America is squatting in its own ruins



Modern people tend to see knowledge as something humanity achieves collectively and then keeps forever. Once a scientific advance or moral truth is discovered, we assume it becomes part of the species’ permanent inheritance.

That is false.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline.

Truth may be eternal, but our knowledge of it is not. Knowledge can be lost when a civilization stops practicing it. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we must understand that remembering our traditions and values is not enough. To keep them alive, we must embody them in what we do.

Ancient Rome is remembered as one of the most powerful civilizations in history and also one of the most technologically advanced. The Romans developed special concrete and engineering techniques that allowed them to build extraordinary structures and civic infrastructure.

When Rome fell, those techniques still existed in one sense. They had been discovered. But they were lost to time because the people who possessed the knowledge could no longer practice it or pass it on. The scientific truth remained objectively real, but without the civilization that had maintained it, the knowledge faded as if it had never existed.

People lived in the ruins of ancient wonders, taking shelter in buildings they could not build or maintain. Without the continuity of tradition, science had no practical meaning.

Moral truth faces the same danger.

The Old Testament shows a repeated cycle of Israel receiving divine revelation and then forgetting what had been handed down by God Himself. Again and again, the nation falls away from the commandments of the Lord until a prophet pulls an old scroll from its rack and reminds the people of what they once knew.

The Israelites cry out and rend their garments in repentance. They practice the truth for a time. Then, the practice fades, and knowledge fades with it.

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Despite receiving direct divine revelation, Israel — and humanity itself — could not maintain the practice of God’s truth. That is why the Lord sent his Son as a perfect example and living sacrifice, an eternal embodiment for all nations to see what the righteous life looks like in practice.

This weekend, America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. But saying that we honor our traditions and culture is not enough.

Most Americans have spent little to no time reading what the founders actually wrote. Their understanding of our national traditions comes from a heavily curated version of history they learned in school. There will be plenty of talk about celebrating the country’s past. What we need is a revival focused on living that tradition in the present.

Sentimentality is nice. It will not save the country.

Today, most Americans, including many conservatives, say the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment means Muslims cannot be prevented from moving here and building entire cities dedicated to their way of life. The average American believes Hindus have a First Amendment right to immigrate and build giant statues of their demonic gods in Texas.

This is absurd.

States often required public officials to be professing Protestant Christians well into the 1840s, decades after the Bill of Rights was adopted. Even Catholics were often considered too foreign to hold office. None of this was viewed at the time as a violation of religious liberty. The idea that religious liberty was intended to allow Muslims or Hindus to control the public square is a lie.

The entire “tradition” of religious liberty many people think they are honoring is false.

The Supreme Court recently provided another example by ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments added to the Constitution after the Civil War to address the legal framework for freed slaves.

Its purpose was to clarify that people born into slavery became citizens once they were free. That intent was made clear by the people who authored the amendment. It did not create citizenship for American Indians, for example, or other groups added later through law and policy.

The idea that birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is some grand American tradition is entirely false. Yet a conservative Supreme Court just enshrined it in the Constitution.

This is what happens when a people inherit words without preserving the practices and assumptions that gave those words meaning. They recite “religious liberty” and forget the civilization it was meant to protect. They invoke “equal citizenship” and forget the specific injustice the 14th Amendment was written to remedy. They honor the shell while abandoning the substance.

A nation does not preserve itself by remembering slogans once a year. It preserves itself by forming children, families, churches, neighborhoods, and leaders who know what those slogans demand when they collide with power, fear, comfort, and fashion. Otherwise, July Fourth becomes pageantry without inheritance.

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A tradition no longer practiced becomes decoration. A truth no longer defended becomes trivia. A people who forget how to live their inheritance eventually become squatters in their own ruins. That is us.

Tradition is not a museum display. It is not a costume we wear on patriotic holidays. It is a discipline. It is a set of habits, loyalties, judgments, and practices that must be taught, defended, and lived.

As we gather with family and friends this weekend, we should enjoy the patriotic festivities. Fireworks, barbecue, and loud renditions of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are all fantastic, and we should embrace them fully.

But we should also commit to learning the true history and traditions of our nation and living them in our daily lives.

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with your children. Read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Read George Washington’s Farewell Address and the letters of the founders.

Most important, live these traditions by becoming the virtuous people those men believed the country could not survive without.

The 250th anniversary must be more than a nostalgic celebration. It must become a renewal of our covenant as Americans.

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Where do Advent calendars come from?



While most people are very familiar with and practice the lighthearted tradition of Advent calendars, many might be surprised by its relatively recent development as a Christian tradition.

The Advent calendar is a Christian tradition dating back only to the 19th century, making it less than 200 years old. Advent, derived from the Latin word "adventus," means
coming” or “arrival.”

'Lacking windows at first, Lang’s design is essentially the same style we have today, though war and a few subsequent alterations would change it slightly.'

The calendar counts down the days until Christmas during the Advent season, which is also the very beginning of the liturgical calendar. The Advent calendar then, in its most basic form, is a method of counting down the days until the coming of Christ on Christmas day.

