Last week, Dad Saves America crossed 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. What some of you may not realize is that this show is a project of Emergent Order Foundation, an organization I founded five years ago.
I agree strongly with your final point that a political order does not sustain itself automatically. But I think the problem may run deeper than young people simply not being taught why America matters.
Any institution that succeeds for long enough creates a paradox: the more successfully it solves a problem, the more that problem disappears from the lived experience of the next generation.
People who have never experienced severe inflation can begin to treat monetary stability as a natural condition. People who have never experienced political repression can treat free speech as a default setting. Eventually, those raised inside a stable order increasingly encounter the costs and constraints of the institution, while the problems it was built to prevent become historical abstractions.
So institutions must continually explain themselves not necessarily because each new generation is more ignorant, but because institutional success gradually erases the lived evidence of why the institution was necessary in the first place.
That may be less an American problem than a general problem of successful institutions.
Government Institutions, successful or not, require mandatory Sunset Clauses; iterate or recreate their functionality if necessary. At 76, "God and Country American" resonates with me today, but only cracked bells rang out from the 60's Assassinations and Lyndon Baines Johnson Vietnam draft era daze.
Appreciate your pushback against what can often feel like a tsunami. It’s not. We’ll win in the end. Have to stay the course and persevere. Bless you, John. All is well. Keep your eyes on Jesus.
Grateful to have experienced these crises with you John. Thanks for all you do. I still say you should abandon the wet look, and go back to your softer, more natural hairstyle.
Also, American is a pretty good label, but it’s not very descriptive because it includes so many ideologies. American constitutional might be an improvement.
If you want to bolster your new educational initiative you would do well to include the American counterparts to Michaela School. Challenger School Founded in Silicon Valley in 1963. And Thales Academy. And why not invite Michael Strong to comment on these schools?
I’ve been making the case for America as well, but here’s where we differ. I don’t think the problem is socialism. Socialism is the result of the fact that from Reagan we drifted Hayek where property is absolute. Reagan told us Government, the thing created by our founders to protect us and sustain our covenant was evil. And in this place where property is sacrosanct we commoditized labor. And we are headed to the same place that Polanyi laid out in 1944, you get facism or you get socialism. But he laid out a third way, and that was re-embedding the market in society. Going from a place where the Country works for the market to a place where the market works for the Country. I think this is going back to Teddy Roosevelt, to a New Nationalism, to a place where we restore the covenant between Americans and away from the oligarchs.
I agree strongly with your final point that a political order does not sustain itself automatically. But I think the problem may run deeper than young people simply not being taught why America matters.
Any institution that succeeds for long enough creates a paradox: the more successfully it solves a problem, the more that problem disappears from the lived experience of the next generation.
People who have never experienced severe inflation can begin to treat monetary stability as a natural condition. People who have never experienced political repression can treat free speech as a default setting. Eventually, those raised inside a stable order increasingly encounter the costs and constraints of the institution, while the problems it was built to prevent become historical abstractions.
So institutions must continually explain themselves not necessarily because each new generation is more ignorant, but because institutional success gradually erases the lived evidence of why the institution was necessary in the first place.
That may be less an American problem than a general problem of successful institutions.
God bless you sir. You are on the right track
Government Institutions, successful or not, require mandatory Sunset Clauses; iterate or recreate their functionality if necessary. At 76, "God and Country American" resonates with me today, but only cracked bells rang out from the 60's Assassinations and Lyndon Baines Johnson Vietnam draft era daze.
Appreciate your pushback against what can often feel like a tsunami. It’s not. We’ll win in the end. Have to stay the course and persevere. Bless you, John. All is well. Keep your eyes on Jesus.
Grateful to have experienced these crises with you John. Thanks for all you do. I still say you should abandon the wet look, and go back to your softer, more natural hairstyle.
Also, American is a pretty good label, but it’s not very descriptive because it includes so many ideologies. American constitutional might be an improvement.
If you want to bolster your new educational initiative you would do well to include the American counterparts to Michaela School. Challenger School Founded in Silicon Valley in 1963. And Thales Academy. And why not invite Michael Strong to comment on these schools?
Any thoughts on the current occupant of the White House?
I’ve been making the case for America as well, but here’s where we differ. I don’t think the problem is socialism. Socialism is the result of the fact that from Reagan we drifted Hayek where property is absolute. Reagan told us Government, the thing created by our founders to protect us and sustain our covenant was evil. And in this place where property is sacrosanct we commoditized labor. And we are headed to the same place that Polanyi laid out in 1944, you get facism or you get socialism. But he laid out a third way, and that was re-embedding the market in society. Going from a place where the Country works for the market to a place where the market works for the Country. I think this is going back to Teddy Roosevelt, to a New Nationalism, to a place where we restore the covenant between Americans and away from the oligarchs.