At this moment in history, we face a choice: Will the next 250 years of America be greater than the first 250?

If we have the courage, the discipline, and the vision, I believe this generation can lay a foundation of renewal so deep that our descendants will look back on us with gratitude, just as we look back on the Founders. And the most important choice we can make together to ensure that the next 250 years of America are greater is to focus—through our laws, our labors, our loves—on making the family the centerpiece of everything we do.

No nation in human history has entrusted so much of its future to the virtue and vitality of its families as America. The great empires of Europe—France, Spain, and England—placed their hopes in armies and palaces. The stability of their regimes rested on the health of a king’s bloodline and the strength of his throne.

But America bet her future on something humbler, yet infinitely stronger: not the pomp of royalty, not the machinery of a permanent bureaucracy, not the shifting will of mobs. We staked it all on what G.K. Chesterton called “the most extraordinary thing in the world”: an ordinary man and an ordinary woman, bound in covenant love, passing on their faith and virtue to their ordinary children.

We staked it all on the American family.

The family is the seedbed and safeguard of our grand experiment in ordered liberty. The source and summit of our political order. The true origin of our exceptionalism. To quote John Witherspoon, “The family is the seminary of the state; the first school of instruction, wherein we have our tempers formed to virtue or vice.”

Strong families, led by great men, were the heartbeat of 1776. And the American Revolution—the birth of this great nation—was sustained and won because of the strength of this heart beating in every American home. The men and women of the Founding generation were hopeful about their future, and saw the family as the bedrock on which the fledgling nation would flourish. In their homes, they cultivated prudence, courage, justice, temperance, integrity, and humility—long before such virtues of statesmanship were demanded of their children in public life. Strong families were the assumed condition of the republic’s survival—as natural and self-evident to Americans as freedom itself.   

While the quiet heroism of ordinary fathers and ordinary mothers raising ordinary children with obedience to God and love of country was not inscribed plainly in the Declaration of Independence, it was inscribed on the hearts of the American people. Our Founders, for all their erudition, prescience, and political imagination, could never have envisioned the state of the American family today.

The Hollow Republic

As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, our political architecture is still outwardly intact. The Constitution that gives our body politic its structure remains in its glass case in the National Archives. But the American family—the spiritual heart and soul that animates our Constitution—has grown weak, fractured, and hollow.

We cannot say we were not warned of this risk. As early as 1798, John Adams told us that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” and that “it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Yet today we permit, and even applaud, an all-out, sustained assault on the very institution that Adams and his contemporaries were counting on to form such moral and religious people. The numbers paint a grim picture.

In 1776, the average age at first marriage was just over 22 for women and 26 for men. Today, it is nearly 30 for women and 32 for men—the highest in American history. Other relevant troubling statistics—chiefly the dramatic decline in marriage rates and birth rates—could be listed.

And yet the American heart still longs for more. Since the 1970s, Americans have consistently said their ideal family size is about two and a half children. But reality has fallen short. Financial pressures, cultural hostility to marriage, and the erosion of hope have opened a tragic gap between the families that Americans desire and the families they believe they can achieve. That gap has only widened since 2008, as more young women and men quietly lower their expectations, even while their deepest longings remain unchanged. But the most profound damage cannot be captured by statistics alone.

Numbers do not express the frustration and loneliness of countless young Americans drifting through life, desperate for duty, meaning, and purpose in a culture that offers only cheap satisfaction—which it calls “freedom.” And numbers do not convey the righteous anger such young men feel when our elites say they can be replaced by immigrants—or machines. Likewise, numbers cannot show the emptiness that many women experience.   

Both men and women are told that marriage and family might stand in the way of personal fulfillment. But today many are finding themselves longing for what the heart has always known: to give in love, to prepare the next generation, and to help build something enduring.

Furthermore, numbers alone cannot capture the quiet heartbreak felt by so many young men and women in a culture that treats marriage as just another lifestyle choice, trading the depth of lifelong vows for the transience of cohabitation and casual relationships.

Because of such arrangements, as many as one in three conceptions in this country end in abortion. Numbers alone can never convey the depth of that loss, or the generations of lives and love that will never be known. Numbers only measure. They can show us that the basic elements necessary for the good life—a spouse, children, a home—lie out of reach for far too many Americans.

