As America turns 250, it’s good to remember how young our country is. Let’s be patient with our new generation of Americans.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
—John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 1798
As we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, the Adams quote above remains an enduring summary of what the Founders envisioned for We the People. Yet the long march through our institutions has sought to produce a different kind of people, characterized by President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
As a professor at a small American college, I can attest to the fruits of this effort. In my less optimistic moments, I observe my students doom-scrolling before class and struggling to read (or pronounce) Plato and Descartes in class. When they do engage, it is to correct Aquinas or Mill with what they have been told that Marx and Nietzsche said (as opposed to what they actually said). The bottom line of our Social Contract — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — is pop-cultured into “I’m right, I get liberty, and you do, too, if you agree with me.”
Okay, that’s a bit of a hasty generalization. In some cases, students submit truly engaging, non-A.I. essays in which they express a genuine desire to do better but struggle to do so. In a word, they want virtue but aren’t even sure what this means. For these students, I provide the following comments, which apply to my students’ youthfulness and, I believe, to the youthful age of our nation as well.
I find that most students resonate with this historical correction to the critical theory fire hose from which they are made to imbibe in most other courses.
Regarding politics, Aristotle states that the “main concern … is to is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”
Somewhere along the way, my young students have lost (or have yet to gain) sight of one crucial point: They are young. According to Aristotle, “A young man … is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject matter,” an underdevelopment due “not to lack of years but to living … under the sway of feelings.”
But again, I see hope, primarily because of Aristotle’s qualifier of virtue pursued over the big-picture course of “a complete life … characterized by rational action.” At age 61, I am in the fourth quarter of my life, and if I lack virtue, that fault rests squarely on me. My students, though, are just starting out, and the opportunity to learn virtue is always before them. As their lives go on and their tax bills increase, they will have the same opportunity we elders have had: to reject childish feel-goodism and pursue hard won but heart-satisfying virtue.
The same applies to our country. This 250th Fourth of July, will our federal, state, and local governments seek to “engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions”? Will our young people learn to move beyond emotion to reason and virtue? Will we together play our part in the ongoing “complete life” of our “more perfect union”? Much of that depends on the habitual choices that We the People — or more specifically, Each of Us the Individuals — make every day.
A notable time marker for our nation is upon us. May it be a reminder, individually and collectively, that age is no guarantee of wisdom. May the allure of maturity, rooted in liberty and the pursuit of happiness, be our focus in our coming week and remaining years. And along the way, may our young people catch this same timeless vision of virtue.
June 27, 2026
Source: Bring Virtue Back for the Next Generation – American Thinker
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