America Never Existed

It is possible (not certain, but possible) that within the next 20 years or so, the United States will no longer exist. 

That would be a great setback for human liberty. The end of the American republic would most likely mean the end of self-government all over the globe—the beginning of a new dark age... More than that, however, the end of liberty on these shores would most likely mean the end of any memory of America....

What I mean by that is not only the Orwellian idea of rewriting history. That theme has become almost a cliché nowadays.... “Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell observed, “who controls the present controls the past.”...

... Let’s stipulate that virtually everyone on the Left rejects as outmoded 18th-century nonsense the founders’ arguments about natural rights, equality, and consent. You already know how this goes: “systemic racism,” “progress,” “changing values,” “science,” etc...

Most people on the Right who focus on politics can be divided, broadly speaking, as representing one of two distinct attitudes about our current crisis. Those I will call the pessimists believe America—insofar as it is part of the modern, Western, liberal world—was doomed from the start....

The other major group... These people, whom I will call the optimists, tend to be moderate and respectable conservatives who were never thrilled with Trump. Although they are alarmed by the growing despotism of the Left, they are also repelled by what happened on January 6 and are fond of making “both sides are flawed” arguments....

Rather than see America’s fate as an open-ended product of moral and intellectual freedom, along with luck, the dogmatic pessimists and doctrinaire optimists both reduce the United States to an equation with a certain solution. In both cases, it becomes hard to justify any civic engagement....

To save our republic, or even to save the memory of America, we must first recover within ourselves the authority and ground for reflection and choice: the moral and intellectual freedom of the human mind....