A Shining Torch for a Shining City

Because if you've seen what I've seen — if you've traveled this country from one shining coast to the other, if you've met the farmers and the factory workers, the veterans and the volunteers, the small business owners who bet everything on the idea that free people and free markets go together — if you've seen all of that, then pessimism about America isn't just wrong. It's a luxury this republic can't afford.

So yes. I'm an optimist. And sixty days out from the Semiquincentennial, I think a little optimism is exactly what's called for.

But let me be clear about something — and I say this as someone who has spent his life believing in this country with everything he's got: optimism without engagement is just wishful thinking. And wishful thinking never kept a republic alive.

That's what Road to 250 is about.

The City on a Hill Is Not Self-Maintaining

I've talked a lot over the years about John Winthrop's image — that shining city on a hill. It's the best description I know of what America is supposed to be. A beacon. A place that the whole world looks to and sees proof that freedom works.

But here's the thing about cities on hills. They don't stay shining on their own. Somebody has to tend the light.

"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks."

Duty. That's an old-fashioned word, and I'm proud to use it. Duty is what gets a soldier out of a foxhole. Duty is what keeps a teacher at her desk on a Friday afternoon grading papers when nobody's watching. Duty is what brings a citizen to the polls, to the jury box, to the town hall meeting — not because it's convenient, but because self-governance doesn't work without people who show up to do it.

James Madison — the man who gave us the Constitution — put it as plainly as I've ever heard it put: "a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." ^[2] Knowledge. Engagement. The fierce and stubborn insistence on understanding the republic you've been given before you can hope to preserve it.

That's what this series is about. Over the next sixty days and through the Fourth of July, 2026, we're going to arm ourselves — with history, with purpose, with pride, and with the clear-eyed understanding of what this anniversary actually asks of us.

What's Coming in Road to 250

Let me tell you where we're headed, because I think you're going to want to come along for every step of this journey.

• ★The Documents and What They Actually Say — I want every American to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution the way the founders meant them to be read — as living arguments, not museum pieces. Not the highlight reel. The whole magnificent thing.
• ★The Founders and What They Built — These were extraordinary Americans. They took an idea and turned it into the greatest republic in the history of human civilization. I want us to know them the way we know our own families — their courage, their genius, their conviction that what they were building would outlast anything the world could throw at it.
• ★What Does "We the People" Mean in 2026? — The jury box. The ballot box. The school board. The city council. The unglamorous, beautiful machinery of self-governance — and the Americans who show up every day to run it.
• ★Carrying the Torch — The real heroes of this republic are the ones you've never heard of. Veterans who came home and built communities. Teachers who changed lives one student at a time. Small business owners who bet their savings on the proposition that free enterprise is the greatest engine of human prosperity ever devised.
• ★America's Proven Promise — This republic has stood against every challenge the world has ever brought to its door. Depression. World war. Cold war. The answer to why it has survived and thrived says everything about what America is made of.
• ★The Next 250 — Because the real question isn't what was handed to us. It's what we hand to our children and grandchildren. And I believe we can hand them something even better than what we received.

The People Who Tended the Flame

You know, people ask me sometimes what gives me hope. And the honest answer is: history.

Abraham Lincoln was handed a republic in the process of destroying itself, and he asked his countrymen to find the "better angels of our nature." ^[4] He believed those angels were there. And they were. The republic survived — at terrible cost, but it survived — because enough Americans answered that call.

Dwight Eisenhower had liberated a continent. He had seen up close what happens when free nations forget the cost of freedom, when they start assuming that liberty will defend itself without any help from the people who benefit from it. He stood before the American people and said — with the authority of a man who had been there — that history does not long entrust freedom to the weak or the timid. ^[5]

John Kennedy asked every American to stop looking at the government as something that existed to serve them, and to start asking what they could offer in return. ^[6] Personal responsibility. Service to something larger than yourself. The understanding that in a republic, the citizens are the government — and the government is only as good as the people who make it run.

And Frederick Douglass — who faced trials that would have broken lesser men — chose to hold this country to its own founding promise rather than surrender it to those who would make it less than it was meant to be. ^[3] That is what faith in America looks like at its most demanding. And it is exactly the faith this anniversary deserves.

These were not superhuman people. They were Americans. And Americans, when the moment requires it, do remarkable things.

Well, Here We Are

You know, there's a line I've always loved from Patrick Henry — not the famous one, though that one's pretty good too. He said: "The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." ^[9]

An informed citizenry. An engaged one. A people that reads its history and knows its documents and shows up and votes and serves and pays attention.

That's not a burden. That's a privilege. There are people all over this world who would give anything for the chance to be citizens of a republic like this one — to have a vote that counts, a voice that matters, a government that has to answer to them. We have that. We have had it for two hundred and fifty years.

Ralph Ellison wrote that America's fate is to become one and yet many — "woven of many strands" ^[8] — one nation drawn from the whole of humanity, bound not by birth or ancestry but by a shared commitment to the idea that all of us are created equal and endowed with rights that no government may take away.

That idea has been tested. It has never broken.

So I want to ask you — neighbor to neighbor, American to American — what so many of the greatest voices in our history have asked in their own way:

How are you carrying the torch?

Are you a veteran? Then you have already answered that question more fully than most. Know that your service is the reason this anniversary is possible, and that a grateful nation — even when it forgets to say so — has not forgotten what you gave.

Are you a teacher? A parent? A small business owner? A coach, a volunteer, a citizen who votes and serves on juries and shows up to things that matter? Then you are, in the acts of your daily life, tending the light that has been burning for two hundred and fifty years.

I have always believed — and I believe it still — that America's best days are ahead of her. Not because the challenges aren't real. They are. But because the American people have never yet met a challenge they couldn't rise to when they decided to rise. And I believe they're ready to rise again.

The torch has come a long way to get to us. Two hundred and fifty years of American hands — calloused and gentle, young and old, drawing from every corner of this earth — have kept it burning.

Now it's ours.

Sources & Footnotes

1. ¹ Samuel Adams, Essay in the Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771. Reprinted in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1906), Vol. II, p. 251.
2. ² James Madison, Letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822. In The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), Vol. IX, p. 103.
3. ³ Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, speech delivered July 5, 1852, Rochester, New York. Reprinted in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 359–388.
4. ⁴ Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. IV, p. 271.
5. ⁵ Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 2.
6. ⁶ John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 1.
7. ⁸ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), Epilogue. Also referenced in Ellison's essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," Time, April 6, 1970.
8. ⁹ Patrick Henry, speech to the Virginia House of Delegates, 1788. Quoted in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), p. 140.