Conceived in liberty
by Myron Magnet
On revolution and counterrevolution in America.
January 2026
Editors’ note: “Reflections on the revolution: a symposium” examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of the American Revolution as well as the enduring pertinence of the United States’ founding ideals. Other participants include Roger Kimball, Dominic Green, Victor Davis Hanson, Wilfred M. McClay, Andrew Roberts & James Piereson.
They were warned. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke prophesied to his fellow members of Parliament in March 1775 that their harsh efforts to control Britain’s North American colonists would surely blow up in their faces.
The reason, he explained, was the colonists’ culture. At its core, he said, was a supercharged version of the British love of liberty. In the Englishmen who settled the New World in the seventeenth century, that passion had been stoked to white-hot intensity by that era’s revolutionary republican politics as well as by the Puritan religion that had led so many to emigrate. Their nonconformist religion, and that of the Huguenots and German Protestants whom similar persecution soon drove to follow them to the Northern colonies, embodied “the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,” Burke observed. It was fiercely “adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” In the Southern colonies, by a shabby quirk of human nature, the prevalence of slavery made freemen especially “proud and jealous of their freedom” as a mark of “rank and privilege.” Such people will tolerate only so much pushing.
Less than a month later, the shots at Lexington and Concord vindicated Burke’s prophecy. One can imagine Patriots shaking their heads ruefully over their colonial newspapers as they read excerpts from his eloquent speech in the months before they signed the Declaration of Independence two hundred fifty years ago. If only.
Certainly the words of “the Newton of political philosophy,” as the Virginia patriot John Randolph of Roanoke called Burke, resonated in the mind of George Washington. A decade and a half later, with the war won and the Constitution awaiting ratification, he echoed Burke’s sentiments in a letter to his former aide-de-camp, the Marquis de Lafayette. It was certain, he wrote, that the United States would now flourish mightily and that everyone would ascribe the growing prosperity to the new governmental framework. But that would miss the main point. The deeper cause of the success, the general wrote, will be the character of the people—the frugality, industry, and thirst for liberty that the first colonists had planted on these shores, moral qualities that would now be sheltered by the newly energetic government.
In the same Burkean vein, Washington didn’t share James Madison’s belief that the Constitution would be a self-regulating machine. He didn’t think that the document’s checks and balances could sufficiently neutralize man’s unruly passions and interests by poising them against one another. The new republic needed a stronger glue than mere parchment to hold it together, the first president believed. And that glue, he thought, would be the unique culture—with “the sacred fire of liberty” at its core, as he put it in his First Inaugural Address—that Burke understood had sparked the revolution in 1775 and that lived on in every American heart.
Washington was still elaborating that idea as his presidency drew to a close eight years later. America’s crucial task going forward, he urged in his Farewell Address, would be to keep nurturing that animating culture, along with a reverence for the constitutional palisade safeguarding it. Education would be crucial, since “when a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” But the culture of liberty engages not just the head but also the heart, he went on, as if channeling the most quoted passages in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published early in his presidency. Culture is not primarily a matter of reason—of which men have but a limited stock, as Burke stressed—but of belief and feeling, the mental faculties that help us make sense of the world and navigate our daily lives. We act most often out of the reflexive loyalties, the prejudices, the habits of the heart that make up culture—our manners, morals, myths, traditions, and religion. While citizens should understand the Constitution intellectually, it’s more important that they cherish it, Washington advised. And mindful that customs and rituals go into the making of a culture, he took pains as he improvised the presidency to create dignified republican precedents that could mature into sustaining traditions.
The patriotism that Washington thought essential is a feeling, yes, but—and this is a crucial point—at its core is a reality: the fact that the American republic is an extraordinary triumph, the highest achievement of the Western Enlightenment. Never before was a government born out of reflection and choice, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist paper, rather than out of accident and force. Never before was a government framed to make the people sovereign and to guarantee their rights, which—again unusually—were declared to be not the gift of government but rather inherent in man’s nature and thus unalienable.
