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Europeans often tease Americans that they live in a young country that’s barely 250 years old. But after spending two weeks traveling across the American East Coast as part of the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, I came away more convinced than ever that these clichés miss something essential. The United States is not a country without memory. Quite the opposite.

In America, storytelling is not reserved for intellectuals or academic elites. It is a civic practice woven into public life—the task of the people, done by the people, for the people. You are expected to know how to explain who you are, where you come from, and what you stand for. American institutions operate the same way.

Alongside fellow Hungarian colleagues, I visited sites dedicated to preserving the past, such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. What struck me most was not simply the scale of these efforts, but the coherence behind them. Each featured an exhibit, collection, or carefully curated display explaining not only what the institution does, but why it exists. Perhaps that is the real difference between America and Europe.

In a calamitous capper to its most recent term, the Roberts Court blessed birthright citizenship for the hundreds of thousands of children born annually in the U.S. to illegal aliens and “birth tourists.” Would that same Court be willing to abide by the removal of the birthright babies’ parents, along with millions of fellow illegal aliens, from the census figures used to apportion House seats, redistrict, and distribute trillions in federal funds?

Trump v. Barbara begs that question. Given several notable parallels between immigration-related exclusions to birthright citizenship and cases poised to arise concerning immigration-status-related exclusions to the apportionment base, it is fair to examine what a future case may hold based on the Court’s ruling in Barbara.

If the Supreme Court were to take a similar tack, it would prove disastrous for our country. It would legitimize the further twisting of the Constitution and a Reconstruction-era amendment to grant millions of non-citizens representation in our political system—a prospect never contemplated by the 14th Amendment’s drafters. It would distort the American political map, dilute Americans’ voting power, and incentivize still more illegal immigration and sanctuary policies.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Marco Rubio to the Globalists: Get Lost | The Roundtable Ep. 326

Narcissism has given itself a new name: socialism. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the generation that has grown up scrolling through social media feeds tends to be self-obsessed. This is evident in fewer marriages, lower birth rates, and a greater likelihood of mental illness. Politically, it is reflected in the alarming percentage of young people who have favorable views of socialism.

Over the past few months, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have found success in political races across America. Whether it’s Zohran Mamdani’s cadre of candidates in New York City or Colorado’s Melat Kiros, it seems like no place is safe from the DSA’s growing influence.

On June 30, the Supreme Court affirmed in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment says that if you are born on American soil, you are an American citizen. Chief Justice Roberts, citing Calvin’s Case from 1608, called citizenship “the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community.”

The ruling settled the question of birthright citizenship in the courts—for now. But it opened a harder one: If citizenship is unconditional, what holds a nation of citizens together?

For most of American history, civic identity was a set of specific commitments, transmitted through institutions everyone belonged to and enforced by law. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in 1831: “Without ideas held in common, there is no common action, and without common action, there may still be men, but there is no social body.” He viewed Protestantism as a political habit of mind that held the American republic together: every citizen is competent, no priestly caste is required, and individual conscience is the final authority. To Tocqueville, that was the epistemology that made America’s self-governance thinkable.

For much of the 20th century, Maine was not primarily known as a vacationland. It was a working state. Paper mills dotted the rivers. The forests supplied a robust timber industry. Its small towns revolved around businesses that turned natural resources into exportable wealth. The image of Maine that entered the American imagination was a place of rugged lobstermen, loggers, and hardscrabble Yankees rooted in a productive economy. In very short order, Maine became something different.

The state increasingly resembles what might be called a statewide retirement community—sustained not by the production of goods but by the consumption of scenery, lifestyle, and wealth accumulated elsewhere. It lacks dynamism and youthful vitality: Maine’s total fertility rate has been below replacement for more than 30 years. The state attracts few remote workers and struggles to retain its own young people.

This transformation did not happen by accident. It emerged from a series of political choices made over decades, as Maine shifted from a purple state with divided partisan loyalties to a solidly blue state. Environmental organizations, regulatory agencies, political leaders, and affluent newcomers together moved Maine’s priorities from production to preservation.

