We gather at a time of great anxiety—and great possibility. For years, we’ve seen an America in decline. We have been told that our best days are behind us. That the people are too divided, our institutions too broken, our moral center too hollowed out ever to recover.

And yet—here we are. In 2025. Back under the leadership of President Trump. Not in retreat. Not in despair. But in the early, bracing hours of a national renewal.

I believe we are witnessing the dawn of a golden age. Not because of one man—though he has been a battering ram through the fortress of the ruling class. But because of what this moment now makes possible: a return not just to strength or prosperity or sovereignty—but to the permanent things.

As Russell Kirk once wrote, “The conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and the character—for the perennial truths.” And if anything defines this political moment—it is the hunger for those truths.

We are living through the collapse of liberal technocracy. And we are standing at the edge of something new—or rather, something very old. A renewal of the American republic grounded not in managerial jargon or neoliberal drift but in the principles of moral order, self-government, national purpose, and human dignity.

We are not clinging to fading embers but standing at the sunrise of a golden age, guided once more by the permanent things. This is not an accident of policy. It is the result of a people remembering who they are.

But to understand this moment, we must be honest about how we got here.

An Age of Inversion

The golden age began in the shadow of a long decline—and it is important we name it for what it was. A dark age. An age of inversion.

For decades, America was sold a lie—that economic growth alone could sustain a nation. That liberty could survive without virtue. That cultural foundations were expendable, so long as we had stock gains and GDP upticks.

We were told that freedom meant self-expression, not self-governance. That the market would raise our children. That as long as the quarterly reports were strong, the country was strong.

But what followed wasn’t flourishing. It was fragmentation.

As economist Jennifer Roback Morse rightly said in 1998, “Neither the government nor the marketplace is any substitute for mothers and fathers.” That truth—ignored by technocrats and dismissed by neoliberals—lies at the heart of our national decline.

Why did our economy hollow out? Because our families hollowed out first. Because the institutions that once formed men and women of character—the church, the family, the school, the neighborhood—were dismantled by design.

And what took their place?

An age of inversion, where the elites told us biology was bigotry. Where children were sacrificed on the altar of convenience and identity. Where border walls were racist and drag shows virtuous. Where the very ideas of nationhood, of fatherhood, of truth were treated as relics. And anyone who dissented was treated as a heretic.

And so, it should be no surprise that our economy also suffered while we underwent a moral crisis. Jobs weren’t offshored by accident—they were offshored because the people who ran this country stopped believing in the American people. Choosing instead to believe in shareholders, not citizens. In abstractions, not America. They valued efficiency over virtue.

And this moral hollowness had real consequences.

From 2000 to 2016, we lost more than five million manufacturing jobs. Suicide rates rose nearly 30%. Opioid deaths tripled. Male workforce participation collapsed. Birth rates fell to record lows. What we were witnessing was not simply the failure of policy—but the death of meaning.

As my friends at Hillsdale College remind us, a constitutional republic cannot survive without moral formation. And as the Claremont Institute’s Charles Kesler has written, modern liberalism’s final form is not freedom but nihilism—a politics that seeks to dissolve every boundary and displace every belonging.

Michael Anton warned us in his “Flight 93 Election” essay: the American regime had lost its purpose. The people were being sacrificed to globalism and bureaucracy. America was headed off a cliff. The choice was not simply between Trump and normalcy. It was between survival and suicide.

And now we have chosen to fight. Not for moderation, but for rupture. Because rupture—the tearing away from the bankrupt consensus of globalism and technocracy—is what opens the door to renewal.

President Trump’s return is not the cause of renewal. It is a consequence of it. He is giving voice to what millions already know: that America has been dying from a lack of meaning. And that the greatest scarcity we face is not energy or capital—but conviction.

A Fundamental Shift

The Republican Party’s political map has been redrawn, and its new coalition is reframing the terms of national debate.

Working-class Americans—the forgotten men and women of steel towns, farming communities, border counties, and oil rigs (to speak of my people)—are now at the center of our movement. And the elite professional-managerial class, who once claimed to speak for them, now finds itself permanently displaced.

What we’re witnessing is hardly a shift in coalitions. It’s a fundamental redefinition of political purpose.

For years, American conservatism was content to manage decline. To preserve the status quo. To offer technocratic tweaks while the moral order collapsed around us. To vilify those of us, especially the sage Patrick Buchanan, for being overly concerned with…the permanent things.

But remember, friends: it’s always darkest right before dawn. And here we are, with all that twaddle in the past, in dawn’s early light. THIS IS AMERICA’S GOLDEN AGE.

We are not here to tweak liberalism. We are here to bury it—and to resurrect something older and truer in its place.

We are tasked with renewing a conservatism that is pro-worker, pro-family, pro-God, pro-nation—just as it was under Abraham Lincoln. A conservatism rooted in the American tradition—not ashamed of our history, but proud of our inheritance—just as it was under William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, and then Reagan, and now Trump.