Among those rights was not only liberty but also something equally new in political discourse—the pursuit of happiness. “Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue,” wrote the brilliant novelist V. S. Naipaul. But in fact they express “an immense human idea,” as profound, transformative, and universally applicable as the Golden Rule, Naipaul thought. They open a vast world of possibility: “a certain kind of awakened spirit . . . the idea of individual responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.” They free each individual to define his own idea of happiness and to work toward it in his own way, to discover and make the most of whatever talents, energies, and tastes lie within him. For Hamilton, that strenuous enterprise implied the need for a highly developed, highly diverse, free economy, offering every species of opportunity, open to unlimited innovation and maximum social mobility.
There’s an almost heroic individualism contained in the idea—the quintessence of Protestant individualism, complete with a heroic measure of individual responsibility. It echoes the Protestant belief that one’s outer condition mirrors the merit of one’s inner soul. To put it in secular terms, the “pursuit of happiness” formulation that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence proposes not just the freedom but also the moral imperative to realize all one’s talents in an imagined march of enlightenment and human perfectibility. It is an enterprise implying energy and effort as well as potential, and of course it led to the most spectacular and widely diffused spread of wealth and well-being in history—unsurprisingly for a creed that weds the Protestant ethic that Jefferson stressed to the spirit of capitalism that Hamilton emphasized. And insofar as each of us is the captain of his soul, if we run aground, that’s our lookout, not society’s or the state’s. If we have chosen a lazy or frivolous or base idea of happiness—or if we have shirked the choice—we own the consequences.
It’s in this sense that the bromide that America is an idea is true. The idea of America is the government-protected promise of the liberty to pursue happiness, which drew to these shores the diverse immigrants who followed the original settlers. Like Washington, who had a taste for Biblical language, they saw America as “a second land of promise”—in several senses. Their embrace of that promise as something precious and unique, along with their (sometimes imperfect) acceptance that every other American has equal rights, is what forged people who weren’t born of the same blood and soil into a nation. The sturdiest constitution wasn’t on parchment but in their beliefs.
As we mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s birth in the document that so memorably proclaimed these rights, what remains of this vision of our national culture? Does the glue that Washington thought would bind the nation together still hold?
To this crucial question the answer is not so rosy. Over the last seven decades, America has undergone an ever-accelerating revolution in its fundamental beliefs—a destructive revolution, not a renovating one.
It began healthily enough with the civil-rights movement in the 1950s. Of course the framers knew with shame that slavery was a travesty of the universalist principles on which they based the nation. But only by tolerating that injustice could they get the Constitution ratified. Even after the Union sacrificed 360,000 soldiers’ lives to free the slaves, and after the post–Civil War amendments had repaired the flaw in the original Constitution, two bizarre Supreme Court rulings of the 1870s gelded those amendments and licensed a century of segregation and civic exclusion. So the marches and rallies of the 1950s and ’60s, the agitations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders, repaired the framers’ work—at the cost, however, of emphasizing its signal deformity and stressing the framers’ failures over their successes.
One liberation led to another, and the luminous justice of the civil-rights movement cast a glow of reflected but illusory legitimacy on those that followed. As the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s began to fray the tissue of manners and morals woven into American culture, further torn by a welfare-rights movement that advocated dependence rather than liberty, Marxist radicals like the Weathermen saw the chance to hook their revolutionary politics to the cultural unraveling and spread the idea of America the Bad, a nation needing total revision.
Influenced by ideologues from Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, they skittered away from Marx’s tone-deaf notion that ideas, rather than shaping history, are insignificant reflections of the socioeconomic relations that are the supposed bedrock of reality. Instead, they took ideas seriously—but only to show that they masked or distorted rather than illuminated reality. For these political radicals, the lesson was that ideas were instruments by which powerful oppressors hoodwinked the masses to hold them in thrall. Radicals must disabuse the oppressed classes of the “false consciousness”—the bourgeois morality and gimcrack patriotism—that had made them co-conspirators in their own subservience to capitalist overlords.
