The America I Want
A Nation Based on Truth, Peace, and Love
“For in your flaws, I see the strengths,
The will to change, the power to be,
The dream that once enchanted me,
A promise of true liberty.”
Two hundred and fifty years after America declared to the world that liberty was not a privilege granted by power but a truth written into the nature of man, the nation stands before the old promise again — not to celebrate it, but to decide whether it still has the courage to become worthy of it.
A republic does not die only when its laws are repealed. It dies when public words no longer answer to reality, when conflict becomes a permanent condition, and when citizens stop recognizing one another as fully human. America’s current crisis is therefore not merely political. It is not only economic, cultural, constitutional, or partisan. Those are symptoms. The deeper crisis is civilizational: America is losing the conditions under which a free people can govern itself.
Those conditions are truth, peace, and love.
Truth means that public words remain answerable to reality. A republic cannot endure if citizens no longer believe their government, their media, their institutions, or one another.
Peace means that conflict remains inside the bounds of law, election, argument, diplomacy, and restraint. A republic cannot survive if politics becomes war by other means, or if foreign wars become permanent.
Love, as I use the word here, does not mean romance or sentimentality. It does not mean compulsory kindness, public tenderness, or national self-flattery. Civic love first of all means treating others, regardless of their identity and background, as human beings, worthy of compassion and care. It is the bond without which liberty becomes selfishness and justice is compromised.
Measured by those standards, America is failing at all three at once. Americans no longer trust what their government tells them. They no longer trust the mainstream media that reaches them. Increasingly, they do not trust each other. Political disagreement has hardened into contempt, and contempt has begun, here and there, to draw blood. For generations, citizens have gone to the ballot box asking, among other things, for honesty and peace. Again and again, those promises were broken somewhere between the campaign and the term in office. Not because every campaign winner was uniquely deceitful, but because the machinery between public will and public action has been quietly rewired to answer to secrecy, money, fear, faction, and power.
This is not a policy paper, though it contains policy ideas. It is not a left program, a right program, a technocratic plan, a nostalgic hymn, or an exercise in national self-condemnation. It is my vision of what kind of nation America can and should become, what kind of republic would help us all thrive, and what kind of country we owe to our children. The proposals that follow are not a comprehensive platform; they are examples of what truth, peace, and love would require if America took them seriously.
I write for Americans who are tired of being told that decay is inevitable, that hatred is realism, that corruption is unavoidable, that endless wars are making us safe, and that nothing fundamental can be repaired. I write for Americans who believe that this beautiful, hardworking, and unique country can become truthful, peaceful, and full of love.
The word for that work is Renaissance.
The first Renaissance in Europe was not born in comfort. It bloomed amid plague, faction, war, usury, intrigue, and corrupted power. Its achievement was not that it found humanity already noble. Its achievement was that it returned the human being to the center of the canvas. It recovered old tools and gave them new life: the text, the studio, the school, the city, the argument, the living face.
We need a new American Renaissance now: not a return to a golden age that never fully existed, but a rebirth of the deepest promise of the American experiment. The founders did not leave us helpless before our challenges. They left us tools such as the Constitution, juries, statutes, local self-government, and public argument. These tools are still here. They are set down, covered with dust, yet still sound.
The new American Renaissance begins by picking them up again.
I. The Inheritance: An Unfinished Renaissance
In the summer of 1787, in a Philadelphia room with the windows shut against eavesdroppers, fifty-five men built something that had never quite existed before: a government made not by conquest, not by dynastic succession, not by the slow sediment of a thousand years, but by argument.
They had studied ancient republics and modern monarchies. They had lived through the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. They argued over federalism, representation, executive power, judicial independence, taxation, war, and the separation of powers because they understood the terrible possibility of getting the design wrong.
They did not know whether the Constitution would hold. They built it as though the whole future depended on getting it right, because they suspected it did.
The Constitution that came from that room was not perfect. It compromised with slavery. It excluded women. It left much of the human promise of the Declaration unredeemed. An honest account must hold that contradiction without disguising it. America was born with a creed higher than its conduct.[1]
But that is not the same as saying the experiment was false. It means the experiment created a standard by which America could later be judged, condemned, amended, and redeemed. The genius of the Founding Fathers was not that they achieved justice. They did not. The genius was that they built a constitutional order capable, at its best, of being corrected by its own principles.
That is their inheritance: not a finished temple, but a workshop. Not a marble idol, but a republic under construction.
The founders knew that truth, peace, and love were not ornaments. They were load-bearing beams. A republic requires enough truth for citizens to reason together, enough peace for conflict to remain political rather than violent, and enough civic affection for opponents not to become enemies.
America has drifted from all three. The failure is not that the tools of repair do not exist. The failure is that we have not used them with seriousness.
II. The Diagnosis: Three Broken Conditions of Self-Government
Truth: A Republic That No Longer Believes Its Own Words
A free republic runs on a shared sense of what is real. Strip that away and everything downstream begins to fail: the vote, the verdict, the public debate, the promise, the peaceful transfer of power.