Akhil Reed Amar is one of the rare legal academics who are willing to use the term “originalism” without dismissing the concept out-of-hand, although he will (I suspect) be the first to add that he has his own very idiosyncratic take on what the term can mean. It is originalism’s flexibility that informs his newest volume, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920, the second installment of a trilogy on the history of constitutional interpretation he began in 2021 with The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. This newest extension of Amar’s survey moves from the waning of the founders’ generation, through the Civil War years, and up to the adoption of the 19th Amendment. It is a story told in his inimitably raffish and colloquial style, and it tracks the emerging centrality of equality in American law, and the two dominant impulses equality encouraged: emancipation and citizenship for American slaves and voting rights for women.

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration issued a proposed “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” to make federal grantmaking “consistent with the public purpose of federal authorizing legislation and aligned with administration policies and priorities.” To that end, in the domain of scientific research, the 108-page regulation “clarif[ies] that peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion.” The rule proposes to allow federal agencies to terminate a science grant if it “no longer effectuates program goals, federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of the termination.”

In short, this rule proposes to strengthen and clarify what we might call civilian control of science and other areas of federal expenditure. Not boards of peers (fellow scientists shielded by anonymity) but named and, in most cases, politically appointed and Senate-confirmed agency heads are to be responsible and accountable to the president and to Congress—and through them, to the public—for grantmaking. Programs are not to go on any longer than their political masters believe them to serve the national interest—or, at least, when they do go on, we will know who is to blame.

Abraham Lincoln vastly admired the founders and the Declaration of Independence. But he felt compelled to add a silent corollary to the clause “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights among them the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That addition stated, in effect: “and the right to advance economically and socially as far as their talent, industry, ability, ambition, and determination will take them.”

Half a century ago, the late Gabor S. Boritt noted that Lincoln undertook “the task of updating the Declaration of Independence to meet the needs of a society exploding economically.” The Declaration, Lincoln believed, should be considered a ringing endorsement of social and economic mobility as the foundation of a free society. Equality of opportunity meant that everyone should have an equal chance in the race of life, but it did not mean equality of outcomes. Instead, it meant what Boritt felicitously called “the right to rise,” though he rather narrowly confined it to the realm of economics, whereas Lincoln included social as well as economic mobility.

Commenting on the Declaration’s phrase “all men are created equal,” Lincoln said,

A few months ago in Mercer County, Kentucky, more than 200 residents packed a planning and zoning commission meeting until every seat was filled, with citizens standing along the walls. Yard signs reading “NO DATA CENTER” lined farm roads from Harrodsburg to Burgin. Diane Floyd’s “We Are Mercer County” had gathered thousands of signatures against a proposed 555-acre hyperscale data center on prime farmland off Handy Road near Burgin, and speaker after speaker rose to be heard.

The frustration was not abstract. It was in the soil, the homes, and the way of life that residents were watching get priced out. One speaker after another said the same thing in different words: “This isn’t development, it’s sacrifice.”

Residents described how the facility would pull millions of gallons of water daily from the same aquifer that irrigates their crops and fills their wells. They talked about the constant low-frequency hum from a sprawling, windowless complex the size of dozens of football fields, the kind of noise that would end the quiet nights that drew horse breeders and retirees to the area. Backup diesel generators the size of shipping containers would sit ready to roar, and similar projects elsewhere had already driven up residential rates while delivering almost none of the promised local tax revenue following massive abatements.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Supreme Court Roundup with John Eastman, Part 1 | The Roundtable Ep. 325

Modern democratic politics began with three great revolutions, with the English, American, and French Revolution each marked, though in very different ways, by a memorable public Declaration justifying and explaining the political changes. Americans’ impending commemoration of the 250th anniversary of our Revolution—and our Declaration of Independence—invites at least a brief comparison with these other revolutions’ declarations, followed by a more sustained interpretation of our own illuminated by its differences with them.

The English Bill of Rights

With all of the justifiable disappointment in the Supreme Court’s term-concluding decisions on birthright citizenship and mail-in ballots, one could be forgiven for overlooking the significance of the blow it dealt to the administrative state. While there are some important qualifications which I will go on to explain, the Court in Trump v. Slaughter strongly embraced the American Founders’ principle of unity in the executive branch. It repudiated the idea that parts of the federal bureaucracy should be free to wield executive power independent of the president and the voters who elect him.

