LM#75--America 250, pt 4: the Closing Argument for America

America 250 And The Big Question

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Those are the drums of Liberty. You're celebrating America 250 years. 250 years of the longest-running experiment in self-government the world has ever seen. We are succeeding. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to this Liberty Minute. This is a video, an audio podcast. Happy birthday, America, 250 years. We made it. We have spent the last three videos walking through the pillars that make America unlike any nation in history. An exceptional nation, in fact. We went from defending liberty at Bunker Hill to Baghdad, from the economic miracle that turned a bankrupt colony into the richest country on earth, and divine providence, the founder's radical insistence that your rights come from God, not from the state. But here's the question. 250 years later, does it all hold up? Does the case still hold up for American greatness, or are we watching it slip away? You know, the book is The Case for America by Brett Bear. This is part four of our America 250 celebration series. This is our closing argument. In this video, I'm going to give you three nuggets of wisdom that are going to tie the whole thing together. So three nuggets. Let's roll.

Liberty Must Be Relearned

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Nugget number one: Liberty is not just a one-time event. Defending liberty isn't a one-time event. It is a question every generation has to answer. Again and again. You know, in part one, we took you from Valley Forge to the beaches of Normandy. From the farmers with muskets staring down the British Empire to the Union holding the line at Gettysburg. 156,000 men hitting those beaches on D-Day, knowing many of them would not come home. And here's the thread every single time. It's free people refusing to kneel. And here is what Brett adds that stopped me cold in his book. Defending liberty doesn't just mean fighting foreign enemies, it means protecting the very structure of how we disagree with each other. Bear points out that Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, in his call at the end of the Civil War, he offers charity towards all and argues that dissent itself is proof of our freedom, not a threat against it. The voices of disagreement are not the same as fracture in our country's basic beliefs. That's the tight rope we have to walk. Dissent versus fracture. You can disagree with your neighbor without disowning the country. We're missing that. Lincoln understood that at our worst moment in America history in American history. You treated him like a fellow citizen who happens to be wrong. That is defending liberty too. Not just on the battlefield, but in the town hall, at the ballot box, and how we talk to each other. Part one showed us that Americans have bled for freedom for 250 years. We need to respect that.

The Blueprint For Prosperity

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Now nugget number two is the economic miracle that was the blueprint. The economic miracle was no accident. In fact, it was our blueprint. Didn't have it in the beginning, but boy, decade after decade, from 1776 onward, we put it together. And in part two of our video series, we walked you through the book The Empire Steel by John Steele Gordon, a bankrupt little colony with worthless currency, frankly, became the richest nation in human history. How? Three forces that were working together. Freedom unleashed a nation, because when a man knows he can build knows he can keep what he can build, he builds like his future depends on it. And America rewarded the inventor instead of punishing him. Eli Whitney, Carnegie, Edison, Ford, ordinary people who changed the world because the system let them try. Many of them tried and failed, but eventually they succeeded. And limited government trusts the resilience of the American people. Every time Washington got out of the way, the economy roared. And John Steele Gordon in his book, he traced that pattern across two and a half centuries. The booms came when government left the room for free people to act. The slowdowns, well, they came when government got too heavy. Got too in your business. Gotta keep government limited. But here's the part that makes every American sit up straight. The country's real economic engine has never been the politicians. It's always been the people. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, to financial panics, to a Great Depression, to world wars, every single time the experts said America was finished, and every single time the American people dusted themselves off and rebuilt bigger than before. Freedom plus invention plus limited government equals prosperity. It's not more complicated than that. It's fragile, but boy, it is absolutely worth defending. Now, this is part four, like I said, of our closing argument, America 250 series. Be sure to like and subscribe, and check out our substack where we go in depth on more of these topics.

