As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding this July, it seems fitting to reflect on our national heroes. This country has many monuments honoring important figures from our history, but none loom larger than Mount Rushmore, featuring the faces of four of our greatest American presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each of these leaders was flawed in his own way, but we honor them together as heroes for the way they served their country.

As human beings, we need heroes. We need not only abstract descriptions of what is excellent, but also individuals we can strive to emulate. Reading the stories of those who pursued excellence in the face of adversity can train us to pursue that which is good in our own circumstances. Stories of human excellence show us that achieving the good is still possible in our time and should prompt us to be better than we would be on our own.

Heroes are not limited to national leaders. They can be found in almost every area of American life—even in classrooms. What if the field of education had its own Mount Rushmore? What four American teachers, out of the millions who have faithfully taught students, should be represented? We propose Booker T. Washington, Anne Sullivan, Jaime Escalante, and Marva Collins.

Cast Down Your Bucket

Booker T. Washington was a teacher and leader who overcame great adversity to get an education and championed the dignity of manual labor. Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, Washington and his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, after their emancipation. There, he worked in a salt furnace and later a coal mine to help provide for his family. When a day school for African American children opened in his town, Washington attended night classes until he struck a deal with his stepfather: he would work before school and again after school each afternoon.

At the coal mine, Washington heard about Hampton Normal and Agricultural School in Virginia and immediately sought to attend the school to continue his education. When he was about 16, he left Malden for Hampton even though he did not have money to make the entire journey, let alone to cover tuition. By ingenuity and grit, Washington made it to Hampton and worked as a janitor to pay for his board at the school.

Upon graduating, Washington returned to Malden and taught at the same school where he had studied as a boy. He sent a respectable number of his own students to continue their studies at Hampton, where the school’s administration was impressed by how well-prepared they were. Eventually, Hampton’s administration asked Washington to teach for them. Later, they recommended him to be the founding principal of a new school for African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama.

At Tuskegee, students received both academic instruction and training in manual skills. Washington had them construct the school buildings, grow the school’s food, and make everything else the community needed. This was an opportunity for the students to develop their skills and to experience the satisfaction of making something for themselves first-hand. Washington led by example, showing his students that he was not ashamed to work with his hands alongside them. He demonstrated to them that hard work—which many still associated with the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery—led to dignity, agency, and self-respect.

Through his success at Tuskegee, Washington became a well-known national speaker, traveling widely to lecture about the cause of his people and the work at the school. His speech at the 1895 International Exposition was particularly famous. He called for black and white men to learn to serve and appreciate one another for their skill, hard work, and ingenuity. Though Washington’s emphasis on manual education at Tuskegee was controversial, he was committed to doing what he thought was necessary to prepare his students to flourish as individuals and as a community.

A Helping Hand

The second face on our Mount Rushmore of great American teachers is that of Anne Sullivan. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Sullivan spent a significant portion of her childhood in the harsh conditions of an almshouse, eventually leaving to study at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Despite multiple surgeries on her eyes, she struggled with poor vision throughout her entire life. After graduating, Sullivan was hired by a family in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to tutor a blind and deaf child named Helen Keller, whose ability to communicate was severely limited.

Sullivan quickly learned that Helen’s biggest problem was not her inability to communicate—it was her lack of self-control. Out of pity, the Keller family had spoiled Helen for years and imposed little to no discipline on her. As a result, Helen became a self-absorbed, unhappy, wild child lost in a world of ignorance.

But Sullivan believed that Helen could learn.

She taught Helen to communicate through a manual alphabet, a system of finger motions corresponding to the letters of the alphabet that could be made in the palm of another person’s hand. Patiently and methodically, Sullivan used this manual language to introduce Helen to the wider world.

Sullivan encouraged her to ask questions about anything that interested her and always tried to answer her truthfully. She eventually taught Helen how to read raised-letter books, and later, Helen would go on to author 12 books of her own. Helen traveled to 39 countries in her lifetime and met many well-known people from her day. Sullivan remained Helen’s teacher and companion for most of her life. Although Sullivan is known mainly for her tireless efforts with one famous student, she is an inspiration to educators everywhere to continue to do their noble work with compassion and tenacity.

Standing and Delivering

Next to Sullivan appears the face of another remarkable American teacher: Jaime Escalante. Escalante grew up in Bolivia, where he excelled at math, science, and sports. A friend convinced him to begin teaching even before he had completed his training. Escalante eventually taught at three different schools at once.

After a few years of teaching in Bolivia, Escalante and his wife moved their family to California, where he took a job at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, which served mostly poor Latino students. Although Escalante had been hired to teach computer classes, he quickly discovered he had been assigned only basic math courses.

Escalante believed his students could learn advanced mathematics, regardless of family income and social status. After teaching at Garfield for a few years, he started an AP Calculus class and helped many of his students do advanced high school mathematics. Believing that learning requires hard work, Escalante assigned large amounts of homework and arranged study sessions outside of school hours to immerse students in the math they were learning. He used toys and employed sports metaphors to make mathematical concepts more interesting and understandable for his students.

Escalante treated his students like members of an athletic team, and he acted as their coach. He consistently showed them that he cared for them, but he was no pushover. Escalante would often use edgy nicknames for his students, and he was not above using insults—and even threats—to motivate them to learn.

In 1982, several of Escalante’s students had their AP Calculus scores suspended for suspected cheating because their mistakes were unusually similar. Most of the class ended up retaking the test, and all those students passed it—again. This incident drew widespread media attention to Escalante’s teaching and his students’ remarkable success. In 1988, Warner Bros. Pictures released a feature film about Escalante and his students entitled Stand and Deliver.