Jefferson understood this with almost mechanical precision. In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he wrote that truth is strong enough to prevail when left free to contend with error.[2] He was equally severe about falsehood, warning Peter Carr that the habit of lying becomes easier with repetition until the liar tells lies without noticing and truths without being believed.[3]
That is the danger now. A country can survive being lied to. It cannot survive becoming accustomed to lies.
Trust in government has remained low for decades.[4] Trust in mainstream media has fallen toward historic lows.[5] Many citizens suspect, rationally, that official language conceals more than it reveals; that policy is written by those who can buy access; that institutions correct their enemies more aggressively than themselves; that important truths are classified, twisted, buried, or algorithmically manipulated.
This distrust is not merely a mood. It has causes. The government classifies too much. It hides too much. It speaks too often in euphemism. It has built surveillance authorities broad enough to chill the habits of a free people. Money has distorted the public argument through lobbying, corporate election spending, dark money, and regulatory capture. The state has also learned the subtler art of censorship by indirection: pressure on tech platforms, “misinformation” aka censorship projects, propaganda, and by letting private actors do what the First Amendment would forbid the government to do.
The strongest objection must be admitted: voters are not philosophers. Political science has shown that citizens often reason backward from identity, tribe, mood, and recent circumstance.[6] No reform will manufacture a nation of disinterested sages.
But that objection does not defeat the argument. It clarifies it. The goal is not to make every citizen perfectly rational. The goal is to defend the floor of shared fact beneath democratic disagreement. Institutions can be bound to standards individuals rarely meet. Records can be opened. Conflicts can be disclosed. Official claims can be audited. Secrets can expire. Money can be traced. Speech can be protected from state coercion.
Truth in public life does not mean universal agreement. It means a republic honest enough to argue.
Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright who later became President after the fall of communism, called the opposite condition “living within the lie,” and gave the cure its durable name: living in truth.[7] That phrase belongs in America not because America is a communist dictatorship, but because every society has its own approved evasions. To live in truth here is often simpler and harder than grand resistance: refuse the sentence you know is false; ask what the slogan means; name the actor hidden by the passive voice; decline the tribal lie even when it flatters your side.
Truth also requires personal discipline. Citizens are not passive consumers of official reality. Each citizen has a civic duty to read beyond the tribe, separate evidence from assertion, correct falsehoods from his or her own side first, and resist the small intoxicating lie that makes one’s faction feel innocent. Institutions can make deceit costly, but citizens must make self-deception less pleasurable.
Peace: A Republic Addicted to Conflict
Peace was not an afterthought in the American design. It appears in the Constitution’s Preamble as “domestic Tranquility.” Madison, in Federalist No. 10, treated faction as the central danger of republican government. He did not imagine faction could be abolished. He wanted it contained.[8] In Federalist No. 51, he made the same premise blunter: men are not angels, so power must be made to check power.[9]
That was the constitutional achievement: to let a fractious people argue and debate without resorting to violence.
Judged against that standard, America is in danger. Threats against public officials, judges, election workers, and legislators have risen sharply in recent years.[10] Political identity has hardened into something closer to sectarian belonging. More Americans now imagine their opponents not merely as mistaken, but as dangerous. A republic can survive anger. It cannot survive the normalization of political hatred and violence.
Nor is peace only domestic. John Quincy Adams warned in 1821 that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”[11] He understood that foreign policy shapes domestic character. A republic that becomes accustomed to permanent war abroad eventually imports the habits of war into its own politics: secrecy, emergency, surveillance, propaganda, censorship, obedience, dehumanization, executive overreach, and moral numbness.
The United States has lived too long on a permanent war footing. The post-9/11 wars alone have imposed catastrophic human, fiscal, and institutional costs.[12] Congress has repeatedly surrendered its war power to presidents.[13] The defense establishment has become not merely a shield but an ecosystem: contractors, bases, bureaucracies, jobs, doctrines, fears, and habits that reproduce themselves. Eisenhower saw the danger clearly enough to name it as he left office.[14]
This is not an argument for weakness. A nation must defend itself. A government unable to protect its people has failed at the first task of sovereignty. Peace requires deterrence, alliances, intelligence, competence, technological superiority, and the capacity to defeat enemies if attacked.
But defense is not the same as global domination. Security is not the same as hegemony. Prudence is not the same as a permanent war state. A republic that cannot distinguish defense from empire loses the moral and constitutional discipline required for both.
Love: A Society That Became Cruel
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-7[15]
Civic love means that political opponents remain fellow citizens. It means the lives of foreign children do not become an afterthought in a targeting order. It means the poor are not treated as moral failures, prisoners are not treated as outcasts, workers are not treated as inputs, and the sick are not treated as revenue streams.
Lincoln understood this because he governed through the moment when civic love failed most catastrophically. In his First Inaugural, he pleaded that Americans were “not enemies, but friends.”[16] War came anyway. In his Second Inaugural, after the fields had filled with the dead, he returned to the same moral architecture: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”[17] That was not softness. It was statesmanship. He knew the Union could win the war and still lose the peace if victory became revenge.