At least two generations of student radicals dedicated to the task of unmasking the supposed oppressiveness of American culture, to deconstructing and confuting its myths and pieties, graduated into professorships in colleges, law schools, and teachers colleges, and onto newspaper and broadcast editorial boards. Propagandizing from these culture-forming positions, they infused a new worldview into the national consciousness, further propagated by the schoolteachers, lawyers, and judges they trained. Whereas mid-twentieth-century educators strove to transmit the works of the Western, and particularly American, tradition to their students, explaining their special value, a sneering anti-Americanism became the keynote of the new academy.
If there was truth at the heart of George Washington’s patriotism, clots of falsehood lie at the heart of this new picture of America: the lie that America was conceived in slavery and is defined by systemic racism, the lie that sexual freedom is so absolute that men can become women or that there are fifty shades of gender. In the wider world, these falsehoods produced caricatures of the civil-rights and sexual-liberation movements: the LGTBQ and transgender crazes, along with Black Lives Matter, “antiracism,” and The New York Times’s influential and mendacious 1619 Project, with its risible claims that America began when the first slaves landed in Virginia and that a key goal of the revolution was preventing Britain from ending slavery here. Another result was an American president who declared that the idea of American exceptionalism was no truer than British or Greek exceptionalism.
These aren’t simple falsehoods. They are as much diametrical reversals of the truth as the Orwellian assertions that freedom is slavery, that two plus two make five, that you can’t rely on the evidence of your senses or any of your habitual notions but instead are adrift in an unfathomable world. The point is to make all that is solid in our national ethos melt into air and thus to weaken the nation by dissolving the ligament that ties it together. Emblematic of this destructive transvaluation is the push by the American Historical Association—the history professors’ official national organization—to declare July 4, 2026, not a day of celebration but rather a Day of Atonement for the Original Sin of our birth. A panelist in a pro-Palestinian conference in Detroit this past summer summed up the goal succinctly: “to destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads,” demoralizing the citizenry by erasing their belief in American exceptionalism and weakening the nation by subverting its foundational culture.
No wonder foreigners piled on with the professors and journalists to undermine the American ethos, whether to weaken an adversary or to propagandize on behalf of a foreign interest or both. Billions of dollars from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other governments poured into American universities, funding radical professors and special-interest programs from Confucius Institutes to Middle East studies departments. These propagated the idea of America as a racist, colonialist empire, guilty of dispossessing the Indians from their land, of tarring the cultures of Arabia and Asia as backward and thus rightly ruled by more enlightened Western powers, and of supporting Israel in its supposed colonialist oppression (now amounting to “genocide”) of the innocent Palestinians. Social media now buzzes with the hum of thousands of foreign bots conveying these messages. Strong in their faith, whether in the inevitability of Chinese communism or the Islamic caliphate, our adversaries understand that a nation that doesn’t believe in itself is easier to coopt or defeat. Indeed, it will help to defeat itself, since without the glue of a common culture, citizens will splinter into feckless, irritable dissention.
That’s why the biggest accomplishment of the Trump administration might prove to be the cultural counterrevolution it has launched. Making America great again, the president believes, includes reviving the idea of American exceptionalism. On day one of his new term, he moved to halt the cultural subversion. He ordered the scrapping of every vestige of the Biden junta’s “whole of government” diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. No more would the government advance the fiction that America is so institutionally racist that it needs affirmative action to place minorities in positions from which only discrimination had supposedly barred them hitherto. No more would the military ranks include “dudes in dresses,” as the secretary of war recently scoffed. No more would the national museums and theaters obsess over America’s failings rather than celebrate, or at least honestly present, its signal virtues. No more would tax dollars support the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s babble of leftist propaganda.
Radicals routinely deface the statues of American heroes, and local governments and museums have removed them in deference to left-wing mobs, so the president pledged to erect a statue of George Washington in the White House grounds, to sponsor the construction of a vast sculpture garden of American heroes, and to return the banished Reconciliation Monument to Arlington National Cemetery. Official Washington buildings, including the new White House ballroom, will henceforward be built in the classical style, appropriate to the nation’s intellectual roots in democratic Greece and republican Rome and expressing its mainstream respect for order, tradition, harmony, and beauty rather than the angst and iconoclasm of brutalism and the other modernist styles that have splattered such eyesores as the now-crumbling Hoover fbi Building or the National Museum of African American History across the otherwise dignified capital.
