

The building is modest, built in the 1980s. The exterior is coral pink, which is nice. Otherwise, it’s nondescript. Gum-spackled greige carpet coats the stairs which get shampooed once every financial quarter. The walls are gouged from the constant movement of the high-turnover tenants’ cheap, frequently moved furniture. It’s cheap because it’s old, bought second hand. It gouges the wall because it’s old, too. Things were built different not so long ago. This is one of the sturdier buildings in my area, which is under aggressive hedge-fund development.

The encroachment of modernity is why I choose to live in the ruins. Things are alive here. I can’t imagine a worse fate than living in a modern high-rise, which to me evokes post-apocalyptic imagery much more sharply than the dust, noise, and slanted floors of my current abode.

The elevator opens. Maintenance is removing an ancient refrigerator from my neighbor’s apartment. There are four people involved. No one speaks English. Two maintenance guys shout at each other in Chinese. The elderly tenant mutters to herself in Farsi. The fourth person, his function unclear to me, blasts Bad Bunny from an impressively loud Android handset. Then a fifth person slides out from under the sink, wrench in hand, and demands something from the fourth guy in Chicano. The tenant catches me staring so I bashfully slink away. Sorry lady, just wanted to make sure the world wasn’t ending.

Satisfied that the building won’t imminently collapse, I decide to go for a walk. I am free to do this because I, along with most of my friends, work remotely. I’m wearing swim trunks and no shirt. Eventually, my boss will ping me and I’ll have to type something work-related. It beats moving refrigerators, which, outside of writing-for-hire, is my sole alternative profession. Thirty years ago, that’s what I’d be doing, and wearing a coarse button-down while I was at it.

I bash my shin on the bumper of a 1958 Cadillac idling against my front steps. It’s spotless, chrome glimmering, black and baroque and awe-inspiring, like a giant manta ray surveying the depths. A monument to the American Dream and all that’s still left of it. What’s even more beautiful is that now the convertible top is going down. The Chicano shoulders up behind me, along with his helper. They’re carrying my neighbor’s refrigerator—Maytag—a name and chassis as storied Cadillac. The fridge sags into the guts of the red vinyl bench seat with room to spare for its two pallbearers. The driver throws her into gear and The Most Beautiful Car in The World sputters down the hill, vanishing against the downtown skyline, where the refrigerator is presumably promised a new life.

Wandering through a park Downtown, I come across a graffitied-over Art Deco relief of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. Beneath him a cartouche that reads “MOSAIC LAW.” I take a picture with my phone and share it on Instagram. The irony of a beautifully intricate digital world allowing us to mull over the decline of the physical world is not lost on me.

This contrast becomes especially stark as I pass under new housing developments, all painted hedge-fund gray, all of which would definitely collapse under the weight of this morning’s fridge swap, whose interiors would tear like cheesecloth if a battered thrift-store armoire were to graze the wall. A new Cadillac passes by, indistinguishable from a new Toyota, but smaller and somehow uglier, making a sad electric whine. It’s a slightly different shade of battleship gray than the buildings. An iPhone on wheels.

Disheartened, I turn back, toward the coral-hued sea of 80s low-rises that seem so much more desirable than their newer counterparts. America’s a young country, but in Los Angeles, where so much happens so quickly, a decade or two constitutes an ocean of time, giving nondescript 80s construction a distinct old-world charm.

As I scroll my phone (my boss is pinging me, so I’ll have to make this quick), I look at the notifications building up on my Instagram photo: it’s gone global, this little forgotten, regional thing spawning polyglot commentary second only to that in the apartment above mine. I scroll the app some more: pictures of the gray glass-and-steel towers, big families moving in from far-flung locations; American kids with three roommates and Minnesota license plates looking to make it big in Hollywood; a Korean DJ beaming with pride in front of his 2026 electric Cadillac. Their stories are still being written, and I’m watching them unfold in real-time. Could the whole point of our weird historical moment be just this? To appreciate the past, memorialize the present, and speculate about what’s to come? We may have given up some material elegance to build in the digital world, but are matters of taste—battleship gray vs. coral fuschia, EV vs. hot-rod, Panasonic vs. Maytag—really such a big sacrifice? Are we fish swimming through the ruins of Atlantis? Or are we intrepid divers, mining the sunken past to build a better future?

Two workmen shoulder my neighbor’s sleek new fridge past me. It’s a thing of beauty, arrived via an impossibly intricate logistical network to keep my neighbor’s orange juice cold. I got to witness its arrival—and take a picture shared across the world—and publish my scattered thoughts about fish and Atlantis and America and Bad Bunny and Moses and refrigerators—all before getting back to work from the comfort of my apartment, which, as far as I know, won’t be underwater any time soon.