America is now drifting in the opposite direction. Affective polarization has made citizens colder toward the other party. Geographic and media sorting mean many Americans rarely encounter serious disagreement in ordinary life. Each side imagines the other as more extreme than it is. Contempt feeds on distance.[18]
Martin Luther King, Jr. later converted the older Christian command to love enemies into a civic method.[19] Hatred answered by hatred multiplies hatred. Humiliation rarely converts. Durable justice requires truth, courage, sacrifice, and a refusal to declare whole classes of human beings beyond redemption.
Civic love is not the denial of evil. It is not the refusal to judge. Some things must be opposed. Some ideologies must be defeated. But a society based on love refuses to make dehumanization its method. It seeks justice without humiliation. It tells the truth without spin. It remembers that punishment without restoration becomes cruelty, and liberty without mutual obligation becomes abandonment.
Truth, peace, and love are not separate ideals. They depend on one another. Truth without love becomes a blade. Love without truth becomes fog. Peace without either becomes submission. Even Paul’s famous account of love binds the two together: love “rejoices with the truth.”
The American Renaissance must restore all three.
III. The Betrayal: Why the Promises Keep Breaking
The American people have repeatedly asked for honesty and peace. They have not always been consistent. But the demand itself has been real.
Presidents have campaigned against war and then started wars when elected. Candidates have promised transparency and governed through secrecy. Congress has claimed constitutional authority and then avoided the votes that authority requires. Reformers denounce corruption until the machinery benefits them. Each party condemns executive overreach when out of power and discovers necessity when power returns.
The pattern outlasts individual hypocrisy. That is why blaming personalities is insufficient.
The first broken gear is war power. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war because war should be slow, public, and owned. Yet Congress has learned the career advantage of evasion. Vote for war and own the casualties. Avoid the vote and preserve the option to criticize later. Cowardice becomes rational when the institution rewards it.
The second broken gear is money. Campaign finance, lobbying, revolving doors, procurement networks, and donor access do not need to buy every vote to corrupt the republic. They shape the menu. They determine who gets heard, who gets funded, who gets attacked, and what possibilities are treated as realistic before the citizen ever enters the booth.[20]
The third broken gear is attention. Modern citizens live busy lives inside an information environment engineered for distraction and anger. A voter cannot easily monitor every war authorization, appropriations rider, classified program, agency rule, platform policy, judicial doctrine, and campaign donor. Institutions know this. Complexity becomes deception.
This is the hard truth: many reforms must pass through the machinery that profits from their absence.
That is not a reason to abandon reform. It is a reason to sequence it intelligently. Daylight reforms first, because disclosure creates pressure for the next reform. Ballot initiatives and state-level experiments where Congress will not move. Automatic sunsets where politicians evade responsibility. Simple rules where complex discretion invites capture. Transparent public records where secrecy breeds impunity.
The machinery will not repair itself, because institutions are ultimately operated by human beings, and power attracts not only public servants but careerists, narcissists, opportunists, and men and women whose ambition has been cut loose from conscience. A republic cannot survive if it keeps elevating leaders who seek office as a ladder to wealth, fame, domination, or permanent war. Ethical leadership is not charisma, celebrity, ideological theater, or the absence of scandal. It is the discipline of character under pressure: truthfulness when lies are useful, restraint when force is popular, humility when applause is available, courage when principle is costly, and service when power could be used for self-advancement. Americans must therefore judge leaders not by slogans, brands, tribal loyalty, or media spectacle, but by their record: whether they tell the truth, honor the Constitution, resist corrupt money, reject unnecessary wars, defend civil liberties, serve the powerless, and accept accountability. No Renaissance can be built by a political class addicted to ambition without virtue. A truthful, peaceful, and humane republic requires ethical leaders who understand public office not as possession, performance, or conquest, but as public stewardship.
A Renaissance does not wait for the finished city. It begins when someone opens the shutters, clears the table, and lays the old instruments in the light. Friedman was right that crises often determine what becomes possible; what matters then is which ideas are already lying around.[21] This essay is the blueprint for repairs, filed in advance.
IV. The Vision: A New American Renaissance
A new American Renaissance is not nostalgia. It is a blueprint for American rebirth. It takes what is highest and best from the past and gives it new form.
The first task is to recover the text: truth. The second is to still the warring city-states: peace. The third is to return the human to the center of the canvas: love.
Some proposals below follow directly from constitutional principle. Others are policy ideas that I think should be publicly debated and improved upon.
Living in Truth
A truthful republic does not require perfect citizens. It requires institutions that make deceit difficult, costly, and visible.
Government in daylight. Make disclosure the default and secrecy the exception. Every consequential act of government — spending, contracts, grants, lobbying contacts, senior calendars, regulatory dockets, official datasets — should be published in real time online, searchable, free, and permanent. There are legitimate exceptions such as operational security, personal privacy, and active investigations. But each exception should be narrow, written, time-limited, and reviewable. A citizen should not need a lawyer, a fee, or a lawsuit to learn what his or her government has done in his or her name. Sunlight, Brandeis’s old disinfectant, should not be left to heroic whistleblowers or accidental leaks; it should be built into the architecture of government.[22]
Plain speech and audited promises. The government should say what it means. Every major policy announcement should include measurable claims: what will happen, by when, at what cost, and by what standard success will be judged. One year later, an independent public audit should compare promise with reality. Euphemism should be treated as evasion. “Mistakes were made” should be answered by the republican question: made by whom?