The counterrevolution’s most important campaign, its push to reform the intellectually corrupt universities, has grown all the more newsworthy thanks to the keffiyeh-masked know-nothings braying for intifada at Columbia and other campuses, along with the presidents of Harvard, mit, and Penn prissily telling Congress that they “contextualize” campus anti-Semitism. This is also the messiest battle, since it rages in the confused no-man’s land between public and private, between civil society and the state. To what extent do the billions of taxpayer dollars that Washington lavishes on universities in research grants and student-loan guarantees give the feds the right to tell these most powerful of culture-forming institutions whom to admit and hire, how to police their faculty’s speech and discipline their students, and how to balance their course offerings?
For now, it’s a victory to put these tax-exempt institutions on the defensive, to demonstrate their discrimination by race, and to force them to account for the conversion of their humanities, social-science, and area-studies departments into leftist propaganda mills rather than searchers after truth or transmitters of the accumulated wisdom and experience of our culture. It may be that market forces rather than government dictates will be the most potent engine of reform for undergraduate education, as employers increasingly view Harvard or Columbia diplomas with misgiving and non-leftist parents send their kids to colleges dedicated more to free inquiry and to transmitting the great works than to propaganda and activism. Colleges are prestige-conferring and connection-making institutions as well as educational ones, and their status rankings will inevitably change as prestige follows the new choices of the most talented students who go on to the most successful careers. City Journal ’s new college-ranking list, rewarding mostly Southern universities that boast ideologically diverse faculties and student bodies, traditional curricula, free-speech protection, and graduate success, is the first codification of what will be an ongoing transformation. By these measures, the University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin come out on top, while schools like Middlebury and Vassar sink to the bottom.
In graduate education, government has an unambiguous responsibility. For more than half a century, federal grants have fueled the scientific and technical research that has made American universities such renowned engines of progress. Certainly, it’s right for Washington to tell these institutions that it’s not in the national interest for half their science graduate students to be foreigners likely to transfer our advanced technology to our adversaries (and it’s also the State Department’s duty to deny student visas to many of these foreigners). And it makes sense for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to stop accompanying research grants to scientists with a grant for “overhead” to their universities. This provision, which hitherto has added 50 percent or more to basic grants, not only funds secretaries and lab space but also subsidizes humbug in the humanities. Let universities spend their own money for the facilities that attract the researchers who confer such prestige on them. And let the feds ban the foreign money that influences undergraduate curricula and student life.
These moves have already lightened the dispiriting fear that the long cultural revolution is unstoppable. But can it be reversed? And how far? Can the public schools be salvaged, wrested away from left-wing unionized teachers who are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party and who believe that they, rather than parents, are in charge of molding children’s beliefs and thus the culture they will embody? Will school choice become universal, offering classrooms that salute the flag, recite the Lord’s Prayer, insist on good manners, and teach American history with a respect that is entirely merited, not as mere party indoctrination? Will teachers colleges arise to prepare their students to teach traditional subjects in a traditional way, and will alternate certification expand the teaching ranks beyond teachers-college grads to include experienced outsiders? Will publishers supply the textbooks for such schools on the lines of the old, still popular Landmark Books biographies, with their emphasis on merit and independence of character? Will these changes prompt the birth of a more decent social media for young people, as Elon Musk made Twitter more free for adults?
This isn’t a pipe dream. Cultural counterrevolutions have happened before, most notably in eighteenth-century Britain, when Methodism uplifted the morals and manners of working-class Englishmen and gradually transformed a nation full of Hogarthian drunks, brutes, bull baiters, and adulterers into strait-laced Victorians. Here in America, the embers of the sacred fire of liberty still glow red hot. Step up, Americans, and fan them into a brilliant blaze once more.