The Court’s ruling in Slaughter and in a series of related cases leading up to it marks a restoration of democracy, not an assault on it. After all, how can it be an assault on “our democracy” to take power from those who are unaccountable to voters and give it, instead, to the only official for whom the entire nation votes?

France is in freefall. Industry, agriculture, public finances, trade, educational and cultural standards, health, scientific research—nothing is mastered any more, and everything is going downhill at high speed. The luxury-goods, defense, and aeronautics industries, along with wine and cereal crops, are the last islands of French excellence to survive in an ocean of mediocrity. The French people feel that they can no longer control their own destiny.

I often say that immigration is not the cause of anything, but it makes everything worse. It was collège unique and the methods of the pedagogists that destroyed the school. But the massive immigration of people from Arab-Muslim countries, most of whose parents have very little social capital and a dull hostility to French culture, has considerably accelerated the collapse of standards and violence. It was the 35-hour working week and bureaucracy that disrupted the hospital system. But the unlimited, free admission of patients from all over Africa overwhelmed and sank a French hospital system that 25 years ago was still recognized as the best in the world.

The gains made in classical education in recent years are truly encouraging. Students are once again learning great names, great stories, and encountering primary texts that invite them to participate rather than be passive observers. But while the classical academic program is teaching our children the names of virtues long out of fashion, we should ask whether we have created the conditions in which those virtues can truly take root and flourish.

In the Cyropaedia, Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’s formation and adventures before he ascended to Persia’s throne, Xenophon describes the paideia, or the process of formation whereby young men become statesmen. Xenophon’s Cyrus grew up with rigorous discipline: combat, cold exposure, fasting, and the austere corrections of men hardened by war. His education was a series of experiences fashioning him for military service, accustoming him to privation, and schooling him in the unapologetic art of justice.

Laura Field once again accuses me of “distort[ing] and obscur[ing] a specific passage from an important speech by Lincoln.” She also accuses me, once again, of betraying the teaching and legacy of Harry Jaffa—an extraordinary claim for Field to make, considering that in her book she admits to finding Jaffa “unreadable” and plainly demonstrates that she doesn’t understand him.

In truth, Field is the one doing the distorting and obscuring—both in her new articles and in her book, which I showed when I reviewed it earlier this year. I will go through the logic chain line by line, which can get tedious, so be warned, but before I do, let me cut to the chase and state a few conclusions up front. Which will make this, in addition to tedious, a bit repetitive, so be warned about that too.

One of the earliest civic traditions to emerge in the United States was the Fourth of July oration. Prominent citizens gave speeches in churches, town halls, and philanthropic societies reflecting on what it meant to be an American. These speeches often included a full reading of the Declaration of Independence, an exercise recommended by founding mother Mercy Otis Warren to American youth “as a palladium of which they should never lose sight, so long as they wish to continue a free and independent people.”

One of the most famous—and arguably best—of these orations was delivered by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821, on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Today, Adams’s speech is best known for his brief concluding remarks on foreign policy—that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But his task was even larger than sketching out an enduring approach to U.S. foreign policy. The speech was intended to show his fellow citizens that the principles of justice and philosophical claims embedded in the Declaration of Independence cohered with their own political experience and could guide them to national greatness.

Up from Monarchy

At two o’clock in the afternoon on August 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to address a crowd gathered at the Fulton County Courthouse in Lewistown, Illinois. He came to answer Senator Stephen Douglas, who had given a speech in Lewistown the day before. According to newspaper reports, Lincoln spoke for two and a half hours and had more listeners at the end of his remarks than when he began. The speech he delivered was not simply part of a campaign to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. It was an act of recovery—an effort to recall the meaning of the American Founding at a moment when its principles were contested and under strain.

