Cynics do not build

Originally published by the Washington Examiner

This piece was co-authored by Lilly Urieff

The American dream has come to be measured almost entirely in the things that can be counted — a home, a wage that outpaces the year before it, a child who rises higher than the parent. These metrics are real, and the fight for them is just.

Yet beneath them lies a foundation rarely named: The willingness to labor, save, innovate, and sacrifice across decades presupposes a faith that the civilization one builds upon is legitimate, durable, and worthy of the effort. People taught to regard their own inheritance with suspicion have little reason to plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The gravest threat to the American dream is civilizational, and we have raised a generation to inherit a country many were never taught to love.

The founders understood memory as a foundation and argued in the idiom of history — of ancient rights and inherited English liberties, of a covenant binding the living to both the dead and the unborn. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison knew that liberty is not self-sustaining, and they steeped themselves in the record of republics ancient and modern precisely because they meant to avoid the fates of those before them. When Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg in 1863, he did not begin with the carnage before him but reached back to the founding, knowing that a nation is bound together not only by its borders or its markets, but also by a story faithfully told and remembered.

To read the full article, click here.