The secrecy state cut down to actual secrets. Classification should be limited to a short list of genuine secrets: active operations, human sources, weapons design, and specific intelligence methods whose disclosure would produce concrete harm. Every original classification decision should require a written harm-based justification signed by a named official. Automatic declassification should actually execute. Existing classified documents should all be declassified, subject to very narrow exceptions. Over-classification should carry penalties. Real secrets are safer when the fence is credible. A secrecy system that hides everything eventually protects nothing.[23]
No state censorship by proxy. The First Amendment already forbids direct censorship. Modern power prefers indirect censorship. Government officials should not pressure tech platforms, publishers, banks, payment processors, advertisers, or regulators to suppress lawful speech that the state could not suppress directly. This principle should be codified as law with a private right of action, damages, fees, and discovery. The government may answer speech with speech. It may warn openly, correct openly, publish openly, argue openly. It should not corrupt public debate from behind the mask.[24]
No government propaganda aimed at Americans. Government speech should be open, attributed, and accountable. Recruiting posters, public health warnings, disaster alerts, and official explanations are legitimate when they speak in the government’s own name. Covert domestic propaganda is not. Paid commentators, fake grassroots campaigns, undisclosed influence operations, and government-funded domestic speech suppression should carry real penalties. The government may persuade its citizens. It may not disguise itself as them.[25]
Only citizens fund the political argument. The argument over America’s future should be conducted by Americans, as citizens, not by corporate treasuries, foreign lobbies, dark-money networks, or shell organizations. Foreign money and foreign lobbies should be barred completely from ballot measures as well as candidate elections. Corporate spending in elections should be prohibited. All political spending entities should disclose their true donors. Americans can disagree about whether money is speech, and the Court has treated independent political spending as protected expression; but concentrated treasuries are not citizens, and a republic should not grant them citizen-equivalent power over the political argument.[26]
The surveillance state must be ended. The governing rule should be simple: the government may not surveil an American without a particularized warrant based on probable cause. No backdoor searches. No data-broker loopholes. No purchase of information the state would need a warrant to seize. No secret laws. No permanent emergency. The third-party doctrine, born in an analog age, should not govern the digital soul of a citizen. Watched people censor themselves before the censor arrives.[27]
The official lie made costly. A citizen who knowingly lies to a federal official about a material matter can commit a felony. A federal official who knowingly lies to citizens in an official capacity should not enjoy impunity. This must be done carefully because the First Amendment protects even some knowing falsehoods; the remedy should focus on official capacity, materiality, intent, concrete harm, civil penalties, removal, and discovery rather than criminalizing political speech. The goal is not a jail full of press secretaries. The goal is a restored norm: a duty of honesty to the public.[28]
Public office without private trading. Members of Congress, senior executive officials, central bank officials, their spouses, and dependent children should not trade individual securities while in office. The rule should be clean: diversified funds or genuine blind trusts only. Violations should require disgorgement and meaningful sanctions. A citizen who trades on inside corporate information can go to prison. An official who trades on inside government information should not enjoy a softer law than the people he governs.[29]
Technology that illuminates instead of manipulates. The algorithm is the printing press of the new Renaissance, but distorted by incentives. Tech platforms should be required to provide data portability, interoperability, user-selected middleware, transparency, and researcher access. Citizens should be able to choose how their feeds are organized, and default feed systems should be transparent, auditable, and viewpoint-neutral, not secretly shaped by state pressure or opaque corporate manipulation. Researchers should be able to study systems that shape public life. Users should be able to leave without losing their communities. None of this dictates content. It makes the platform architecture open.[30]
Elections that reflect public will. Election Day should be a national holiday, paired with early voting and secure voting. Paper ballots should be preserved. Routine risk-limiting audits should make results provable rather than merely certified. Ranked-choice voting should be adopted: a candidate who needs second-choice support has reason to speak beyond his base.[31] The Electoral College should be retired by constitutional amendment. Small states already have the Senate. The presidency is the only office meant to represent the nation as a whole; its legitimacy should come from the whole people counted equally.
Living at Peace
A peaceful republic does not renounce strength. It exercises strength responsibly, legally, and humanely.
Congress takes back the war power. Every authorization for the use of military force should sunset. Every new authorization should name the enemy, geography, mission, reporting requirements, and expiration date. Unauthorized hostilities should trigger automatic withdrawal and automatic funding cutoff unless Congress affirmatively votes to continue them. Silence should no longer fund war. Evasion should become visible. No statute can make Congress brave, but law can change the incentives so cowardice stops being the easiest path. War should require a real vote.[32]
End endless wars. The United States should end all the wars in which it is engaged. Only truly defensive wars should be authorized, and only by an explicit vote in Congress. A government that says it wants peace while budgeting for permanent war is lying in the language budgets understand.