But they can’t show the spiritual ruin that accompanies this reality. They can’t convey that feeling we all have of being lost at sea, tossed about by cultural currents we did not choose, as if we were helpless.

Taking Responsibility

But we are not helpless. We remain the masters of our fate, both as individuals and as participants in the commonweal. We can make the next 250 years of America greater than the last 250—if we so choose.

The American people have entrusted us with the power to govern. They are asking us to “make America great again.” They are urging us to usher in a new Golden Age in American life.

To honor their request, we have one clear task. We must do intentionally what the Founders did instinctively: stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers. As conservatives, this means we must change the way we approach and prioritize the issues of our time. It will require being uncomfortably honest about our present crisis and taking responsibility for our part in it.

That means acknowledging that the American family’s collapse is neither recent, accidental, nor inevitable. Rather, our situation today is the result of a deliberate campaign to uproot the most fundamental institution of human life.

You can call this campaign liberalism. Or Enlightenment rationalism. Or modernity. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is realizing that our current crisis has been centuries in the making.

Take marriage. As early as the mid-1700s—decades before the American Revolution—certain Enlightenment philosophers were already taking a sledgehammer to its foundations. What Cicero called the “first bond of society,” Rousseau dismissed as nothing more than a civil contract. And David Hume, for all his insight into the frailty of human reason, spoke approvingly of the “liberty of divorce” as a remedy to what he viewed as the inconveniences of lifelong commitment.

Such ideas were not yet dominant in popular culture at the time of the Founding, but like rot within the beams of a house, they slowly weakened the structure from within.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the assault grew bolder. The collapse in our birth rate didn’t start with Instagram influencers or the careerist feminism of the sexual revolution.

It began more than a century ago, when Margaret Sanger, funded by a coterie of wealthy industrialists and American eugenicists who touted “trust the science,” set out to reduce births among the poor, the devout, and what Sanger diabolically considered the racially “undesirable.” She championed sterilization, spread contraceptives, and began reengineering our culture around the idea that children are a burden.

These efforts were accompanied by a transformation in education. Men like John Dewey led the charge. They shifted children’s formation from home and church to state institutions, providing an education not grounded in classical or Christian principles and an understanding of the human person, but an activist education, a tool for social engineering that shapes children according to the latest theories of progressive ideology.

Being honest about the current crisis requires us to admit that these people have largely succeeded. While we have won many battles recently, we are still losing the war.

If that is difficult to hear, think about how they have affected every part of our society. I’m not just talking about pride flags, DEI, and ESG. I’m talking about the anti-family campaign of the uniparty, which has run Washington, D.C. for too long. Isn’t it good and just and beautiful to see their anti-American project finally collapse?

The economic policies they champion are built on the assumption that maximizing GDP is an overriding (if unspoken) goal. They push women who would rather be at home raising the next generation to work full-time to keep up with their neighbors, or even simply to make ends meet. As a result, we now have longer school days and shorter summer vacations—with parents delegating the role of raising their children to strangers they barely know. That some of those strangers facilitate abortions and sexual mutilation surgeries without parents’ consent is a direct result of the family being too weakened to withstand the onslaught of the degradation that has taken its place.

The national security strategies they push aren’t guided by the sanctity of the life of each and every one of our soldiers. Instead, they prop up what uniparty leaders call “the family of nations.” The cultural orthodoxies and technological pursuits they cling to deny the very reality of man and woman. Our opponents have succeeded in redefining the family and weakening our nation because we have allowed them to.

One contemporary observer foresaw this tragedy 25 years ago. The great Patrick J. Buchanan—who is so deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom—said in 2001 that

many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations.

Indeed, since then, time after time after time, our leaders have opposed the latest and most outrageous policies of the Left while slowly conceding the philosophical ground on which those policies were built. We have fought them in the public square, only to quietly allow their ideas to seep into every institution of American life: our laws, our schools, our churches, and even our homes.

Taking Back Our Homes

But there is another truth, which is just as important: what has been done by design can be undone. The family’s decline is not a law of nature, nor is it an unstoppable force. It is the product of human choices—and human choices can change. Indeed, if we hope to restore the family and save our republic, they must change.

