Did the Experiment Fail?

America was always the great experiment. When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he was asked what the delegates had created. His answer: a republic, if you can keep it. This week, voters told us whether we can.

The genius of the American founding was a balance few nations have ever struck.

The republic supplied the principles: the dignity of every individual and the rule of law, not the rule of men, however great they imagine themselves to be. The democracy supplied the energy: the strength and creativity of a free and committed people. Bound together by shared faith, shared history and the habit of compromise, the two made something that could survive and thrive. It was never guaranteed. It took luck, and it took citizens who understood what the exceptionalism they had inherited.

Our two parties were supposed to guard those two virtues. Too often they merely paid lip service. Republicans drifted toward oligarchy, protecting the rich and the well connected. Democrats drifted toward socialism, promising to solve every conceivable problem by redistributing wealth until the golden goose dies, and refusing to admit that talent and effort are real and deserve their reward.

Donald Trump interrupted that decline. He joined respect for principle and law to a genuine concern for the welfare of all Americans, not just donors and not just one class, race or sex. He sought a new golden age of prosperity and peace, anchored in a foreign policy of principled realism that put the sovereign nation first.

That project did not survive the midterms.

Now watch what follows. Partisan judges in place of the rule of law. A packed Supreme Court, with term limits engineered to keep the new justices pliable. Two new states to manufacture Senate seats. An assault on the Electoral College. Investigations, subpoenas and impeachment hearings without end. Within hours of victory, the message from the winning side was not “let us govern” but “lawyer up.” Politics has become warfare by other means, with no notion of a common good.

The pundits will blame the prolonged war, inflation, the price of gas, affordability, or the President’s own ego. Those things mattered. But they are symptoms. The causes run deeper, and they have been decades in the making.

First, education. Our schools and universities stopped teaching the principles of the founding and replaced honest history with a narrative of national guilt. Too many stopped teaching the basics at all. By the government’s own national assessment, only about a third of eighth graders read proficiently. A citizen who cannot read closely, write clearly or reason with numbers cannot weigh the promises of the people asking for his vote.

Second, culture. E pluribus unum, out of many, one, has given way to a multiculturalism that divides rather than unites. The powerful story of the American Dream, of striving and earned success, has been replaced by a story of grievance and victimhood.

Third, assimilation. A nation of immigrants once asked newcomers to learn the language, the history and the principles that make citizenship meaningful. We stopped asking. Worse, we began teaching new arrivals that America is the source of their troubles rather than the source of their opportunity and then wondered why so many feel no bond to it. Meanwhile, a steady supply of cheap labor became an excuse for the rest of us to avoid hard work and personal responsibility. That bargain serves neither the newcomer nor the native born.

Fourth, the media. Journalism has become a closed guild that mistakes its own narrative for news and hands itself awards for telling and distorting it.

Fifth, the political class. Look closely at those who seek office and the staff around them. Few have run a business or met a payroll. Many have done little but practice law or social organizing. They tell voters they are victims, promise the proverbial free lunch, and line their own pockets with the power and perks of office. They do not offer different public policies. They have one policy: me first.

Finally, the public itself. A people that takes its opinions from TikTok celebrities, influencers and charlatans, that scrolls rather than reads, cannot govern itself for long.

America turned 250 this year. It was a remarkable anniversary for a remarkable experiment. But anniversaries are not guarantees.

Restoration will not come in the next two years, or even the next ten. It will require rebuilding our schools, recovering a shared civic story, insisting again on assimilation, and demanding more of our leaders and of ourselves. Franklin’s condition still stands. The only question is whether enough Americans still want to meet it.