Learning for All

The final figure to appear on the Mount Rushmore of great American teachers is Marva Collins. Collins grew up in Alabama and attended Clark College, where she studied secretarial science. She had not intended to become a teacher, but she found a teaching job after graduation, and it turned out she was well-suited to the work.

Collins moved to Garfield Park, a westside neighborhood of Chicago, where she got married and started having children. The neighborhood was deteriorating into a ghetto while the Collins family lived there, but Marva wanted to stay and help the children in her community. After taking a break from teaching to care for her own children, she returned to the classroom in 1963 at Delano Elementary School. Collins was incredibly successful, but some of her colleagues did not like being shown up. As a result, these educators made things difficult for her, and Collins left after only one year at the school. Soon after, Collins was asked to help found a private school in Garfield Park known as Westside Preparatory Academy.

Most of the students who transferred to Westside Prep had been thought to have a variety of learning difficulties and struggled academically. But Collins believed that all children could learn regardless of their challenges and labels. She told her students that they could succeed if they were willing to take responsibility for themselves and their work.

Collins firmly believed that reading was the key to future academic success, and she used a phonetic method to teach her students how to read. Phonics gave them the linguistic tools they needed to sound out any word, and even struggling students learned how to read under Collins’s tutelage.

She also believed in the power of great stories. Collins ignited a passion in her students to read by giving them interesting and worthwhile books, especially fairy tales, folk tales, and classic works of literature such as Shakespeare’s plays. She knew they needed good stories that would teach sound morals and show them a larger world beyond the ghetto. Collins intentionally gave each of her students plenty of encouragement, praise, and physical affection. She knew many of them had been convinced by prior failures that they were incapable of learning, but she strove to create an environment where every student could learn.

The Four

The four teachers discussed above should be heroes for American educators today. Their stories present powerful examples of how teachers, in the face of difficult circumstances, can give students excellent instruction and make direct, positive contributions to their lives.

Washington strove against all odds to pursue an education for himself and to educate black Americans in order to prepare them to live as free people. Anne Sullivan, despite her own struggles with blindness, sought to reveal the world to a deaf and blind girl by treating her as a human being capable of knowledge, understanding, and creativity. Jaime Escalante helped his often-overlooked students to learn and love mathematics, teaching them how to overcome challenges in the face of societal expectations. Marva Collins tenaciously worked with struggling students and enabled them to become competent and confident learners through being exposed to a rich tapestry of great literature. 

These teachers faced incredible challenges in their classrooms but never gave in to despair. They left a rich legacy for all teachers who have come after them, which is why they have earned a place on the Mount Rushmore of American Educators.

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Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.

In a sense, dystopian novels are both optimistic and conservative. They are optimistic in that they do not hold the future they describe to be inevitable and unavoidable. They are conservative in that they imagine a world very much worse than our own, and therefore are an encouragement to political virtues such as prudence and realism. They remind us that, short of extermination camps or other complete disasters, we always have something to lose as well as to gain and that progress often has a dark—even a very dark—side. Perfection is not of this world.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

The plot is simple. A huge armada of rotting hulks, bearing a million impoverished and half-starved Bengalis desperate to reach Europe, which they suppose to be a land flowing with milk and honey, sets out from Calcutta and eventually reaches the south coast of France. The local population flees before this invasion, no official efforts having been made to repel it. French society collapses; the success of the armada spells the downfall of Europe, and the whole of the West, as a civilization.

***

This is a new and excellent translation by Ethan Rundell of the 2011 edition of Raspail’s novel, published by Vauban Books (whose name is a reference to the great 17th-century defensive military engineer and architect, the Marquis de Vauban). It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the re-translation and re-publication of the book are conceived by both its publisher and translator as an act of civilizational defense against the dangers of which Raspail warned.

In the book’s preface, Nathan Pinkoski compares it to both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I don’t think it can be put in their class. It is very badly written, too long, verbose, and frequently boring. There is always a danger that a roman à thèse will become more thèse than roman, and this is precisely what happened with Raspail’s book. Quite often, one feels on reading it as if one had been cornered at a cocktail party by a fanatic determined to get his point across who will not let you go until he has succeeded in doing so. One is buttonholed, cajoled, harangued by the narrator (who never makes his role quite clear), or by the characters, who stand for ideas rather than emerge as real human beings. The Camp of the Saints is a fictionalized essay, whose ideas could have been expressed in 20 or 30 pages.

***

From the first, the book was attacked as racist and even white supremacist. Its author spent a lot of his life describing and sympathizing deeply with remote non-white populations, so the charge against him personally cannot stick. But it is not difficult to understand why his book should have been attacked in this fashion. The desperate emigrants are dirty, foul-smelling, superstitious, concupiscent, fatalistic, heathen, unthinking, and without apparent scruple. They are not individuals, they are a mass, a vast herd, like wildebeest during their transhumance in the Serengeti. They are more biological phenomena than human beings. If I were Bengali, I would not much care to have had my compatriots depicted in this way.

But Raspail is an equal-opportunity deprecator, and his true target is the French intelligentsia and, by extension, that of the whole Western world, which he depicts as cowardly, sentimental, opportunistic, dishonest, shallow, vain, and self-satisfied. Although the intellectual class is supposed to live by ideas, it has its herd instincts, and it is of some historic interest to read how far Raspail thought political correctness and wokeness (which, of course, he did not name as such) had ravaged intellectual life as early as 1973.

Read the rest here.

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Hungary’s elections earlier this week marked a seismic shift after 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s dominance, as Peter Magyar’s opposition Tisza party won with over half the vote and a supermajority in the legislature.