In this renewal, we are witnessing the rebirth of what the Founders envisioned—a republic grounded in virtue, guarded by borders, governed with consent and the rule of law, and guided by divine providence.

And now the tide is beginning to turn.

Main Street Conservatism

Under President Trump’s leadership, America is regaining its appetite for work, for production, and for independence. For doing the hard things again. We are witnessing a return to an abundant economy that serves the American people.

But let’s be clear: the abundance we seek is not strictly material. It’s not merely energy, bandwidth, and delivery speed. It’s not simply the latest and greatest version of artificial intelligence. We are committed to a true agenda of abundance—rooted in the permanent things.

Faith. Family. Work. Worship. Sovereignty. Sacrifice.

The abundance that builds homes, not pods. That celebrates babies, not DINKs (dual income, no kids). That restores local institutions and respects the dignity of working families.

And we are seeing the early fruits: according to the Reshoring Initiative’s 2023 annual report, at least 1.3 million manufacturing jobs have returned to U.S. soil since 2017—a trend accelerating again under Trump’s second term. Onshoring is no longer a slogan—it’s a national priority, fueled by Trump’s willingness to challenge the status quo.

Wages will likely rise for blue-collar Americans, just like in his first term—especially for men without college degrees, who have been long abandoned by both parties.

The U.S. will soon reclaim its place as the world’s largest producer of energy, slashing foreign dependence and restoring geopolitical leverage.

And we are seeing a surge in skilled trades education, apprenticeships, and innovations that give young Americans a path to prosperity without college debt or ideological capture by tyrants who shroud themselves in “academic freedom.”

Let me be blunt: this is the end of wax-museum conservatism. We are building things again, and this is just the beginning.

Imagine a country where every man who wants to work can find honest, dignified labor—building homes, restoring roads, forging steel, protecting borders. Quite literally, builders of the republic, just as Henry Clay imagined.

Imagine a country that puts prayer back in schools, the family back at the center of our economy, and the citizen back in power.

That is the future we are building—not for Wall Street, but for Main Street.

And let’s not forget it is only possible because we have stopped pretending that globalization is inevitable. Because we have the courage to say no—and to build again. Because the people are choosing to reclaim sovereignty.

The Trump Doctrine Redux

But no golden age is complete without peace—and no peace can endure without strength.

One of the most underappreciated achievements of this political moment is the resurgence of moral seriousness in American foreign policy. After decades of drift—from utopian globalism to endless wars—we finally have a foreign policy that puts America first and war last.

Gone are the days when the United States sent its sons and daughters to die in the deserts of Mesopotamia for theories scribbled in think tank white papers. Gone is the delusion that liberal democracy can be exported at gunpoint while our own republic crumbles at home.

In its place, President Trump is pursuing strategic realism: he previously brokered the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and Arab neighbors while isolating Iran. He is bringing adversaries to the negotiating table—not with platitudes but with leverage through the imposition of a tremendous tool of statecraft: tariffs. He is ending reckless entanglements that bleed our treasury and credibility dry. And today, he is reasserting American leadership by trying to broker ceasefire talks in Eastern Europe and restoring deterrence in the Indo-Pacific—not by appeasing tyrants but by reminding them that America is still a lion.

But even more than peace, what the Trump Doctrine restores is purpose.

The Founders warned against foreign entanglements not because they were isolationists but because they believed in ordered liberty at home. We defend peace abroad to protect our civilization—not to remake someone else’s.

As Claremont’s Angelo Codevilla taught, the difference between a republic and an empire is whether we believe in self-rule—or whether we believe we must rule everyone else. This golden age is a return to what John Quincy Adams declared: that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

This is not retreat. It is a renaissance of realism—and a recovery of moral clarity.

After decades of cultural erosion and spiritual confusion, Americans are waking up to truths that were nearly forgotten: that human beings are made for community, not consumption. That children are a blessing, not a burden. That truth exists, and it can be known. That to be free, we must be good.

This awakening isn’t theoretical. It is taking shape all around us—in families, in towns, in churches, and in our hearts.

We are witnessing the revival of tradition, especially among the young: classical Christian schools and homeschooling are surging as families flee corrupt institutions. Marriage and birthrates, after decades of freefall, are stabilizing and beginning to turn—not everywhere, but in the places most committed to faith and family. Conversions to Christianity are rising, particularly among young men disillusioned by nihilism and starving for order and belonging.

And in the wake of COVID authoritarianism, millions of Americans rediscovered localism, neighborliness, and the power of the home—especially the most important place for the family, the dinner table.

This is no longer a culture in decay. It is a culture waking up.

As Hillsdale President Larry Arnn has reminded us, the West does not endure because it is strong. It endures because it remembers. And we are remembering the permanent things. Michael Anton has argued that cultural renewal only becomes possible when a people stops apologizing for its civilization and starts living it again.

But we must go further.