Providence Means Humility

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Now, nugget number three is providence is humility. It's not arrogance. Divine providence is not arrogance. It is humility. In part three, we walked you through a fantastic book, Michael Medved's The American Miracle. The most radical political argument in human history was that rights come from God, not from government. Let me repeat that. Rights come from God, not from government. The state does not give you your freedoms. The state exists to protect those freedoms and what you already have. And then Medved goes into the miracles, and boy, there are so many. The fog that saved Washington's army at Brooklyn, the storm that scattered the British fleet at Boston, the perfectly timed French alliance, one after the other, things with no rational explanation happened at exactly the right time we needed them to. You know, the founders called it Providence. Medved argues that acknowledging this, it's not swagger or superiority. It's the exact opposite. Boy, it's gratitude, not arrogance. It's humility, not chest thumping. Something bigger than us was at work, and frankly, still is. That's the proper posture for our nation at 250 years old. Now let's tie this all

Civics Literacy Has Eroded

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together. Because here is where Bret Baird does really good. He ties all three pillars together, and it is the argument that nobody wants to hear, frankly. At least nobody on the left. You can't defend what you don't understand. You can't protect a blueprint you've never read. And you can't feel gratitude for Providence if you were never even taught what Providence is. So Baer makes the case for civics, arguing that civics as a shared taught practice was strong throughout much of our twentieth century and even before. But all of that has since eroded. And Americans today are, in a word, lacking any civic literacy. Nearly everyone he interviewed for this book calls for its return, both left and right. So Reagan said it best many decades ago that freedom was never more than one generation away from extinction. He warned us it doesn't pass through the bloodstream. It has to be fought for, protected, and then handed down for the next generation, or they simply won't have it. That is exactly what Brett Baer in this book is diagnosing for us now, decades later. We frankly just stopped handing it down, and we gotta get back to doing that.

Virtue As The Glue Of Freedom

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But let me add one more attribute here, one that every Catholic, every Christian, frankly every Jew as well, has to live up to virtue. If we're going to succeed for another 250 years, a life of virtue will be the true glue that holds us together. John Adams knew it, Lincoln knew it, FDR knew it, Kennedy knew it, Reagan knew it. Every great American leader has told us the same thing over and over. Virtue is what matters most. Prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, the cardinal virtues, they're the spine, they are the skeleton. And when you overlay that with authentic charity, not just charity for charity's sake, but a true love of neighbor. When all of that is overlaid and you sprinkle on some humility to live that out, self-government gets a whole lot easier. Frankly, President Kennedy put it best at his inaugural as well. Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. That is what living a virtuous life looks like in practice. It's service, it's putting your neighbor, your community, your country ahead of yourself. That is what fortitude and charity can look like. Not as an abstraction, but as a daily decision. So there you have it. That's the challenge of America at 250. Not that the principles stopped working, that we just stopped teaching them, and we frankly stopped living them too. The founders assumed every generation would pass the story down, and would pass the virtue down with it. And for a long time we did, but somewhere in the last few decades, civics became optional, and virtue became optional right alongside of it. And a country that does not know its own story and does not practice the virtues that built that story is a country that can be talked out of its own birthright. And we don't want that to happen. The evidence from 250 years is overwhelming. But a case only works if the jury hears it, and then only holds if the people living it are actually virtuous enough to sustain it. True civic education and a virtuous life are not two separate projects. They are the same project, and we have to pursue them. So to piggyback on Brett Bear's book, here is the closing argument. America was born with an idea no nation had ever tried, that rights are divine, not political. It built an economy on a blueprint no nation had ever followed. Freedom, invention, and limited government. And it was defended by generations who understood that liberty was no guarantee. It was a choice. Sometimes we had to lay down our lives for that choice. The 250-year-old case for America holds up though. But it only holds up if we know it, if we teach it, and if we live it. And that's on us.

Go Deeper And Join The Debate

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Now, if you want to go a little bit deeper, our Substack page has all the writing on all four parts of our series. Uh be sure to check that out. We have companion pieces over there that go a little bit deeper. But tell me in the comments below, do you agree with me, and frankly agree with Brett Baer, that civic literacy and the pursuit of virtue, those are the two most important things that we need to get right if we want to make this country last another 250 years. So with that, happy birthday, America. Happy 250th. I am David Kaiser for the Mojo Academy, and as always, keep fighting. A good fight.

Resources And Sign Off

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at TeamMojo Academy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.