The attention focused on this small Central European country may seem disproportionate—but Orbán attracted not only the active support of the Trump Administration, with Vice President Vance flying out to rally for him in person, but also equally strenuous opposition from the American Left and its allies in Brussels. In the wake of Orbán’s defeat, left-wing luminaries Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Alex Soros (son of Hungarian native and Orbán arch-nemesis George and inheritor of his left-wing activist empire) were among those sending out celebratory tweets.

“We didn’t go because we expected Viktor Orban to cruise to an election victory,” Vance later told Fox News. “We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time.”

I have some personal familiarity with Hungary, having made two multi-week visits as a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank that was broadly aligned with (though occasionally critical of) Orbán’s government. 

Despite my own support for Hungary’s national project under Orbán as a bold model for the global Right, I was hardly blind to its flaws, either then or now. I am not surprised that, at least for now, the Hungarian people sought new political leadership. For one, 16 years is a very long time for any one leader in a democratic system, and eventually voters will look for change. Helmut Kohl presided skillfully over German reunification before being bounced by voters in the late 1990s after 16 years in power.

Corruption and cronyism have also been ongoing problems in Hungary. While it is difficult to know whether it was really worse than in other post-Communist nations in Eastern Europe, given that the same folks pushing these critiques were the people falsely calling Hungary “autocratic” or a “dictatorship,” there is a public perception that Orbán tolerated significant corruption.

The Hungarian economy remained sluggish in recent years, as it lagged behind similar countries in growth. Its trajectory was not helped by the E.U. withholding tens of billions of dollars due to the Orbán government’s refusal to accept various bureaucratic diktats. High inflation was also a real problem. And yes, Hungary’s relationships with Russia and China were also legitimate concerns—one that the Trump Administration raised directly to the Hungarians, without making these issues the entire fulcrum of our relationship. And thus it was that Péter Magyar, a former senior member of Fidesz who ran on replicating much of Orbán’s nationalist program—particularly on immigration—while reducing Hungary’s isolation from the E.U. and cracking down on corruption, was able to triumph.

After his victory, Magyar noted his intention to continue Orbán’s firm immigration policies:

I will make it clear to the President of the European Commission and to all European leaders that Hungary will take a very strict stance on immigration and will not accept any pact or allocation mechanism of this kind, and furthermore we will keep the border fence reinforced and even plug the holes that are there now, because there are holes in that border fence, probably not by accident.

That Magyar campaigned as he did shows the depth of Orbán’s accomplishment in redefining the political debate in Hungary. If Magyar continues to take this approach, embracing the core of Orbán’s nationalist revolution while improving transparency and E.U. relations, he could govern quite successfully. But he will receive a lot of pressure to give in from the E.U. and domestic leftists in his coalition.

Attack of the GOP-e

What is more interesting for Americans than the domestic Hungarian political reasons for Orbán’s defeat are the deep fissures it has exposed on the Right. The old guard Senate GOP establishment, in particular, remains at war with an America First foreign policy. Despite Orbán’s strong support from President Trump, several leading Republican senators couldn’t resist publicly showing their disdain for Orbán. (For each one who spoke out, you can be sure that more Republican senators feel the same way but have chosen judicious silence.)

“Congratulations to Péter Magyar on his election as Hungary’s new leader,” wrote outgoing 65-year-old North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis on X. “This outcome underscores the power of democracy and NATO prevailing over the previous regime’s support for autocracy and Putin.”

Seventy-three-year-old Florida Senator Rick Scott, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted that “The Hungarian people have chosen freedom by rejecting Putin and standing with their western allies here in the United States and in Europe.”

And 75-year-old Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally blunt: “The freedom-loving people of Hungary have voted decisively in favor of democracy and the rule of law…. They’ve rejected the malign influence of Vladimir Putin, the world’s most malicious dictator and decided their own future.”

What is remarkable about all three tweets is that they are virtually identical to those released by Clinton, Obama, and Alex Soros. They didn’t just frame the election as a choice of policy on Russia versus Ukraine—contrary to all evidence of the election they had just witnessed—but as a question of “freedom” and “autocracy” versus “democracy.” It is an example of the uniparty in action.

Even worse was 84-year-old Mitch McConnell’s Fox News op-ed, appearing the day after the election, with a headline stating that Orbán’s loss is a “lesson” for the American Right. He argues that conservative admiration for Orbán is based on a “myth,” as Orbán offers only a cautionary tale, not a political model.

What really angers McConnell and his colleagues is Orbán’s lack of support for the Ukraine War, an obsession among the establishment that has not abated. The senior citizen senators seemed trapped in an intellectual time warp, simply unable to understand that Russia, while an adversary of America and the unquestioned aggressor in Ukraine, is not the Soviet Union in either its goals or its power. Contrary to their assumptions, our relationship with Russia should not be viewed through a Cold War-era lens, nor should another country’s position on the war in Ukraine be considered the sole determinant of our strategic relationship with that country.

The most revealing statement of the GOP establishment mindset occurs toward the end of McConnell’s op-ed, when he notes that “to the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.”

At first glance, this sounds like common sense. Certainly, America’s strategic interests must come first in its relationship with any country. That is literally what it means to be America First. But the question is how one defines strategic importance for a small European country like Hungary that has relatively little military or economic weight to throw around.

Was it in our strategic interest to have a right-wing and nationalist European partner aggressively asserting its sovereign rights over left-wing bureaucrats in Brussels?

Was it in our strategic interest to have a European partner pushing unabashed pro-family social conservatism against pressure and fines from Brussels?