Diplomacy as first resort. Diplomacy should not be the ceremony after military policy has failed. It should be the first instrument of national power. The United States should build a larger, better-trained diplomatic corps, fluent in languages and regional histories. Conflict prevention should be career-making. Alliances should be maintained where they deter war; commitments should be revised where they become blank checks; force should remain available but disciplined by law and humane application.
Claim the peace dividend. Ending the wars and having a smaller military for actual defense of the homeland, not endless wars of aggression would save trillions over time. This peace dividend should be invested at home in America: in the floor beneath the poor, healthcare, education, eradicating homelessness, infrastructure, science, and debt reduction.[33]
Reject the empire without rejecting defense. The moral premise is simple: a child abroad is not worth less than a child at home. While a government has special obligations to its own citizens, it does not have a right to treat others as collateral damage. America should not be the world’s policeman. It should not be involved in regime changes or covert wars abroad. It should respect sovereignty of other nations, live at peace with the world, and use military force only if attacked.
Building a Society Based on Love
If truth is the recovered text and peace is the quieted city, love is the restored human figure at the center of the canvas.
A society based on love does not rely on sentimental speeches. It builds conditions under which human beings can live and thrive without desperation, participate without humiliation, disagree without hatred, and recover from failure without being discarded.
Human flourishing as the design principle. Every law, program, budget, and institution should face one question: does this help Americans flourish? Not markets alone. Not bureaucracies alone. Not abstract output alone. Human beings. That is the Renaissance principle. The human returns to the center.
A humane justice system. End mass incarceration without pretending that confinement is never necessary. Violent offenders may need to be incarcerated. But much of the current system punishes beyond reason: drug possession, technical violations, excessive sentences, permanent civic exclusion, criminal records that become life sentences after formal sentences end. The purpose of justice should be safety, accountability, repair, and rehabilitation.[34] A cell should not be a warehouse for a ruined life; where release is possible, it should be a workshop for return. Prisons should educate, treat addiction, teach work, and prepare people for reentry. Mercy is not softness. Mercy is civilization refusing to waste human beings.
An economic floor beneath every American. A person terrified of destitution cannot easily practice generosity toward strangers. America should establish an income floor through a negative income tax: full support at the bottom, gradual phase-out with earnings, and no benefit cliffs that punish work. The floor should consolidate the cash and near-cash welfare tangle it replaces rather than stack another program on top of the old maze. Work should always pay. No raise should make a poor family poorer. The cost must be stated honestly, which is why it should be phased, audited, and funded from the peace-dividend savings.[35]
Health as a human right. The United States already spends enough, in aggregate, to make universal healthcare a reality rather than a fantasy: OECD’s 2025 country note places U.S. health spending at about 2.5 times the OECD average - at $14,885 per person in purchasing-power terms, compared with a $5,967 OECD average, while U.S. life expectancy remains below the OECD average. The failure is not poverty of national resources; it is fragmentation, monopoly pricing, administrative waste, gatekeeping, and incentives organized too often around managed sickness rather than health. Universal coverage should be the commitment; the plumbing is up for debate. Single payer, regulated multipayer, public option, mandate-and-subsidy architecture, or another route should be argued in daylight. The country should move healthcare money upstream: primary care, prevention, nutrition, mental health, addiction treatment, environmental health, and research aimed at cures rather than lifelong revenue streams. A humane society does not price survival as a subscription.
Concentrated power, private and public, must be restrained. Civic love cannot survive where human beings are ruled by unaccountable concentrated power. Corporate monopolies should be treated as concentrations of power, not merely pricing problems. Antitrust should protect workers, suppliers, readers, creators, consumers, and democratic discourse. But public power must be restrained too. A government strong enough to break private kings can become one. Sherman saw the analogy clearly: Americans should not endure a king over the necessaries of life any more than a king in politics.[36]
A government of essentials, done superbly. A government that tries to do everything often does the most important things badly. Every public function should face two questions: is this essential, and is this the right level of government to do it? What survives should be funded properly, staffed professionally, measured publicly, and held accountable. What fails should move downward, outward, or end. Limited does not mean starved. It means disciplined.
Care as infrastructure. Roads are infrastructure. The electric grid is infrastructure. So are the systems that produce capable human beings. Child care, elder care, parental leave, disability support, and mental-health care are not private luxuries. They are public necessities disguised as family burdens. The unpaid difference falls heavily on women, who are praised for love while silently subsidizing the economy. A serious country funds care as the infrastructure of human life.
Renaissance Education. Education should be consolidated around one purpose: forming free, capable, truthful citizens. That begins early. Universal early childhood education should be available because development does not wait for legislative patience. Public school funding should follow student need, not neighborhood wealth. Teachers should be paid as nation-builders, because that is what they are.[37] Vocational excellence should be honored alongside academic excellence. Higher education and retraining should be affordable without debt peonage. Every student should learn the civic arts of freedom: history, constitutional structure, rhetoric, logic, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, media literacy, financial literacy, and the ability to detect manipulation in language.