Lincoln spoke on that occasion of the evil of slavery existing in the American colonies when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall,” he recounted,

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

What Makes an American—Birthright Citizenship and the U.S. at 250 | The Roundtable Ep. 324

“Like all fascists’ aesthetics,” declared a Guardian editorial, “Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized ‘classical’ age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold.” The charge is familiar. President Trump is having a roughly 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the White House and wants to erect a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery; the article describes this as “trashing monumental public works while building cheesy monuments” and defiling the United States’ “collective heritage.”

A few miles from this room, 86 years ago, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, with Hitler’s army right across the English Channel, and delivered a speech for the ages. We all remember how he ended: “we shall fight on the beaches…in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender.” But we stop one sentence too soon. Immediately following that famous line, Churchill made another assertion: that even if his island were subjugated and starving, the struggle would go on “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill looked across the Atlantic—to a younger nation born of English stock—and staked the survival of the West on the promise that America would come.

Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.

I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.

Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.

That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts traces the English doctrine of jus soli through Calvin’s Case, Blackstone, a substantial body of antebellum American authorities, and finally United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It may well become the definitive defense of the conventional understanding of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

But it answers the wrong question.

The issue is not whether America inherited English legal language. It plainly did. The issue is whether America also inherited England’s understanding of political membership.

The Declaration of Independence imagines revolution and legislation as two distinct phases in man’s political history. First, an aggrieved people “alter or abolish” a form of government destructive of man’s rights. Only then does that people “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

America’s revolutionaries, however, had to fight and legislate at the same time. As they were beating the British, they ratified state constitutions and legislated for a free people. New Hampshire’s temporary constitution was written before the Declaration was adopted, as was South Carolina’s. Ten of the 13 colonies adopted constitutions before the Battle of Saratoga in 1777—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island did not. (Massachusetts adopted its constitution in 1780, well before the Treaty of Paris.)

Although state constitutions were defective in significant ways, they accomplished much. Combined with the Articles of Confederation, they were good enough to win independence. State constitutions reflected a social vision for a republican people that Americans could rally around during the war, one that would be elaborated for decades. They contained the promise of something better, something worth fighting and dying for.

The famous philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the sacred Greek precinct of Delphi is “Know thyself,” an imperative at the heart of the Western tradition of liberal education. It includes both the Greek tradition of political philosophy inaugurated by Socrates and the rich and ample resources proffered to Western men and women by biblical revelation. A corollary to that imperative is the Platonic/Aristotelian call for thoughtful and conscientious human beings to “care for the soul” as the one thing most needful, a call that also powerfully resonates in the Christian tradition.

Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”

For years, America’s immigration policy has been determined less by the elected branches of government than by a handful of federal district judges. Presidents proposed policies, Congress enacted statutes, and almost inevitably, a single judge somewhere in the country would issue an order purporting to suspend those policies nationwide. That era may finally be drawing to a close.

The Supreme Court’s two immigration decisions issued last week mark an important turning point—not simply because they uphold significant Trump Administration immigration policies, but because they reaffirm a more fundamental constitutional principle: immigration policy belongs primarily to the political branches, not the judiciary.

The Court’s decisions addressed different questions: Mullin v. Doe concerned the executive’s authority over Temporary Protected Status, while Mullin v. Al Otro Lado involved the government’s ability to regulate when and how aliens arriving at the border may invoke asylum procedures. Both opinions reject the increasingly common assumption that federal judges may freely substitute their policy preferences for those of Congress and the president in matters of immigration.

Convention requires me to disclose that I have known, admired, and learned from Thomas G. West for more than thirty years. I also, in 2018, became his colleague as a scholar and lecturer at Hillsdale College. Moreover, Professor West and I studied many of the same subjects, with some of the same teachers. Cynics might therefore be tempted to discount the ensuing praise for his new book as logrolling by an ally. But I beg to be believed when I say that I would lavish acclaim on The Political Theory of the American Founding, whoever wrote it—though, in my judgment, only Tom West could have.

West has spent the better part of a very productive life studying the American Founding as deeply as anyone ever could. The result is the most important political book published in my lifetime, a distinction I expect it will hold even if I live another half century. West’s effort probably has been, and may yet be, surpassed philosophically or historically by two or three volumes. But no other book has brought these three strands of inquiry together in a way that meets the twin exigencies of timelessness and urgency.