And most importantly, was it in our strategic interest to have a European country effectively standing up (as it did alone for years) against the Brussels open borders regime and the replacement of the European population with culturally incompatible foreigners?

To McConnell and other establishment senators, these are minor issues because they ultimately don’t care about them, even though they determine the fundamental character and destiny of all countries. McConnell and his colleagues are globalists, and therefore see the world only as a geopolitical chessboard. America could be totally demographically and culturally transformed—but as long as we keep sending enough dollars to Zelensky, our geriatric Senate Russia hawks will be happy.

McConnell’s references to “illiberal court-packing,” “[f]awning servitude to authoritarians,” and Hungary offering “little in the way of strategic alignment, let alone ‘moral cooperation,’” are identical to the talking points issued by the establishment Left. It underscores McConnell’s failure to appreciate one of Orbán’s greatest accomplishments: steering non-governmental institutions of society toward right-wing ends.

Orbán understood how to wield power legally—a virtue that has been absent from the GOP for decades (this is why Republicans are so ineffective even when they win). He used legal powers and ruthless, but constitutional, means to tame Hungary’s left-wing judiciary in ways McConnell would never dream of.

The Senate GOP establishment’s anti-Orbán broadsides are also notable because Orbán was the only European leader who endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, and he stuck with him through thick and thin in the ensuing decade. That sort of support should engender fondness for any leader—and would indicate, at the very least, that one might offer some gracious comments in his direction after his defeat. Unless, of course, you hate Trump and the voters he represents—as these senators seem to—and therefore see Orbán’s support of Trump as one more black mark against Orbán.

Alive and Kicking

In immediately conceding defeat, Viktor Orbán demonstrated the very democratic values his GOP critics claimed he threatened. They concede the Left’s premise that strong nationalist leaders like Orbán are inherently anti-democratic, because all of them ultimately agree with the Left’s worldview, including a belief that it is fundamentally “undemocratic” to aggressively challenge leftist control of powerful non-governmental organizations. Meanwhile, Budapest still looks European, and minorities such as Jews can walk freely on the streets without fear of violence—which is not the case in large parts of Paris and London. But for the GOP establishment, none of that matters.

Trump’s 2024 victory rested on voters demanding sovereignty, border security, and skepticism of endless foreign entanglements—precisely the instincts Orbán operationalized in Hungary. When McConnell urges the Right to learn the “lesson” of Hungary, he is really urging a return to pre-Trump Republicanism: muscular internationalism abroad and cultural weakness and demographic replacement at home.

Orbán is proof that even a small nation can defend its borders, its families, and its sovereignty against elite consensus. For American conservatives confronting their own demographic and cultural challenges, Orbán’s model—flawed yet instructive—offers lessons in statecraft that transcend any single election result, which is why so many conservatives flocked to Budapest during his time in office.

Without Orbán, we would likely have no Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, AfD, Giorgia Meloni, or other rising nationalist leaders and parties in Europe that might set their nations on a more positive course. Whatever his flaws, Orbán showed right-wing nationalists the art of the possible. And that alone has a great deal of strategic value.

In the end, McConnell is correct that Hungary itself is a small player in the realm of geopolitics. But the GOP establishment’s reactions to Orbán’s defeat show that the failed pre-Trump consensus is still alive and well in the Senate GOP.

And that is very concerning indeed.

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Spencer Klavan has invited us to contemplate the American age, to think again in civilizational, epochal terms, and to search out the prerequisites for its continuation.

The chaos (good and ill) of the past decade has made it difficult to look beyond the immediate. But Klavan is right: Trumpism, whether embattled or dead, is more a harbinger of a possible future than its fulfillment. To carry on, “Americans will need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence. Much depends on whether we can learn to see ourselves that way again.” This is a spiritual inquiry as much as an intellectual one.

The singular trait most essential to American renewal—perhaps the most predominant, central belief during the founding period—is what I have called “Protestant Providentialism.” Here we find the American soul that gives shape to the body and governance to the mind, and promise to America’s future.

A Providential Nation

On the Great Seal of the United States is the well-known motto novus ordo seclorum (“new order of the ages”). Less remembered or mentioned is the other motto affixed above, annuit coeptis (“He favors our undertakings”). The latter phrase hovers over the eye of Providence atop a pyramid. At the base of the structure is the year 1776 in Roman numerals. Given the image, annuit coeptis is typically (and was intended to be) translated as “Providence has favored our undertakings.” As Charles Thomson, the seal’s primary creator, explained, “The pyramid signifies Strength and Duration: The Eye over it & the Motto allude to the many signal interpositions of providence in favor of the American cause.”

Both mottos are traceable to Virgil. Thomson, like many of his contemporaries, was a Latinist, and the Aeneid was a particular colonial favorite. (Given Thomson’s biblical scholarship, to which he dedicated his retirement years, it is surprising that the Great Seal was not covered in the Greek of the Septuagint—which he translated into English for the first time in 1808—or the synoptic Gospels.)

Annuit coeptis comes from a prayer of Ascanius, son of Aeneas, to Jupiter before battle, a prayer answered with victory and the eventual establishment of Rome. It was uttered after the founding of a new city by a man of piety who carried the religion of his ancestors with him. The phrase “novus ordo seclorum” was lifted from a prophecy in Virgil’s Eclogues: “the great cycle of ages is born anew.” As Tom West has explained, the fourth Eclogue announces a new, divinely endorsed golden age of prosperity and peace. According to Thomson, these two phrases described “the beginning of the New American Era.”

But while foreigners might have tended to refer to America as a “New Rome,” Americans themselves had historically applied different monikers: a new England and, more importantly, a new Israel.