They should learn how power hides inside phrases like “collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation,” “mistakes were made,” and “all options are on the table.” They should learn how evidence differs from assertion, how statistics mislead, how algorithms shape attention, how propaganda flatters the tribe, and how to argue without becoming cruel or violent. Education is the studio of the American Renaissance. It is where citizens learn to see.
Pluralism with public accountability. School choice should be treated as pluralism with public accountability, not as a separate ideological war. Funding should follow the child among public, charter, religious, and independent schools, but any school that takes public money must publish outcomes and meet the republic’s civic minimum. In return, it should retain freedom from micromanagement. Good schools should be allowed to be meaningfully different. Bad schools should not be allowed to hide behind ideology.
Rebuild the rooms where neighbors meet. Contempt is a long-distance emotion. It weakens at arm’s length. America should rebuild the civic rooms where citizenship is practiced in person: local media, libraries, juries, fire halls, town meetings, school boards, parks, ballfields, houses of worship, arts institutions, and community theaters. The arts, music, and humanities should be treated as a civic investment. Arts train the imagination to build a better life.
The Citizen’s Part
Institutions matter because they make virtue less heroic. But a Renaissance cannot be simply legislated into existence. It also requires citizens willing to practice the habits the law can only protect.
The citizen’s part begins with language. Refuse the lie that flatters your side. Ask what the slogan means. Read beyond the tribe. Do not outsource your conscience to a party, a feed, a priesthood, or a favorite enemy. When officials say “mistakes were made,” ask who made them. When a corporation says “we are committed to community,” ask what it pays, where it pollutes, and whom it silences. When your own faction dehumanizes, refuse the pleasure.
The citizen’s part also begins locally. Serve on a jury. Attend the meeting. Know the teacher. Read the local paper. Help rebuild the room before cursing the country. The republic is not an abstraction floating above us. It is the argument at the school board, the budget in the city hall, the neighbor whose sign you hate and whose driveway you shovel anyway.
A Renaissance is made by patrons and painters, printers and teachers, builders and apprentices. In a republic, citizens are all of these. The studio is public life.
V. A New Measure for the New Road
What a nation measures, it becomes.
For too long, America has navigated by output alone. Gross domestic product counts the prisons, wars, and the oil spills as growth. It counts the chemotherapy bill and the divorce lawyer. It counts the opioid clinic after the town has been hollowed out. It counts the security system bought because neighbors no longer trust one another. It counts weapons, waste, disease, and repair. It does not count a parent raising a child. It does not count the neighbor who visits the lonely. It does not count trust, creativity, beauty, artistic expression, leisure, civic knowledge, clean air, or time with the people one loves.
Prosperity matters. Poverty is not romantic. Growth matters. A stagnant society turns mean. But GDP is not civilization. It is a partial instrument, not a compass.
America should publish a national flourishing dashboard alongside economic statistics: healthy life expectancy, literacy, civic knowledge, trust, loneliness, family time, mental health, addiction, housing security, air and water quality, local participation, educational attainment, mobility, and the condition of children. New Zealand’s wellbeing budgeting is not a perfect model, but it proves that public finance can be made to ask more human questions.[38]
This is not bureaucratic ornament. It is moral accounting. The Declaration of Independence did not name the pursuit of GDP. It named the pursuit of happiness.
An American Renaissance needs a new measure because it is trying to build a different kind of wealth.
VI. The America We Can and Should Have
If the American Renaissance became reality, America would not become perfect. It would become recognizably alive: prosperous without becoming cruel, strong without becoming imperial, free without becoming polarized, diverse without becoming hostile, and ambitious without forgetting the human beings for whom ambition exists. The country would feel less like a machine for extracting attention, labor, votes, debt, and resentment, and more like a civilization confident enough to cultivate flourishing.
Prosperity would be broad, creative, and upward-moving. Work would pay enough to build a life. Families would have a realistic path to a home, savings, children, education, enterprise, leisure, and dignity. A poor child with talent would not need a miracle to rise. Small businesses would have room to compete. Inventors, builders, farmers, engineers, artists, teachers, nurses, scientists, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs would see America not as a closed hierarchy, but as an open field of possibility. Growth would mean more than higher asset prices. It would mean more Americans able to stand upright in their own lives.
Peace would be visible in the national temperament. Political opponents would still argue fiercely, but they would not be trained to hate one another as enemies. Elections would transfer authority without civic panic. Public debate would recover proportion. Abroad, America would remain formidable, but its power would be disciplined by law, prudence, and humane restraint. The country would be respected not because it dominates every conflict, but because it is strong enough to defend itself, wise enough to avoid needless wars, and trusted enough to make peace more likely.
Justice would become firmer and more humane at the same time. Streets would be safe. Law would be clear. Courts would be fair and efficient. Police would be polite, professional, accountable, and respected because they protect rather than occupy. Prisons would hold the dangerous when necessary, but they would also educate, treat, train, and prepare human beings for return wherever return is possible. Punishment would not become revenge, and mercy would not become permissiveness. The moral test would be civilization: order without brutality, compassion without chaos.