Though scholarship surrounding the Constitution’s 14th Amendment has generated much controversy, it has nonetheless established one stable point of consensus. Since its adoption, virtually all authorities have agreed that its first section bars state laws that impose a racially defined fiscal or regulatory burden on American citizens. The states cannot, for instance, establish any “black code” or “white tax.”

At the same time, there has been remarkable dissensus as to three closely related matters. First, precisely what provision of that amendment—whether the Privileges or Immunities, Due Process, or Equal Protection Clauses—establishes this prohibition? Second, what other discriminations besides race are forbidden? And third, does the ban on discriminatory burdens extend to benefits, such that the 14th Amendment bars discriminatory public expenditures (educational segregation, affirmative action, etc.) as well as discriminatory taxes?

The In-munia of American Citizenship

The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise. Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework. The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.

The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. Weapons hold authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. Weapons tight authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. Weapons free authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.

A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

60 Days to End the War | The Roundtable Ep. 323

The United States and the Iranian regime have signed a 14-point memo of understanding, establishing a 60-day window to negotiate the war’s end. To work out the details—which include an end to sanctions and international monitoring of Iran’s uranium—J.D. Vance met with Iran’s diplomats in Switzerland, while Secretary Marco Rubio is slated to confer with Middle Eastern allies this week. Meanwhile, U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer has resigned amid a breakdown of government trust, sparked by the Labour government’s failure to take immigration and related crime seriously.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 323 appeared first on The American Mind.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has reignited an old debate on the Right between the immoderate defenders of “creed” and the equally immoderate advocates of “culture.” The either/or nature of this argument was already stale 50 years ago in the lead-up to the Bicentennial, and it hasn’t improved with age.

Harry V. Jaffa, whose students founded the Claremont Institute, was a key figure in the intellectual wrangling over the meaning of America in 1976, and his name is still invoked today—wrongly—as a champion of the extreme “creedalism” position. Though his argument has often been misinterpreted, Jaffa demonstrated that American republicanism requires both creed and culture and showed why both are necessary. What both the creedalists and the culturists miss is that American constitutionalism was a moral and intellectual solution to a set of problems that had been afflicting Western civilization for more than a thousand years.

What Shakespeare Almost Saw

Even those who strongly support the Trump Administration can grow frustrated with the pace of change. Sometimes that frustration is justified. But other times, moving deliberately is essential, particularly when it comes to the law. A shoddy or rushed legal opinion may grab headlines, but if it changes nothing or is overturned in the courts, it’s just a long, noisy out. And judges are fickle and self-regarding creatures, especially on the Supreme Court, the ultimate adjudicator of many of these disputes.

Given that reality, the recent opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declaring the vast majority of disparate-impact uses—a cornerstone of the civil rights regime for over half a century—effectively unconstitutional is a legal earthquake. It won’t get the sort of headlines of border walls or banning boys from girls’ sports, but in terms of its potential impact on America, it is vastly more important.

Oratory is out of fashion. The word itself sounds archaic to our ears, denoting something people used to practice in antiquity and at long length in 19th-century America. Even the more down-to-earth sounding “rhetoric” is heard to mean “mere” rhetoric—words false or deceptive by definition. Politicians talk about “messaging,” and the more significant politicians have layers of staff for “communications.” This does not bode well for the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Every politician in America will feel obliged to say something for the occasion. Whoever can—with perhaps some rare exceptions—will deploy a staff member or staff members to draft his remarks. The staff members themselves, products of American universities where American history is frowned upon or given the 1619 treatment, will have to do original research to prepare for the task. A significant percentage of them will rely on A.I. Patriots have reason to wonder whether there is a politician (or comms team) in America today who understands and can articulate for his fellow citizens and the world the meaning of July 4, 1776.

Practically every school and university in America claims to teach “critical thinking.” It appears in mission statements, accreditation documents, course catalogs, and commencement addresses with the regularity of a loyalty oath. Ask any dean what distinguishes a college education from a YouTube tutorial, and “critical thinking” will come up within the first sentence. It has become the universal binding agent of higher education’s value proposition—the one phrase that justifies tuition, tenure lines, and the institutional architecture.