We must meet the long campaign being waged against the family with an equally long offensive campaign to restore it. And this campaign must begin, first and foremost, with taking back our own homes.

Why?

Because if those of us who claim to fight for the family do not order our lives around that truth, then every word we speak in its defense will ring hollow. Today, there is a temptation to separate the personal from the political—to believe that our private lives are of no concern to our public work.

That separation is a lie.

A movement that seeks to save this nation and restore the family must itself be composed of men and women whose private lives are not a contradiction, but a confirmation of their public witness.

Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, called the family “a society very small…but none the less a true society.” He meant that the family is not a mere adjunct to the state, not a creature of legislation, but a community with its own God-given purpose and authority.

This authority is exercised not through force or bureaucracy, but through love and example. And it is precisely this example—of duty embraced, of promises kept, of sacrifice made for the sake of others—that will rebuild the moral capital of our nation.

Just last week, Pope Leo XIV echoed his predecessor of a century ago:

There is no such thing as a public personality split in two: on one side the politician, on the other side the Christian. No. There is the politician who, under God’s gaze and in conscience, lives his commitments and responsibilities as a Christian.

So, in that spirit, we cannot just praise marriage from a podium. We must enter into it, embrace its commitments, and remain faithful through its trials.

We cannot merely lament the falling birth rate. We must welcome children into our homes and give them the love and discipline they need to grow into virtuous citizens.

We cannot merely shake our heads at falling marriage rates. We must be hospitable and bring people together in our homes—just as the Founding generation did—so that young, marriage-aged people can meet one another and, God willing, fall in love. Our republic depends on this most simple act.

We cannot criticize the state of our schools while outsourcing the next generation’s formation to institutions that work against our values. We must build new schools or transform our very own kitchen tables into places of learning and wonder.

Rather than simply opposing loneliness, atomization, and secularism, we should observe the Sabbath, open our homes to our neighbors, and pray with them and share the joy of a proper feast.

And we cannot sit back and complain about our leaders. We must become leaders ourselves and raise our children to rule with the prudence that so many of our current leaders lack.

Taking Back Our Politics

Which brings me to my final point: the importance of prudence cannot be overstated. This virtue, above all others, has been missing from our politics. Recovering it is essential to ensuring that our nation survives for another 250 years.

But what is prudence?

Prudence is not mere caution. It is not the timidity of those who are afraid to act, nor the endless calculation of those who never decide.

Prudence is the ability to govern action by the light of reason—to discern, in concrete circumstances, the means most likely to achieve that which is good. St. Thomas Aquinas named it the “charioteer of the virtues,” for it guides courage, justice, and temperance toward their proper ends.

Prudence is the opposite of ideology.

Ideology, whether on the Left or the Right, begins with an abstract formula and forces the complexity of human life to conform to it. As Russell Kirk reminds us, “[C]onservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

Prudence begins with the concrete reality before us—the family, our culture, the circumstances God has placed in our care—and asks what must be done here and now to promote the good. Reclaiming prudence has profound implications for the future of the conservative movement.

For too long, our debates have been dominated by questions framed in rigid abstractions: Are we for or against tariffs? For or against regulation? For or against immigration, foreign wars, new technologies? As if the answer to such questions could be settled once and for all, regardless of changing conditions, and then applied like a mathematical equation to every new situation.

Prudence does not permit such laziness. It recognizes that the interests of the family and the national interest are not merely aligned—they are one and the same.

It demands that we ask of every policy, every proposal: Will this strengthen the American family? Will it advance the common good of our people? Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure? If the answer is no, even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it. But if the answer is yes, then prudence requires us to pursue it.

Consider trade. There are times when tariffs are a tool of justice, protecting the livelihoods of families from unfair foreign competition and preserving the industries and crafts that sustain communities and strengthen our national defense. There are other times, however, when tariffs raise the cost of living for working families, driving up the price of food, clothing, and shelter.

An ideological movement will declare itself pro-tariff or anti-tariff and remain so forever, regardless of the consequences. A prudent movement will ask, in each case, what serves the long-term welfare of American families—and act accordingly.

Again, Kirk offers a pithy path:

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

Consider regulation. There are industries—pornography, sports betting, and social media—where business models prey on the weaknesses of our children, addict them, corrupt their innocence, and hollow out their capacity for love and responsibility. Prudence demands that we, at the very least, regulate those industries with a firm and heavy hand.