Americans themselves would be healthier, calmer, happier, and more friendly. Fewer people would live one emergency away from ruin. Preventive care, mental-health care, addiction treatment, nutrition, clean air, safe streets, time outdoors, and time with family would become ordinary supports of life rather than luxuries. Children would grow with more stability. Parents would have more room to breathe. The elderly would remain visible and included. Friendship would become easier because fear, exhaustion, loneliness, and humiliation would no longer be the background weather of everyday life.
Government would feel efficient, modern, and friendly rather than distant, hostile, or absurd. A citizen renewing a license, applying for a permit, paying taxes, starting a business, receiving benefits, reporting a problem, or asking a public question would encounter systems that are clear, fast, courteous, accountable, and intelligible. Public service would recover its meaning as service. Bureaucracy would not disappear, but it would be disciplined by design: fewer traps, fewer delays, fewer hidden rules, fewer humiliations, more competence, more transparency, more respect for the citizen.
Infrastructure would express seriousness. Airports, ports, roads, bridges, rail, public transit, water systems, broadband, power grids, schools, hospitals, parks, and public buildings would be modern, clean, resilient, and beautiful enough to make citizens feel that the future is being built for them. The physical country would stop teaching decline. Cities would become greener, safer, more walkable, more beautiful, and more humane. Towns would regain their centers. Public spaces would be welcoming and comfortable: shaded streets, libraries full of life, plazas, gardens, theaters, playgrounds, music halls, markets, and civic rooms where strangers can become neighbors.
Education would become one of America’s highest arts. Children would learn to read deeply, think clearly, speak honestly, calculate competently, understand history, test evidence, recognize propaganda, appreciate beauty, and govern themselves. Teachers would be honored as builders of civilization. Vocational excellence would stand beside academic excellence. Universities would become less like debt machines and ideological factories, and more like studios of discovery, argument, invention, and wisdom. Scientific achievement would accelerate because curiosity, rigor, and public purpose would again be treated as national treasures.
American science and technology would illuminate rather than manipulate. Laboratories, universities, startups, and public missions would pursue cures, clean energy, safer materials, better agriculture, space exploration, artificial intelligence aligned with human flourishing, and tools that expand human capacity rather than merely addict human attention. The measure of technological greatness would not be how efficiently citizens can be surveilled, nudged, monetized, or replaced. It would be how powerfully technology helps human beings learn, heal, build, create, and live more freely.
American culture would become luminous again. The country would produce outstanding music, film, literature, poetry, theater, ballet, painting, architecture, design, and public art because a confident civilization does not live by utility alone. It sings. It builds beautifully. It tells the truth in stories. It gives form to grief and joy. It remembers the dead and celebrates the living. Popular culture does not need to be shallow to be popular, and high culture would not need to be sterile to be serious. America would again export not only products and platforms, but beauty, courage, humor, wisdom, and spiritual force.
Families would have more room to become strong. Marriage would not be treated as a luxury good for the already secure. Children would not be treated as private lifestyle accessories in a public economy hostile to family life. Work schedules, housing costs, schools, neighborhoods, healthcare, parental leave, elder care, and public safety would all be judged partly by whether they help families endure and flourish. A society that says it loves children would finally organize more of its life around their formation, protection, delight, and future.
The environment would become part of the national inheritance rather than a casualty of growth. Clean rivers, breathable air, fertile soil, living forests, healthy coastlines, restored habitats, and beautiful parks would be treated as forms of wealth. Green cities would not mean cold ideological austerity. They would mean shade, trees, gardens, clean transport, quiet streets, human-scale neighborhoods, efficient buildings, and architecture that makes daily life more graceful. America would learn again that beauty is not decoration. Beauty is civilization made visible.
In such a country, greatness would be felt before it is proclaimed. It would be felt in the confidence of a young person choosing a path, in the dignity of a worker paid fairly, in the calm of a parent who can afford the future, in the trust of neighbors who disagree without hatred, in the pride of citizens who see competence around them, in the music rising from its cities, in the books and films that enlarge the soul, in the discoveries that heal disease, in the public spaces where people want to linger, and in the knowledge that America is again building something worthy of love.
That is what the American Renaissance would look like: a flourishing republic, peaceful and strong, prosperous and humane, modern and beautiful, inventive and wise. A country where truth makes public life intelligible, peace makes freedom durable, and love keeps prosperity from becoming cold. A country where the point of national greatness is not domination, spectacle, or abstraction, but the full development of human beings and the renewal of the common life they share.
VII. The America Our Children Deserve
On the last afternoon of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin looked at the sun carved into the back of George Washington’s chair. For months, he had wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun. As the delegates finished their work, he chose hope: the sun was rising.
The beauty of the story is not certainty. Franklin had none. No one in that room knew whether the new Constitution would endure. They had built a republic for a future they could not see, and entrusted it to Americans not yet born.
We are those Americans.
The men and women before us paid for the wager in installments: revolution, civil war, emancipation, depression, labor struggle, world war, civil rights, cold war, reform, failure, renewal. They did not purify the country. They carried it. They handed forward an unfinished thing and asked us, silently, whether we would do the same.
We now face our own installment.