This is a problem. Critical thinking, as commonly understood and widely practiced, is not enough to form a young mind. And our failure to say so clearly is costing us something we may not be able to rebuild.

Though the Fourth of July is less than a month away, the 250th anniversary of American independence has been met with overwhelming ambivalence. I suspect that is because Americans no longer feel we are one people. Our nation encompasses hundreds of millions of souls who speak hundreds of different languages. And the public is so divided along political fault lines that openly displaying patriotic symbols can be seen as a partisan act.

To fully understand and celebrate our semiquincentennial, we must reflect on what made us a nation.

The Declaration of Independence opens with the claim that Americans are “one people” who must “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with” the British. But what makes the Americans “one people,” separate and distinct from other peoples? What, after all, makes a people?

The famous opening of the Declaration’s second paragraph offers a clue: “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” As Willmoore Kendall pointed out in The Conservative Affirmation, the “We” is important. All political societies, he argued, are founded on a “consensus,” a “hard core of shared belief.” Part of what made America a people was basic agreement on the most serious political matters.

Affordability has become a pervasive mantra in American politics. Both President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponents are vowing to stem the rising cost of living. Over the last few decades, while automation and trade have kept the prices of manufactured goods in check, costs have increased significantly in three sectors of the economy: healthcare, housing, and education. Young college graduates, renters, new homebuyers, and parents are particularly exposed to the latter two. They have also cross-subsidized rising healthcare costs through entitlements and employer-sponsored group health insurance pools, likely contributing in part to delayed family formation and rising political discontent.

This inflationary pattern, known as “Baumol’s Cost Disease,” has been attributed to the labor-intensive and as-of-yet automation-resistant nature of these sectors. But another factor is that all three have become increasingly regulated over the course of the last century to the point of quasi-nationalization.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

America’s Fight Night | The Roundtable Ep. 322

There is no better place to hear what America’s historians and history teachers think about the American Founding than in Philadelphia’s historic Old City. While recently on a guided walking tour through the neighborhood, my guide—a prominent scholar of 18th-century Philadelphia—was so overcome with emotion at a particular site that he breezed past a more notable landmark.

The first stop was the Old London Coffee House on the corner of Market and Front Streets, a hub for colonial life since its establishment in 1754. Philadelphians would meet there to discuss politics, hear the news of the day, and conduct business. One such historical detail about the coffee house captured the emotions of my guide: slave auctions used to be held in front of the building.

As he was choking back tears, he led my group right past another landmark just a few doors up the street. A plaque on the building noted the site of John Dunlap’s print shop. The Irish-born Dunlap emigrated to the colonies in the 1750s to apprentice at his uncle’s Philadelphia print shop. His uncle left the business in his care in 1766, and Dunlap eventually bought it outright. He went on to serve in the Continental Army during the War for Independence and saw action at Princeton and Trenton.

As the Fourth of July approaches in this semiquincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence, the best commemorations will contain some element of civic education—a reflection on the words and deeds of the American Founding. In advance of celebrating what Frederick Douglass called “the first great fact” in our nation’s history, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a civic cri de coeur at the University of Texas at Austin on the principles of the Declaration and the character necessary for maintaining the American way of life.

Exhibit A was the black American community in which he was raised. Identifying himself as “American by birth and Georgian by the grace of God,” Thomas showed his affection for a country where the black residents of Pin Point, Georgia, affirmed the nation’s “promised ideals” even as they experienced “the indelible mark of segregation and its companion evils.” Their moral fiber in the face of Georgia’s segregation laws and customs taught him his worth as a human being and his rights as an American. As Thomas put it, “At home, at school, and at Church, we were taught that we were inherently equal…. [T]hat you did not get your rights or your dignity from those governments, but from God.” That moral self-understanding, shaped by the ideals of the American Founding and a culture shaped by Christianity, was central to Thomas’s message about the Declaration of Independence.

For generations, Democrats have portrayed themselves as the party of ordinary Americans—factory workers, waitresses, truck drivers, police officers, construction workers, and middle-class families trying to get ahead. Yet one of the most striking features of modern American politics is how often Democrat leaders, activists, and media allies seem genuinely baffled by the very people they claim to represent.