The Pillars of National Greatness

We must build a culture where a young couple can afford to marry, have children, and raise them on one income—if that’s what they choose. We must build neighborhoods full of laughter, playgrounds, cookouts, and church bells. We must rebuild institutions that tell the truth, form the soul, and honor the good. And we must never again allow the bureaucratic state, the corporate oligarchy, or the cultural commissariat to tell us how to raise our children or worship our God.

The Golden Age is opening the door to a new political and cultural consensus—one that says: national greatness begins with strong families and the economy exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

As G.K. Chesterton said, “Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.” A civilization that forgets how to build churches, raise families, or honor the Sabbath is a civilization forgetting how to endure. But we are remembering those things now—and rediscovering that joy follows duty, meaning follows sacrifice, and blessing follows obedience.

If this truly is a golden age, it will not be golden because of economic prosperity alone. It will be golden because of what we are remembering. And what we are remembering are the permanent things. As Russell Kirk taught us, these are the enduring truths that outlast kings and parliaments, fads and empires. They are what ground a people when everything else is in flux: belief in a moral order, fidelity to tradition, loyalty to place, reverence for the sacred.

In this golden age, these truths are no longer whispered. They are proclaimed.

The foundations of a flourishing nation are not arbitrary. They are written into the nature of man and the structure of creation. Our rights come not from courts or constitutions, but from God. Our duties arise not from ideology, but from God’s ordering of the universe.

The recovery we seek—in economics, in politics, in foreign affairs—will collapse again if not anchored in the permanent things.

This is why the Left fails. They build utopias on a foundation of sand—pretending the soul doesn’t matter, pretending the past can be erased, pretending that truth is a social construct.

And this is why conservatism, rightly equipped and ordered, will endure: because it begins with the created order and ends in the common good. Conservatism, as we like to say at Heritage, leads to living the good life.

The genius of America—as the Founders understood—was not simply its structure, but its rootedness in natural law and biblical wisdom. John Adams’s well-known observation is timeless: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” That means if we wish to save the republic, we must restore the things that make self-government possible: the family, the church, the community, and the conscience.

Politics alone, then, is not enough. It is not enough to win elections if we lose the culture. It is not enough to pass laws if we do not form souls.

We do not fight for power for its own sake. We fight for the freedom to live virtuously. To raise children in righteousness. To worship without fear. To order our lives toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

This golden age is about remembering what is eternal—and rebuilding a nation that reflects it. But this golden age is not meant for America alone.

Golden Age Nationalism

We are not the only nation stirring. Across the West, people are waking up.

In France, in Spain, in Britain, in Hungary, in Poland, and even in Paraguay and Argentina, men and women are beginning to remember what the West once was—and can be again. They are rejecting the false comforts of secular decadence. They are rediscovering the ancient pillars of faith, family, and nation. They are reclaiming what is theirs: the right to exist as a sovereign people under God.

As I said recently in France, the hour is late, but it is not too late. The West’s future will not be secured by bureaucrats or billionaires. It will be secured by believers—men and women with the courage to kneel before God and stand before tyrants. To remember that liberty without order is chaos, and that without truth, even freedom becomes a mask for slavery.

The golden age we seek must be transatlantic—not through transnational bureaucracies, but in common values and our shared roots. This is a civilizational fight. And America must lead not because we wish to rule as an empire, but because we still remember what is worthy of protection.

Now, a golden age is not a guarantee. It is a possibility—and achieving possibilities demands courage.

The enemies of ordered liberty have not disappeared. They are regrouping. Retrenching. Rebranding the same failed ideologies under new slogans and framings. But their goal remains unchanged: to demoralize the people, delegitimize the nation, and dissolve every source of meaning outside the state and the market.

We will be told this revival is dangerous—that our belief in God, in family, in truth is somehow “authoritarian.” That wanting strong borders and strong homes is “democratic backsliding.” That patriotism is a threat, masculinity a disease, and motherhood a burden. We will be mocked. Smeared. Lied about.

But if the last decade has taught us anything, it is this: the American people are not afraid anymore.

So, we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We must build institutions stronger than the ones we are replacing. We must catechize our children better than the culture indoctrinates them. We must form men and women of character, courage, and conviction—in our homes, in our churches, in our schools, and in our neighborhoods.

The days of playing defense are over.

It is time to play offense —boldly. To challenge their institutions with our own. To outbuild them in education, in media, in law, and in the public square. To name the lies, smash the idols, and construct a moral, political, and economic order that reflects the will of the people and the truths of nature and nature’s God.

It is time to save Western civilization—to recover not only what was lost, but also what was never fully realized.

That is the challenge. But it is also the call. And I believe—truly—we are ready.

The American people have endured a dark age. An age of inversion. Of cowardice. Of control. But that chapter is closing. Not because of a miracle. Not because elites came to their senses. But because the people have rejected it.

They are choosing courage over comfort. Order over anarchy. Truth over technocracy. And in doing so, they are giving birth to a new moment—the golden age—not just a political victory, but the chance to begin again. A chance to rebuild a republic where men are strong, women are cherished, children are protected, and God is honored.