The debt is not abstract. Every lie left uncorrected is charged to our children. Every war drifted into without consent is charged to them. Every dollar borrowed to avoid present courage is charged to them. Every institution allowed to rot because repair is tedious is charged to them. Every civic room abandoned to the algorithm is charged to them. Every cruelty normalized becomes part of the weather in which they will have to live.
They did not vote for any of this. They will inherit it anyway.
So we do not get to quit.
We do not get to call despair wisdom. We do not get to mistake cynicism for sophistication. We do not get to say the money interests are too strong, the anger too deep, the machinery too old, the republic too tired, and then hand our children the ruins as though exhaustion were an excuse. Washington warned against throwing upon posterity the burdens the living ought to bear.[39] That warning is not antique. It is addressed to us.
Tell the truth. Make peace. Restore the human being to the center of the republic. Begin again.
That is the America I want: not an America that pretends it was always innocent, and not an America that despairs because it was not.
I want the America that is still possible: truthful enough to confess, peaceful enough to endure disagreement, loving enough to reject hate, strong enough to renounce domination, humble enough to repair, brave enough to begin again.
We inherited a republic.
Our children deserve a Renaissance.
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Artwork
The American Renaissance
The Frontier Man
Endnotes
[1] The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776. Its “self-evident truths” language supplies the moral standard by which later American conduct has repeatedly been judged.
[2] Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), especially the clause that truth is “the proper and sufficient antagonist to error” when free argument is not disarmed.
[3] Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, Paris, Aug. 19, 1785, Founders Online, National Archives.
[4] Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024,” and related Pew trend series. The exact level moves by survey and date; the long-term post-1960s decline is the relevant trend.
[5] Gallup, “Media Confidence” annual trend series, asking whether respondents trust mass media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”
[6] Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press, 2016).
[7] Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990.
[8] James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787).
[9] Federalist No. 51 (1788), modern scholarship generally attributing the essay to Madison.
[10] U.S. Capitol Police, Threat Assessment Section annual public releases; Brennan Center for Justice surveys of election officials; U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Justice reporting on threats to federal judges and prosecutors.
[11] John Quincy Adams, address on United States foreign policy, delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, Washington, July 4, 1821.
[12] Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Costs of War Project, estimates of direct deaths, civilian deaths, displacement, and fiscal costs in post-9/11 war zones.
[13] Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (Sept. 18, 2001); War Powers Resolution, Pub. L. 93-148 (1973).
[14] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961, warning against the “military-industrial complex.”
[15] 1 Corinthians 13:4–7, New International Version.
[16] Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1861.
[17] Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1865.
[18] Shanto Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 129–46; Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement (University of Chicago Press, 2018); More in Common, The Perception Gap (2019); General Social Survey trust series.
[19] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (1963), and the broader nonviolent philosophy of the civil-rights movement.
[20] Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); OpenSecrets, federal lobbying and outside-spending trend data.
[21] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, preface to the 1982 edition, on crises and the ideas “lying around.”
[22] Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914), commonly associated with the line that sunlight is “the best of disinfectants.”
[23] Information Security Oversight Office, Annual Report to the President: FY 2017; Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (Moynihan Commission), S. Doc. No. 105-2 (1997).
[24] Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963); Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024); National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024).
[25] Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, enacted as § 1078 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, Pub. L. 112-239 (2013); annual appropriations riders restricting unauthorized publicity or propaganda.
[26] Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); OpenSecrets, federal lobbying and outside-spending trend data.
[27] Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 (Jan. 23, 2014); ACLU v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2d Cir. 2015); USA FREEDOM Act, Pub. L. 114-23 (2015); Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979); United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976).
[28] United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709 (2012); 18 U.S.C. § 1001; 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h).
[29] Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, Pub. L. 112-105 (2012); Federal Reserve ethics-rule changes following 2021 disclosures about senior officials’ securities trading.
[30] Francis Fukuyama et al., Report of the Working Group on Platform Scale (Stanford Cyber Policy Center, 2020); EU Digital Services Act, art. 40; proposed U.S. platform transparency and interoperability legislation including the ACCESS Act and Platform Accountability and Transparency Act.
[31] Todd Donovan, Caroline Tolbert, and Kellen Gracey, “Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting,” Electoral Studies 42 (2016); Jack Santucci, More Parties or No Parties (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[32] Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (Sept. 18, 2001); War Powers Resolution, Pub. L. 93-148 (1973).
[33] Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, national defense and international affairs outlays; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute military-expenditure data.
[34] National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).
[35] Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service discussions of poverty gaps, effective marginal tax rates, and benefit cliffs; Robert A. Moffitt, “The Negative Income Tax and the Evolution of U.S. Welfare Policy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 3 (2003).
[36] Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st Sess., 2457 (1890), remarks of Sen. John Sherman; Sherman Antitrust Act, 26 Stat. 209 (1890).
[37] Economic Policy Institute, teacher pay penalty reports; Federal Reserve, Consumer Credit (G.19) and household-debt data on student-loan balances.
[38] New Zealand Treasury, Wellbeing Budget framework (2019–present) and Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act 2020.
[39] George Washington, Farewell Address (1796), warning against throwing upon posterity the debts the living generation ought to bear.