The latest example comes from Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, whose reaction to President Trump’s appearance at a packed UFC event on the White House lawn last weekend revealed a familiar pattern among America’s cultural elites. To tens of millions of Americans, UFC is simply entertainment. It is competitive, exciting, patriotic, and increasingly mainstream. To Hesse and myriad other journalists and political commentators, however, its popularity seems to require explanation—as though they are studying the customs of a distant tribe.

That reaction says far more about elite America than it does about UFC fans, and few institutions better embody elite opinion than the modern Democrat Party.

When 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, a horrific local crime quickly escalated to international headlines due to a catastrophic law enforcement failure. Spurred by Digwa’s false accusation of racism, responding officers immediately handcuffed the mortally wounded teenager, even as he told them nine times that he could not breathe, and four times that he had been stabbed. That Nowak was arrested and treated as a criminal while taking his final breaths has shocked and appalled the United Kingdom.

Body-camera footage of his harrowing final minutes also caught the attention of the U.S. government. The State Department warned on X that “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline that must be rejected across the West.”

The University of Florida can’t seem to find a candidate for president who doesn’t have a track record championing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

First, its presidential search committee tried to hire Santa Ono from the University of Michigan; now they’re targeting Stuart Bell from the University of Alabama. Florida supposedly opposes DEI, but it’s business as usual in the presidential search process. It seems that the best UF’s committee can get—now that a cruel fate has removed Ben Sasse from public service—are standard-issue products of the academic cursus honorum who blandly assure Florida’s policymakers that they didn’t really believe any of the things they said for years.

This points to a real supply problem. America isn’t just short of tradition-minded professors. It’s almost devoid of quality candidates for leadership positions in higher education administration.

The British constitutional system from which the American colonists separated in 1776 was not what Americans today understand as a written constitutional system. It was “unwritten”: There was no superintending written constitution that limited the power and controlled the acts of the legislature. In 18th-century Britain, Parliament was supreme. Whatever Parliament enacted with royal assent was the supreme law, which Parliament could always undo. “[T]he legislature, being in truth the sovereign power, is…of absolute authority,” William Blackstone wrote in his influential 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England. “[I]t acknowledges no superior upon earth.” “The power and jurisdiction of parliament…is so transcendent and absolute,” he reiterated, that Parliament “hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority in the making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of” all the laws of the realm.

The American Founding was an epic, earthshaking, history-making event that still reverberates through the ages. For close to half of our history, America has had a filmmaking industry—Hollywood—one that has often been the envy of the world, although its global prestige has faded in recent years.

Despite the historic weight of the American Revolution, it has been mostly a spectral presence in the cinema. Even if we expand our focus to include the period from the war’s conclusion to shortly before the Civil War, Hollywood’s filmed history of early America is rather thin.  

That is not to say that American history was not present on the silver screen from the medium’s earliest days. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, based on events during the French and Indian War, was portrayed as early as 1909. In fact, there were three different films based on that book, and another film based on Cooper’s novel The Spy by 1920. Betsy Ross (1917), about the famous flag maker, still survives.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

America’s Privileged Class – The Press, Libel, and Defamation | The Roundtable Ep. 321

Though the Trump Administration has faced a series of legal setbacks on tariffs, it seems to have found a solution. After the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s reciprocal tariffs were wrongfully imposed, the president immediately leapt to plan B: Section 122 tariffs, which allow the temporary placement of global tariffs. But these tariffs—derived from the Trade Act of 1974, which Trump used to install a 10% levy on most imported goods—expire in just over two months, and a court has ruled them unlawful.

Although that case is still working through the system, the administration is already planning to replace Section 122 tariffs with Section 301 tariffs. These, too, stem from the Trade Act, but unlike the previous tariffs, they will be here to stay. They will also allow the Trump Administration to target countries that have relied on unfair trade practices such as lax environmental standards that let our trade “partners” produce at excess capacity—essentially to get one over on the United States.

The Democratic Party has a problem: Americans are increasingly repelled by transgenderism.

