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Dear Jack,
This year we will be celebrating 250 years since the birth of America.
July 4th, 2026, will feel extra special. Two and a half centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence didn’t just launch a new nation - it proclaimed a revolutionary truth that still echoes today: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when any government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
From that bold idea sprang a new branch of Western civilization - one rooted in individual rights, limited government, and the deep belief that ordinary people, left free, can govern themselves far better than any elite ever could.
But 1776 was even bigger than the Declaration of Independence. It was the year the modern world truly began. Three other extraordinary things happened almost simultaneously - each one a cornerstone of the world we live in now.
James Watt’s improved steam engine: Finalized in 1776, this breakthrough powered the Industrial Revolution - factories, railways, steamships, and the machinery of modern prosperity.
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (published March 1776): The book that laid out the blueprint for free markets, voluntary exchange, and the division of labor - the system that has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else in history.
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first volume, February 1776): A masterpiece that reconnected the West to its classical roots.
Four extraordinary innovations, in liberty, technology, free markets and the recovery of the classics, all happened in that one year, in the English-speaking world. Perhaps it was not really a coincidence
Nor is it a coincidence that each of these four ingredients of Western exceptionalism have been relentlessly denigrated by the progressive left. Our universities have steadily abandoned the study of the classics. The Industrial Revolution, far from being hailed as humanity’s escape from millennia of poverty, is recast as an environmental sin.
Instead of celebrating America as the bold experiment in self-government, too many young Americans are now taught to view their country as always in the wrong.
2026 needs to be a turning point away from all that anti-Western, anti-American nonsense.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a radically new way of ordering society emerged in the Anglosphere - not through top-down design or elite decree, but on the simple, powerful premise that each of us should be free to think, to create, to trade, and to govern ourselves.