At its genesis, America was a historicist and biblicist nation.

Contrary to conspiracies, none of the members of the design committee were Freemasons, save Benjamin Franklin, whose suggestions were entirely biblical anyway. The Eye of Providence within a triangle is an historic Christian symbol for Trinitarian omnipotence. As David Hackett Fischer reports, New England pulpits were sometimes adorned with a great, watchful eye, the lone décor of otherwise austere meetinghouses.

Thomson was himself no stranger to such imagery, considering that his liturgy was Presbyterianism. When he was not serving as secretary for the Continental Congress, the Ulsterman was performing the same role for the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, where he was an elder.

For Thomson and the founding generation more generally, the new American era was an act of God, not man, a manifestation of Providence, of divine governance. God was the foundation of all the efforts of the Americans; the source of their confidence to act was “a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence.”

Providence directed all human affairs, and it smiled on God’s covenanted people. The socio-political necessity of religion and virtue was, of course, a classical insight, but it was the history of Israel that confirmed the principle. As Ezra Stiles preached in 1783, observance of “the history of the hebrew theocracy shews, that the secular welfare of God’s antient people depended upon their virtue, their religion, their observance of that holy covenant.” Recall that it was Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams who wished to cast America as delivered Israel and Britain as Pharaoh on the Great Seal. Preachers like Samuel Langdon and Israel Evans had regularly made the analogy in their sermons.

It is the doctrine of Providence, not equality or liberty, that is definitive for America. It unlocks the deepest understanding of our past and shows our (potential) future. It is this doctrine that conditions and shapes all else, and our apprehension (or lack thereof) of it determines our national character.

In God They Trusted

The chief American doctrine is providentialism. Every founder, as Carl Richard has pointed out, professed and invoked an active Providence: God’s deliberate and active shaping of human history.

It was, accordingly, the doctrine the founders most frequently and freely invoked. There were no “deists” among them, as Mark David Hall has proved, for a deist by definition categorically denies divine intervention. Even Thomas Paine could not go there; his rather untraditional exegesis of 1 Samuel against monarchy would have been as readily shouted down as his Age of Reason. Franklin, often dubbed a deist, made a name for himself attacking the idea of divine noninterference. No deist would call for private and national prayer as Franklin often did, noting that God made the world, governs it, and hears the cries of his people. Franklin’s final confession left out the divinity of Christ, but it affirmed Providence.

Patrick Henry considered the rise of deism the greatest threat to the new American republic. It was only the assurance of its opposite—Providence—that comforted him. Benjamin Rush was similarly apprehensive about deism, which he considered an import spilling over from the continent that had its origin, he averred, in Epicurean and Stoic thought.

To understand the founders as they understood themselves, we must grasp the pivotal place of Providence in their political thought. The new order of the ages was not grounded in some amorphous set of “permanent things,” but in the constancy of Providence.

Apprehension of the American soul must come before her body can be renewed: America’s soul is Protestantism, and her fundamental doctrine is Providentialism.

The Republican Cornerstone

Providence, the defining doctrine of Protestantism, was in turn the defining doctrine of America, in no small part because it was the favorite doctrine of the national father. George Washington referred to or called upon Providence hundreds of times in correspondence, and he seemed aware of his reputation for highlighting the doctrine. It was Washington’s firm belief that the “all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had preserved him; as he told William Gordon, no one trusted in Providence more than he.

American independence was acquired “under the smiles of Heaven”—God’s “divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf” during the Revolution. Her endurance and prosperity were entirely dependent on the same “Providential Agency” that had delivered “the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors [and] planted them in the promised land.” For Americans, “the hand of Providence” of the “great Lord and Ruler of Nations” is ever “conspicuous,” a confidence in an active, special divine assistance.

It is not, of course, that Roman Catholics have no comprehension of or place for Providence. It is that the emphasis, expression, and use in view were distinctly Protestant.

Max Weber rightly understood that Protestant soteriology encouraged agency and activity. He correctly identified the Protestant work ethic as pivotal (and appropriately looked to Richard Baxter for explanation), but he did not understand how predestinarian theology (and cosmology) instigated moral energy and worldly effort. It was not so much that soteriological anxiety—the urgency of making one’s calling and election sure—drove men to political and economic exertion, although there is something to that. Rather, assurance and confidence in election and divine Providence facilitated the work ethic that supplied the necessary confidence for the active life. Earthly work is not a means of internal persuasion but of external demonstration, a duty that can be performed only with the aid of supreme confidence in both immediate and remote outcomes, and confidence of special, elect status.

For our God is a God of means, that is, the active cooperation of his people. Hence, we arrive at both the sinfulness of sloth and the source of confidence to act, namely, assurance secured by the doctrine of Providence. Inaction and endless, tortured deliberations were sinful when “God’s will is manifest,” instructed Richard Sibbes. Only a “false heart” would delay. “What coward would not fight when he is sure of victory?”

It was this ethic that propelled both the Mayflower and the Arbella across the Atlantic and comforted the instigators of the third English Protestant revolution—the colonists fighting the American Revolution. There was a deep trust that Providence would “smile” on their “exertions,” as Washington put it to John Hancock in 1776 (apparently one of his preferred phrases). The chief doctrine of Americanism drove men to use the means with which God had furnished them, with profound confidence in divine pleasure with both their efforts and the ends.