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The Words Every Man Is Waiting to Hear | Anthony B. Bradley

Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise | Johann Kurtz

The End of the Populist Style | Aaron M. Renn

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Manifest Digital: Why America Will Conquer its Latest Frontier

Nate Fischer argues that AI presents an opportunity to renew American innovation, empowering entrepreneurs, communities, and institutions to thrive while reinforcing the nation’s enduring values…

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a month ago · 1 like · Nate Fischer

The classic book that taught us how to Believe!

Believe! is a timeless expression of American principles, reintroduced in this 50th anniversary edition for a new generation. As we approach America’s 250th, its message speaks to both personal renewal and the opportunity for a broader national comeback.

If the book has resonated with you, we’d be grateful if you’d consider leaving a review on Amazon.

Reflect with The Believe! Concierge:

Want to go deeper? Try The Believe! Concierge—an interactive way to put these principles into practice in your work and daily life. For a more natural conversation, use voice mode. Try it now.

Americans recognize that AI and digital transformation will reshape our lives. Many fear the impact, recognizing the disruptive power of these technologies. Entire industries may be reorganized. White-collar professions once thought secure may radically change. Institutions that shaped economic and social life for generations could disappear.

Many assume these technologies threaten America’s already-fragile social contract—accelerating the concentration of wealth and power in a few coastal centers and heightening the cultural and political conflicts that have defined the past decade.

But I believe these technologies offer an extraordinary opportunity to America. Not only can they offer America leverage in geopolitical contests, they can help restore dynamism in communities and industries that have fallen behind in recent decades.

The digital age is likely to reward traits America has historically possessed in abundance: entrepreneurial energy, adaptability, optimism, decentralized problem-solving, and a culture that encourages ordinary people to build and take initiative. New technologies could restore an economy centered on these capabilities even as they disrupt incumbent bureaucratic systems.

For decades, advanced societies drifted toward managerialism. Economic success became tied to credentialing systems, administrative complexity, institutional gatekeeping, and large bureaucratic organizations. Much of professional life came to consist of navigating processes, managing information flows, and complying with procedures. This may have been inevitable in the twentieth century, as everything from government to industry required large bureaucratic systems to operate at a competitive scale, but it suppressed many of America’s traditional cultural norms.

Now digital technologies are increasingly capable of handling exactly this kind of work. AI systems and automation tools excel at processing information, synthesizing knowledge, identifying patterns, generating standardized outputs, and coordinating workflows. Many of the functions that defined the managerial age are among the easiest to automate.

What these technologies do not easily replicate are human capacities like judgment, leadership, trust, responsibility, risk tolerance, and the ability to organize people around a shared goal—strengths that have long been central to American society.

Since America’s original settlement and founding, Americans have had a particular comfort with innovation, change, and chaos. This is exemplified in the canonical American story, the Western. In a typical Western, a protagonist confronts the chaos inherent to any frontier, defeats a threat of some sort, and creates the conditions needed to form civilization. This process includes both a moral element—defeating the criminals who often find opportunity in such chaos—and the practical formation of new economic and cultural institutions.

This spirit likewise helped Americans thrive through a series of technological revolutions, from industrialization to semiconductors. America repeatedly benefited from a population willing to move, adapt, build, fail, and try again—building on these technologies to advance American prosperity and expand our civilization.

That disposition remains embedded in American culture. It positions America for exactly the sort of broad-based innovation that can allow the benefits of AI and other new technologies to be distributed throughout the country, rather than further concentrating wealth and opportunity in a few already-thriving coastal centers.

AI will certainly drive tremendous wealth for the leading Silicon Valley AI platforms. But ultimately, we may see a dynamic similar to the broadband revolution, where vast infrastructure investment meant the greatest rewards went to savvy users of the new technology. With AI, competition among model providers can unlock enormous opportunity for those who productively apply AI to real-world problems.

In many industries, successful application will require combining tech aptitude with the sort of tacit expertise built on close proximity to the physical processes of production. This combo—exactly the sort of practical innovation that Americans have excelled at—will be naturally distributed around the country. This could reverse dynamics of previous decades, where tech change was driven by venture-backed startups and company reorganizations driven by financial firms, with associated career opportunities concentrated in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

America’s Christian tradition can likewise help navigate central challenges of the digital age. As AI raises questions about the distinction between humanity and machines, Christian anthropology provides a strong foundation for understanding both our particular nature and God-given role as rulers of technology rather than passive subjects of change. As some legacy institutions and norms are disrupted, Christian ethics offer timeless principles to shape digital age successors. While Christianity has declined markedly in recent decades, this may reverse as many recognize the inability of secular norms to answer questions raised by emerging technologies.