Between 2022 and 2025, the average American’s favorability toward restrictions on transgender policies rose significantly. Support fell both for requiring insurance companies to cover gender reassignment procedures and for protecting trans individuals from job and housing discrimination. All of this happened as the share of Americans who consider it morally acceptable to change one’s gender has fallen from 46% to 40% since 2021.

This drop in support is seen in younger generations too. Eric Kaufmann found that between 2022 and 2025, the number of trans-identifying college students fell by half. The decline was even sharper at elite institutions: at Phillips Academy in Andover, the number of trans-identifying students fell from 9.2% in 2023 to a mere 3% in 2025. At Brown University, the number of nonbinary students was nearly halved between 2023 and 2025. The data highly suggests those rates will continue to fall.

On my mantelpiece sits a silver teapot. It is boxy rather than delicate, in the 18th-century American Federal style, with a thick band of vines traced elegantly below the lid. The teapot was a wedding gift in 1797 for my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Frances Eleanor Clark.

For over two centuries, mother has gifted that teapot to daughter, keeping alive the gathered memories of our family. Crafted by a Virginian silversmith, it has traveled from Kentucky to Missouri, from the Montana Territory to California, before returning to the East Coast. One day, I will take my own place in the line of “teapot grandmas,” woven into the long memory of that teapot and its new familial guardian.

Though women who treasured that teapot did not make history—several of them spent their lives with men who left a lasting mark on the American West—they performed an important task: keeping it alive for future generations.

In November 1839, Joseph Smith traveled to Washington, D.C. Styled the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he sought an audience with then-president Martin Van Buren. The Saints, popularly called “Mormons” after the reputed author of their holy writ, had been hounded by vigilante mobs in Missouri. Van Buren expressed his sympathy for the Mormons but said regretfully that “if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” A little over four years later, Smith, then running for president, would call Van Buren a “fop or a fool” and blame him for corrupting the principles of the American Founding.

Van Buren was one of many prominent politicians to whom Smith appealed during his meteoric rise to national attention in the 1830s and ’40s. He even once dined with a young Illinois state representative, Stephen A. Douglas, and predicted that Douglas would “aspire to the presidency of the United States.” In his exhaustively researched biography, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, George Mason University Religious Studies historian John G. Turner tracks the Mormon leader’s astonishing trajectory.

Revolutionary America, Hillsdale College’s new Ken Burns-style documentary on the founding, arrives at a fitting moment: the nation’s 250th anniversary. Though it resembles Burns’s work in its message, soundtrack (very much like the work of Hans Zimmer), maps, and pacing, it is far superior to anything Burns has done.

The documentary is a gorgeous, straightforward, non-ideological approach to a difficult and complex historical subject. While the film never shies away from explaining political philosophy, its main goal is to tell America’s history as a story, inviting the audience to encounter its drama, myth, and wonder.

Narrated by Tom Selleck and featuring an impressive lineup of Hillsdale professors and well-known political commentators, Revolutionary America is broken into two parts. Its first half explores the events leading up to the Battle of Lexington, the Revolution’s opening salvo, on April 19, 1775. The second half considers the move toward independence, George Washington’s masterful leadership of the Continental Army, and the Revolution’s fulfillment through the creation and passage of the Constitution. The documentary builds to a powerful close, with President Arnn observing that the American Revolution never really ended—that every generation must rededicate itself to the principles on which it was fought.

As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, Americans will be doing a lot of celebrating. They will honor not only the fact of our independence and nationhood, but also the political thought that shaped America’s founding struggle for freedom. Special attention will be paid, of course, to our Declaration of Independence.

But some may be rather cool to celebrating the Declaration’s doctrine of universal truths, such as the equality of all human beings in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration has become a source of controversy among some younger conservatives who came of age during the Trump era.

The New Right’s dissatisfaction with the Declaration’s universalism is an understandable—but mistaken—reaction to various political misuses of America’s founding creed in recent decades. The older generation of conservatives who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan loves to boast about America’s defense of universal truths. The New Right has rightly argued that this rhetorical approach has not served the conservative political movement or the country well.