At the same time, there are other industries such as construction where overregulation has made it impossible for young couples to afford a home to raise their children. Prudence demands that we deregulate these industries immediately.

Consider technology. There are advances in medicine and science that can help couples overcome infertility, that can heal children before they are born, that can make family life more secure and prosperous. Prudence embraces these.

But there are also technologies—cloning, IVF, gene screening, surrogacy, certain uses of artificial wombs—that seek to bypass or even replace the family altogether. Prudence rejects these without apology.

To some, this flexibility will seem inconsistent. To the ideologue, it will seem like compromise. But to the statesman, it will be clear that keeping our eyes fixed on the good of our families—while pragmatically adjusting our means to changing circumstances—is the only true form of politics.

And to the careful observer of American history, it will be obvious that prudence is the animating principle of several core tenets of our system of government. Federalism, in particular, is dependent on prudence to determine which level of government is best suited to address a given problem.

As we seek to restore the family, we would do well to remember that states’ proximity to the people may at times make them better equipped than Washington to implement ambitious family policies. Indeed, considering that their powers are “numerous and indefinite”—as James Madison reminds us in Federalist 45—we should empower them to become laboratories of family formation, incentivizing them to compete to be the best place in America to be born, marry, raise a family, and die with dignity.

In the years to come, we must be willing to say to our friends and allies, “This policy may be good for your industry, for your donor base, for your Twitter engagement, or even for your electoral prospects—but if it weakens the American family, we will oppose it.” And we must be equally willing to say, “This policy may offend certain ideological shibboleths, but if it strengthens the American family, we will fight for it.”

Prudence is not a retreat from conviction—it is the application of conviction to reality. And in this moment, conviction and reality both tell us the same thing: the surest test of any policy, any law, any reform is whether it fortifies the institution upon which the future of our nation stands. If it does, it is worth pursuing. If it does not, it is not worth the time of free men and women.

Without recovering prudence our movement will continue to lurch from one election cycle to the next, mistaking short-term victories for long-term success and confusing ideological purity with civilizational renewal.

But with it, we can chart a course that is faithful to our heritage, responsive to our present, and worthy of the generations yet to come. That choice will determine whether America is merely another passing power—or a great and enduring civilization.

Onward, Always

In 1776, our forebears pursued freedom from the mightiest empire on earth. They did so with a boldness that defied the wisdom of their age, but it was the prudent choice.

They knew that in winning independence, they would inherit a duty to preserve it. And they understood that this duty would not be discharged by armies alone, nor by parchment constitutions, nor solely by the prosperity of markets. It would be preserved, if at all, by the same force that had birthed it: the strength and virtue of ordinary mothers and fathers—American families.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we stand where they once stood—at the edge of a future we cannot fully see, but for which we will be held accountable by history, by our children, and by God.

The weight of this moment is heavy. America’s 250th anniversary should underscore that our obligation to the future will outlast a single election cycle or a handful of legislative victories. Further, our rich cultural inheritance should remind us that we need to think in terms of centuries, not decades, and that we should measure success not by the headlines of the moment but by the lives of the generations to come.

This project will require hope—the kind of hope that does not deny hardship but endures it for the sake of something greater. And it will require sacrificial love—love that binds husbands and wives, parents and children, and citizens to one another as members of a great, intergenerational covenant.

It won’t be easy. Some may even think it impossible. I can only remind you of this: America is not just an idea. She is both a place—one where ordinary men and women are born, where they will die and be buried—as well as a people who inhabit what they see as their homeland. She is, in the deepest sense, a great family, stretching across generations, entrusted with a sacred inheritance. Our forebears passed it to us, often at great cost. Now the burden and the privilege are ours.

And so, I ask you—not as a political leader, not as the president of the Heritage Foundation, but as a fellow citizen, as a husband, as a father—will you choose to join me in doing the difficult work to pass it on to our children?

Together, can we have the courage to plant oak trees whose shade we will never sit in? Can we labor to build cathedrals whose spires we will never see completed? And will we embrace the sacrifices necessary to make America’s next 250 years greater than her first?

A Golden Age awaits our answer. And our answer must be: Yes, Onward. Always.