In sum, while America is entering a new phase of technological disruption in a fragile position, our particular cultural strengths may actually position it to benefit from this change. Our comfort with chaos and facility with practical innovation will play well to a dynamic where opportunity lies in the application of technology to legacy industries. And our Christian understanding of the person and tradition of self-government prepares us to confront technologies that blur traditional lines between man and machine. Though changes of this sort are always challenging, America is a good bet in the digital age.

Nate Fischer is the founder and CEO of New Founding, a venture firm focused on critical civilizational problems. He also co-founded American Reformer, a non-profit dedicated to promoting a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day.

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Are America’s problems too big for us to solve together?

As we mark America’s 250th anniversary, more than half of all Americans say the answer is yes. Having turned away from each other as the source of solutions, people are turning to extreme top-down ideas — from socialism to protectionism. But these ideas violate the principles that inspired our country’s founding. And they’ve always failed to deliver.

While the rhetoric rages on X, Americans know that talk is cheap. It’s the actions we take to tackle the problems that cause people to look to the extremes that will determine the future of our country. From AI’s economic disruption to affordability. From the crisis of loneliness to political polarization that causes more than 1 in 5 Americans to say violence is justified when we disagree.

To get the future right, we’d do well to look to our past. At the turn of the 20th century, Americans were also bitterly divided. The Industrial Revolution uprooted community life, and millions of agricultural jobs disappeared overnight. Fearmongers demonized immigrants. Cities elected socialist mayors. The People’s Party frothed with populist fervor. Anarchist bombings brought political violence. There was even a pandemic. The Spanish flu killed far more people than Covid, shaking trust in science and the government.

Communism and fascism captured imaginations elsewhere. But Americans didn’t succumb to the siren song of top-down ideas to solve their problems. They doubled down on the principles in the Declaration. The result? Instead of letting the chaos consume them, they created the American Century.

They did it by reinventing the institutions that enable a uniquely American ideal: Out of many, one.

And they did it from the bottom up. A striking number of the local groups that are now household names were formed at this time: the Boy Scouts. The Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis clubs. The NAACP and the “Divine Nine” Black fraternities and sororities. It was Tocqueville for the 20th century: Americans uniting to solve each other’s problems. Before it was over, civic participation had nearly tripled.

This explosion in civic participation reimagined the institutions that shaped American life and defined what it meant to be an American for the next 100 years. It showed people that their actions mattered, and that they were part of something bigger. It gave new life to the Pursuit of Happiness: the idea that we succeed by helping each other succeed. Our country’s problems didn’t go away, but we built the muscle to tackle them.

Our next overhaul is overdue. Today, 20th-century institutions are no longer cutting it. It’s not just government. Businesses are struggling to help workers keep up. Our education system is failing to prepare students for the 21st century. And despite spending trillions of dollars, poverty is even harder to escape.

The good news is that Americans are up to the task. When asked about their highest aspirations, more than 70% say their top priority is contributing to the lives of others. But barely 30% say they’re achieving that. An unmet demand that big is an entrepreneur’s dream. And social entrepreneurs finding new and better ways to solve problems are the bright spots in an otherwise dim landscape. Given the appropriate oxygen, their glow could grow into the institutional framework for the next American Century.

One-size-fits-all education is giving way to entrepreneurs like MacKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt, cofounders of Alpha School. Their students perform twice as well as the best traditional school students in less than half the time. Alpha uses the same AI disrupting today’s workers to prepare tomorrow’s for whatever might come. The VELA Education Fund, active in all 50 states, has provided funding for nearly 5,000 other education entrepreneurs who are meeting the unique needs of 5 million kids.

Social innovators like CarePortal promise to replace broken social welfare programs. They connect churchgoers to families at risk of losing their kids to the foster care system. The group’s technology doesn’t replace human relationships. It accelerates them to keep those families together. The 400,000 kids they’ve helped are far more likely to avoid poverty, prison time, and other tragic consequences of foster care.

Businesses are beginning to transform hiring practices, no longer requiring four-year degrees. The Human Potential Network is a coalition that helps businesses adopt the practice. And if this becomes the norm, they’ll help unlock the potential in more than 90 million Americans who don’t have degrees but do have a lot to offer.

These are just a few of the thousands of innovations that can help shape institutions to better meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century — institutions that empower Americans to solve problems by applying those founding principles we’ll celebrate this summer. As they do, people are less likely to embrace extreme ideas and more likely to begin to build the future together.