The doctrine of Providence enabled the necessary public spirit for American republicanism. “My rule in which I have always found satisfaction,” wrote Franklin, “is to never turn aside from Publick Affairs thro’ Views of private interest, but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me right at the time, leaving the Consequences to Providence.” Diligence in duty, the active life, the Protestant work ethic, and American independence itself: all these are owed to the profound sense of Providence embedded in the American people, a belief that transcended denominational lines and was the one dogmatic principle all the founders shared.

Reviving the American Soul

Following the attempt on President Trump’s life in 2024, 65% of Republicans said they believed his survival showed he was “favored by divine providence or God’s will.” Naturally, only 11% of Democrats agreed. For 18th-century Americans, this would have been an easy question.

Though most Americans now still believe in God, half are deists, which is detrimental to the republican spirit. Americans work fewer hours than they used to, have generally lost the virtue of thrift and charity, and no longer think in generational terms economically. Worse, however, is the decline in public spiritedness. Patriotism as sentimental fandom survives, but it is not the genuine article. “Volunteerism” is not a great measurement of this spirit, but its decline nevertheless speaks to the problem. Fewer than 1% serve in the military, and even fewer serve in public office of any kind. Americans are less, not more, political.

Stacey Schiff recounts how men like Samuel Adams were rarely home for dinner because they were so involved in local political associations and municipal governance. As Paul Rahe has depressingly described, these things have been debased. What talented, aspirational young man would now eagerly serve in the New England township life that Thomas Jefferson so admired? The most likely to do so these days are atheists.

The soul of Americanism is waning.

If the American age is to endure, then a deep and abiding understanding of the all-watchful eye atop the pyramid will have to return. A moral people cannot govern without this. Only America’s indigenous religion, Protestantism, can reinject America with her central dogma, a belief in the divine governance of the affairs of men. This begins in the pulpit, as it did with John Witherspoon in 1776, but not only there. The moral energy and identity of our civilization will continue to deplete until this fuel is recovered. If Americans are to be an exceptional people, they must see again the divine shape of history.

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The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Chimping Out | The Roundtable Ep. 313

For the second time in recorded primatology, a civil war has been observed between chimpanzees. This week, the guys get a little philosophical about the unique status of mankind as a political animal and the unlikelihood that we have much to learn from the chimps—progressive optimism and cash grabs notwitstanding. Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán lost the Hungarian election to Péter Magyar, a result misinterpreted by the Left as a pro-immigration, anti-nationalist repudiation of conservatism globally. What’s really going on in Hungary, and what does it mean for us at home?

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A recent ruling by a German court at first glance could be seen as a victory for freedom of speech. But on closer inspection, it shows why so-called visibility filtering—artificially restricting the reach of online content rather than removing it outright—is the future, and indeed increasingly the present, of online censorship.

As reported by the German alternative media Nius in February, a court in Wiesbaden acquitted defendant Sebastian W. of the charge of having “insulted” Germany’s then-Economics Minister Robert Habeck. (“Insult” is a crime in German law.) In a July 2024 tweet, Sebastian W. referred to the German minister as a “traitor.” Under Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which is commonly known in Germany as the lèse-majesté law, the penalties for insulting a public official are greater than those for insulting an ordinary citizen.

In another highly publicized case also involving Habeck, German retiree Stefan Niehoff had his home raided in November 2024 merely for having retweeted an obviously satirical tweet that jokingly referred to Habeck as a “professional moron.” (On the Niehoff case, see here, here, and here.)

Much of the ostensible “hate speech” prosecuted under German law consists not, say, of speech considered to be racist, sexist, or homophobic, but merely of personal insults. Hence, much of the speech that German sources reported to online platforms under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the E.U.’s flagship online censorship law, undoubtedly consists of such insults as well. The activities of the German organization HateAid, which enjoys the status of an officially certified “trusted flagger” of illegal content under the DSA, make this clear.

Under the DSA, European sources may flag any online content in any language posted anywhere in the world. A German organization like HateAid may not only flag German content for removal—it can also target Americans.

Thin-Skinned

The tweet for which Sebastian W. was charged was ironically part of a larger discussion of insult complaints, which included reference to HateAid.

The main tweet, which was titled “Urgent Warning and a Couple of Tips on Insult Complaints,” began as follows:

The business model of some politicians and suchlike is to bring charges against you, even without incurring any risk thanks to foundations [sic] like HateAid. Thus, politicians use our tax money to bring charges against us without incurring any risk, great.

To this, Sebastian W. replied, “Let’s see what networking can accomplish.” He then referred to a lawyer who is known to have represented Habeck and who, Sebastian W. said, is present on X with three different accounts to “case-hunt.” “Absolutely block,” he continued, “anyone who knows other hack lawyers of other traitors can share, for the purpose of blocking, under the comment.”

Sebastian W. appears not to have been charged for the description of the lawyer, but only for alluding to Habeck as a “traitor.” Why was he acquitted? Section 188 protects public officials only against “insults” on the condition that the “act”—that is, the insult—is such as to “substantially impede” the performance of the official’s public duties.

As Sebastien W.’s lawyer, Melina Schwendenmann, explained to Nius, the court found that while his tweet did indeed constitute an insult of a public official, it did not satisfy the stated condition given its limited reach. The reply had been viewed merely 1,245 times. The court found that this was not sufficient reach to impede the performance of Habeck’s public duties, and hence to justify a conviction.

Et Tu?

The ruling is highly significant for the application of the DSA, which requires online platforms to remove illegal speech, at least in the jurisdiction where it is illegal. (Given the complexities and costs involved in tailoring content moderation to different markets, this requirement can often result in global takedowns.) But the law also explicitly permits platforms to meet their DSA obligations not by removing content outright, but by restricting its visibility and hence reach.

