America Is a Young Country

Jeffrey Folks | June 25, 2026

Only three generations separate me from America’s founding.  My maternal grandfather was born in 1861.  His father was born while Thomas Jefferson was still alive.  That’s one reason I think of America as a young country, with another 250 years ahead as the world’s beacon of liberty.

It’s common for the doomsters to portray America as a nation in decline, if not one on its last legs.  There’s always the shadow of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the whole notion of inevitable decline that permeates liberal thinking.  The problem with that comparison is that America has very little in common with the Roman Empire.  To begin with, we are not an “empire.”  Also, unlike Rome, which was determined to conquer as much territory as possible and was rebuffed only when it ran up against the ancient German tribes, the U.S. has no serious interest in expanding its territory beyond its current size.  (A strategic  arrangement with Greenland is possible, but it’s hard to imagine that unpopulated mass of ice as another “state.”)

The greatest danger to our next 250 years is socialism.  Benjamin Franklin’s remark at the close of the Constitutional Convention that America is “a republic if you can keep it” has served as a warning to centuries of Americans that democracy must be actively defended.  Ironically, one of the greatest threats to our democracy are those liberal sophists like socialists now running for Congress in New York, who claim that Donald Trump and other conservatives are intent on destroying our democracy.  It is liberals, and by extension progressives and socialists, who are........

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