Brian Hooks is chairman and CEO of Stand Together. He is co-author, with Charles Koch, of the America’s 250th anniversary edition of “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World.”

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The Golden Gate Bridge.

The Empire State Building.

Pretty much every inspiring example of late-19th and early-20th Century American architecture, from the Singer Tower to the World’s Fair pavilions to the original Penn Station in New York City.

Guess who built them? Americans?

Pff. Try the Tartarians.

Their ancient empire apparently built all this and more. Americans couldn’t possibly have built all those masterpieces. We’ve never known how to create such beauty. We still don’t.

Welcome to one of the craziest conspiracy theories in America today. Like any good conspiracy theory, the “Tartarian Empire” is easy to disprove. In fact, Americans built all those bridges, skyscrapers, and inspiring structures. No doubt about it.

But this kooky idea should still cause us to ask a hard question: Why don’t we build beautiful things anymore?

There’s a reason the Tartarian Empire has attracted so many followers in the internet fever swamp. People are looking at the structures and statues of yesteryear, wondering what happened to that sense of grandeur and scale and overpowering confidence.

A century ago, Americans were at the height of our creative power. We built with purpose and passion and irrepressible self-belief. Those world fair pavilions drew the eye and the spirit upward. So did the early skyscrapers and the neo-classical masterpieces that used to anchor our nation’s cities.

Many of those structures have been destroyed, but others haven’t. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Empire State Building. They inspire to this day because they were built to inspire. Our country set an incredibly high bar, then cleared it with room to spare. The Americans who labored on these projects poured their hearts and minds into the task.

But in the past 75 years, we’ve poured a lot of concrete instead. Modernist architecture is an eyesore—an insult to people’s sensibilities. Yet such ugliness is all around us, from museums to schools to government offices. The modernist blight is even evident in scores of churches.

Worse, most of what Americans build today has no architectural style whatsoever. It’s cheap, flimsy, doomed for destruction by the sands of time. Anyone who works in a modern office park knows it. Ditto those living in the newest apartments and cookie-cutter homes. The comparison with yesteryear could hardly be more stark. Our standards have fallen so far that our great grandparents’ works are now mistaken for the creations of a mythical empire.

We can do better. We must do better. And if we’re going to bring out our country’s best, we need to set a high bar once again.

As Rich DeVos wrote in Believe!, accountability is one of the most powerful principles in the world. At its core, accountability means holding yourself and others to a standard of excellence, because only then can you rise to meet it. America needs this principle in so many areas—and architecture is undeniably one of them.

Building beautifully and permanently isn’t as hard as it may sound. Think of how far we’ve come since the early 1900s. We’ve made incredible advances in mathematics, materials science, and design. This progress should make it easier than ever to plan and construct buildings that are really works of art. What on earth are we waiting for?

Some Americans aren’t waiting at all. The “new urbanism” movement is actively fighting for cities and neighborhoods that serve both form and function. President Trump has required that new federal buildings meet a standard of beauty—neo-classical, Spanish revival, and so on.

Such developments are wildly popular, and no wonder. They remind Americans that we can—and should—build for the future. We don’t have to settle for ugliness and utilitarianism. We can create communities that uplift the soul and elevate the imagination. We can still build a country that inspires the world.

Whether in architecture or anything else, aesthetics is a choice. As Americans, we can choose to do what our ancestors did, and build in a way that reflects a profound self-belief. Or we can wallow in the mistaken belief that we have to accept low standards and a lack of vision.

That’s where conspiracy theories like the Tartarian Empire arise. But there is a lost civilization out there—our own. The time has come for Americans to rediscover it, because remembering our past is key to charting a better and more beautiful future.

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From The Believe! Journal:

From our Contributors:

The Public Intellectuals America Needs | Aaron M. Renn

Childhood freedom is a now luxury good | Johann Kurtz

The Human Worker as Civilizational Nexus | Luke Burgis

Believe! The American Stream:

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God, Legacy, and The Deep Future

Johann Kurtz recently sat down with Doug DeVos on the Believe! The American Stream podcast to discuss what it means to build a legacy—not just on the level of family, but up to the level of culture and civilization…

Listen now

2 months ago · 1 like · Doug DeVos and Johann Kurtz

The classic book that taught us how to Believe!

Believe! is a timeless expression of American principles, reintroduced in this 50th anniversary edition for a new generation. As we approach America’s 250th, its message speaks to both personal renewal and the opportunity for a broader national comeback.

If the book has resonated with you, we’d be grateful if you’d consider leaving a review on Amazon.

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