This idea was popularized by Elon Musk in November 2022 when, shortly after completing his acquisition of Twitter, he announced a new policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” But long before Musk adopted it, European Commission officials were already using the freedom-of-speech-is-not-freedom-of-reach mantra to try to reconcile the obvious censorship the DSA requires with the freedom of expression that is, after all, guaranteed by the E.U.’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights. (See Věra Jourová’s December 2021 remarks to Politico, where the E.C.’s then-vice-president for values and transparency uses the same expression.)

In theory, visibility filtering or reach restriction is supposed to be reserved for speech that is not per se illegal, but is still deemed socially harmful. Hence, it would be illegal under the DSA itself for platforms to allow it to proliferate. Such “legal but harmful” speech essentially refers to alleged mis- or disinformation. The suppression of “illegal hate speech” and “harmful disinformation” represent the two main pillars of the DSA’s censorship system.

But the ruling of the Wiesbaden court shows that reach restriction, given the above-mentioned condition, can in fact make otherwise illegal speech legal by eliminating the harm, or ostensible harm, entailed by its wide dissemination. As we have seen, this applies to Section 188 of the German Criminal Code regarding insulting public officials.

It also applies, however, to Section 130, Germany’s “incitement” law that prohibits “hate speech” in the more usual sense. This is because Section 130 also involves what we could call a “publicity condition.” Incitement is illegal only on the condition that it occurs in such a way as to represent a threat to public order. Incitement that falls on deaf ears, so to speak, represents no such threat. Ensuring that such speech is not heard, or is at most only barely audible, is precisely what artificial reach restriction is designed to bring about.

Censorship, 2026 Style

The American public debate about online censorship remains almost entirely mired in the assumption that such censorship essentially involves content removal and account suspensions. But this is a very 2020 assumption that no longer corresponds to the reality of online censorship.

Major platforms’ regulatory submissions to the E.U. show that visibility-filtering is already the predominant mode of censorship they use to remain in compliance with the DSA. For instance, data included in X’s April 2024 DSA Transparency Report shows that the platform took action on 226,350 items of content reported to it under the DSA during roughly the prior five months, with 40,331 being globally deleted and 62,802 geo-blocked in the E.U. This means, however, that 123,217 items, or nearly 55%, “merely” had their reach restricted in keeping with the FOSNR (Freedom of Speech, Not Reach) enforcement philosophy that is also touted in the report.

Unfortunately, these aggregate figures were not included in X’s subsequent DSA transparency reports, making it more difficult, if not impossible, to infer the exact extent of visibility filtering in the platform’s DSA enforcement mix.

But other platforms are not so mysterious about the extent of their visibility filtering. Meta’s August 2025 DSA Transparency Report for Facebook shows that its response to alleged misinformation consisted almost exclusively of visibility filtering, or what Meta—and, incidentally, also the DSA—describes as “demotion.” This report explains that demotion “refers to an action that we may take to reduce the distribution of content.” Nearly nine million items of content containing alleged misinformation had their distribution restricted during the six-month reporting period. For what it is worth, Meta claims to have had all such restricted content fact-checked.

Following a change in reporting requirements, the most recent set of DSA transparency reports now essentially consists of raw spreadsheet data presented according to a standard template. The data for X suggests that the proportion of visibility filtering in the platform’s DSA enforcement mix has, if anything, increased since mid-2024. But deciphering that data would require an article in its own right.

However worthy their intentions, American defenders of free speech who continue to focus on content removal and account suspensions are missing the plot about the online censorship regime that has coalesced under the pressure of the E.U.’s Digital Services Act. Content removal and account suspensions were censorship 1.0, while 2.0 is visibility filtering.

In an August 2023 interview with CNBC, then-X CEO Linda Yaccarino spoke of content that she famously termed “lawful but awful”—a dumbed-down version of the E.U.’s “legal but harmful”—and cheerfully admitted that the platform would make such content “extraordinarily difficult to see.” But what, after all, is the difference between “extraordinarily difficult to see” and invisible? The line is a thin one indeed.

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Over a year ago President Trump began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While bemoaned by many in the foreign policy community as a mistake, in reality the agency had long ago strayed from its initial purpose, namely, helping developing nations establish prosperous and growing free market economies. Indeed, its initial purpose as envisioned by President Kennedy was to bring the economic promise of America to the poorest nations in the world. Just as with our opening to China in 1972, we were confident that democracy would follow.

Yet the tragedy of USAID was its failure to bring a single new market-based economy to life. After several decades it could produce no examples of even having brokered an alliance between a Third World country and the United States. USAID’s annual core operating budget of $22 billion and its ineffective record rightly proved too much for the Trump Administration’s DOGE review.

This state of affairs might be seen as inevitable given that USAID’s initial thesis of how prosperous economies come about was terribly flawed. President Kennedy’s friend, Walter Rostow, provided a plan in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto that would govern USAID’s thinking until well into this decade. Published in 1960, Rostow’s book is an entirely conjectural effort long on ideas about how development should happen and short on empirical information about how free market economies actually start.

In the post-USAID era, however, the United States cannot afford to appear to withdraw completely from its historic commitment to helping poorer countries achieve sustained growth. Serious alternatives have been slow in coming, largely because “nation-building” has been out of fashion since Iraq.

Even so, Washington knows that China has been more or less effectively working to export economic development for at least two decades. Its strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, once admired for its innovation, has brought several countries closer to China. Now, however, it is widely seen as a method of extortion, where China can steer the economies—and ultimately the allegiance—of debtor nations.

The U.S. presumes that stable relationships with nations we seek to help must rest on the mutual embrace of individual freedom that derives from market-based economies. Such an economic order must be based on indigenous entrepreneurship. Recent contributions from Nobelists Paul Romer, Ned Phelps, and Joel Mokyr have laid heavy emphasis on the critical importance of entrepreneurs in the dynamics of economic expansion at the nation-state level.

Having shuttered USAID, President Trump should recast assistance to nations the U.S. deems of strategic importance to our economic and security interests. This might be thought of as an America First development policy. Essentially, we would be building a bespoke community of allies. Rather than relying on the demonstrably unworkable formula of a “rules-based world order” and the ineffective record of operationalizing the “Washington Consensus,” American development policy should be rebuilt around what I have called “Expeditionary Economics,” which supports the emergence of entrepreneurial capitalism.

Our outbound support for targeted countries would not start, as American assistance once did, with an externally imposed plan. President Trump has already previewed this approach in Venezuela. Once free, the country can figure out its own path to growth, as Friedrich Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order suggests.

U.S. assistance should:

• Support an indigenous population of entrepreneurs capable of building scalable firms.

• Strengthen the rule of law, particularly as a means to eradicate corruption, and provide predictability to businesses.

• Stabilize the target nations’ currencies, including the possibility of pegging them to the U.S. dollar.

• Encourage a local banking system as a first line of finance to startups.

• Develop uniquely valued products and talented human capital to compete in an inevitably globalizing marketplace.

The core of an America First development policy is advancing entrepreneurial capitalism as the basis for a new world order. As such, it must animate U.S. thinking on reforming the roles that various international organizations play, from the U.N. and the World Bank to many of their bureaucratic dependencies. These post-war institutions gravitate toward recognizing the interests of giant global firms at the expense of startups—the very businesses nations aspiring to economic renewal need.

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It is fitting that in America’s 250th year of independence, public discourse is centered around the meaning of citizenship.

Last summer brought a debate accompanying the “One Big Beautiful Bill” over whether non-citizens, particularly illegal migrants, should be receiving government welfare benefits. In the winter, new revelations were unearthed regarding the many problems with birthright tourism. Each year, thousands of mainly Chinese nationals visit the U.S. to give birth, obtaining citizenship for their babies under the modern interpretation of the 14th Amendment before returning home. The children are U.S. citizens with the right to receive benefits and vote in American elections, despite being raised in a foreign country and under the indoctrination of the Chinese Communist Party.

On April 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship. Does citizenship extend to any child born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally? Or does the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment refer only to those who give their full allegiance to the United States?

In addition to these developments, the Senate is stalled in deliberations over the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. The legislative fight goes to the deeper issue of whether suffrage is the express right of a citizen or something that can be handed out at will.

At the heart of these issues is whether citizenship has deep roots in American history or is simply a means by which one accumulates personal benefit at the expense of the state. This latter attitude is encouraged by policies that liberally confer privileges like suffrage, Medicare, and Social Security on illegal migrants, or exotic legal theories that allow foreigners to exploit loopholes in the Constitution to extract profit. The product of such practices is the existence of separate ethnic enclaves whose people care nothing for America beyond how it benefits them personally. If America falters and the gains cease, would these groups rise to its rescue?

Citizens have a duty to serve their country in times of need. However, a culture of consumers with no real attachment to America’s political principles, history, and traditions does not.

Thomas Jefferson and the founders saw citizenship not as a transaction, but as a compact in which the country protects the rights and privileges of the citizen, who has the duty to seek the good of the U.S. in return. They believed the success of the fledgling American republic depended on a citizenry that sought the best interests of the country above all.

Jefferson’s ideal citizen was the independent farmer: “Cultivators of the earth,” he wrote to John Jay, “are the most valuable citizens.” Though Jefferson later came to acknowledge the importance of manufacturing in light of the trade disruptions caused by the Napoleonic wars, he remained convinced that the American farmer was a great benefit to a free, self-governing society. The farmer’s fate is tied to the country in a way unlike any other profession. He is bound to the land; if the land prospers, so does he. Therefore, the farmer will naturally seek the well-being of that land—and, as a whole, the country.

For historical precedent on the meaning and character of citizenship, the founders looked to the Roman Republic.

Rome’s clash with Carthage in the Second Punic War was an existential struggle between two great powers, but it was also a war between two conflicting ideas of citizenship. Citizens of both regimes enjoyed the franchise, legal protections, and eligibility for political office. The Carthaginian armies, though, were composed mainly of mercenaries; citizens were not the primary fighting force. Conversely, the Roman citizen had a duty to fight for Rome, no matter the cost.

When Carthage brought Rome to the brink of annihilation after inflicting the worst defeat in Roman history at Cannae, surrender never crossed the Roman mind. Rome raised a new army as more citizens rushed to defend her. This was the duty of a Roman citizen. When Carthage faced a similar crisis, the Carthaginians surrendered. Its citizens and mercenary soldiers were purely transactional. They enjoyed the benefits of Carthaginian citizenship, but when greater sacrifice was required, their interest in the country waned, and they gave in. 

G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy that men “did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” George Washington embodied this ethic. He, “with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my country can inspire,” subjected his personal benefit and gain to seek the good of the country he loved. He saw “an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage,” because no country could expect the “smiles of Heaven” if the country disregarded “the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”

Washington set the example for his country of what a good citizen of the new United States would be. He saw his interests as inseparable from the duty he had to support his country. Washington’s selfless example for his fellow citizens rested on the “preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government,” an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

If that experiment is to last another 250 years, Americans must remember what Carthage forgot: American citizenship is not a ledger of benefits to be acquired but a duty to be honored.

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