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Often, in more recent iterations, small treats, gifts, and pictures are placed in the doors of the calendar, the number of which usually range between 22 and 28 days depending on the day that Christmas Day falls on. Because of the possible range, most Advent calendars simply begin on December 1 and end on December 24, Christmas Eve.

Counting down

The Advent calendar has seen quite a few variations in its relatively short-lived existence, though the basic idea has always been the same.

A tradition originating among Lutheran Christians, Advent calendars first involved chalk marks that would be erased as the day approached. This practice helped believers anticipate the coming of Christ.

Originating in and around Munich, Germany, in the 19th century, Advent calendars were used to count down the days until Christmas Day.

Gerhard Lang is widely regarded as the creator of the modern Advent calendar. A partner at the lithographic institute Reichhold & Lang, Gerhard Lang is credited with printing the first Advent calendar in 1908, though some say it was some years later.

Lacking windows at first, Lang's design is essentially the same style we have today, though war and a few subsequent alterations would change it slightly.

Knock, knock

The small, numbered doors, a staple of contemporary calendars, were introduced in 1920. They sometimes had Bible verses or little pictures behind them.

Lang produced around 30 different calendar designs up until the end of the 1930s, when paper shortages and a national ban on paper calendars forced him to shutter the popular business.

However, Advent calendars made a post-war comeback. Richard Sellmer, the founder of the Sellmer Verlag publishing house, published the first Advent calendar after the Second World War, reviving the tradition.

Eighty years later, Sellmer Verlag still sells Advent calendars.

Coming to America

It is believed that American soldiers brought these calendars back after the war, and the tradition spread to the United States.

According to Britannica, the tradition of chocolate behind the doors was introduced in the 1950s, presumably to keep children engaged.

In America, the Advent calendar's popularity spread quickly in the post-war era. These days, children and adults alike can enjoy counting down the days until the Lord's Nativity with a vast array of different calendar designs.

The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition



President Trump and Vice President Vance have every right — and every reason — to call out Republican senators who hide behind the so-called blue-slip tradition to block nominees for key executive positions, especially U.S. attorneys.

The effect is simple and damaging: Trump is denied the full exercise of his constitutional authority over the executive branch. Without aligned U.S. attorneys across the country’s 94 districts, the administration’s de-weaponization agenda stalls. In some cases, it collapses outright. So far, the Senate has advanced just 18 of the 50 U.S. attorneys nominated by the administration.

That is the real function of the blue slip. It is not institutionalism. It is careerism. It lets senators hide.

The blue slip is a Senate custom requiring the consent of both home-state senators before certain nominees — U.S. attorneys, judges, U.S. marshals — can advance to committee. In practice, it operates as a hack of the Constitution. The Senate’s role is advice and consent by the full body. The blue slip transfers that power to two senators, and often to just one, who can halt the process without explanation or accountability.

Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has insisted that the Republican Senate will not reconsider the practice despite the abysmal pace of confirmations. “There are many Republican senators — way more Republican senators who are interested in preserving that than those who aren’t,” he said. What he has not explained is why.

The answer is avoidance. The blue slip spares Republican senators from taking difficult votes. The fewer Trump-aligned U.S. attorneys brought to the floor, the fewer public positions senators must take. The blue slip allows them to kill nominations quietly rather than oppose them openly.

Despite years of rhetoric about party realignment, the Senate remains dominated by politicians hostile to Trump’s agenda. Some were forced out. Many more learned to mimic an America First accent without embracing America First policy. They do just enough to deter primary challengers while staying safely aligned with donors, lobbyists, and institutional power.

Forcing senators to vote up or down on Trump-aligned prosecutors like Alina Habba in New Jersey or Julianne Murray in Delaware — both of whom were serving as acting U.S. attorneys until the Senate ran out the clock — would expose those evasions. So the Senate stalled them instead.

I watched this play out firsthand during the failed confirmation of Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. Because D.C. is not a state, the blue slip did not apply. Senate leadership attempted a different maneuver: delay until time expired.

When the base demanded a vote, Senator Thom Tillis (RINO-N.C.) stepped in and tanked Martin’s nomination outright. As a judiciary committee member, Tillis effectively wielded a one-man veto by shifting the committee balance back toward Democrats.

That decision carried consequences. Shortly afterward, Tillis opposed advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in its existing form. Trump threatened a primary. Tillis burned through his remaining political capital and soon announced that he would not seek re-election.

Had Tillis been able to blue-slip Martin, he might have avoided that outcome.

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That is the real function of the blue slip. It is not institutionalism. It is careerism. Cloaked in collegial language, it operates as a mutual defense pact among Republican senators to shield one another from accountability. It lets senators hide. A six-year Senate term has become a financial asset in a hyper-funded political system. Assets avoid risk. Votes create risk. Fewer votes mean greater protection.

Defenders of the blue slip claim it preserves the Senate’s unique institutional character. That argument belongs to another century. Today’s Senate is neither deliberative nor restrained. It lurches between performative hearings and massive spending bills, punctuated by social media sound bites. Any appeal to Jeffersonian dignity at this point borders on parody.

Notably, the blue slip never restrains Democrats. When Democrats want nominees confirmed, process does not stand in the way. For Republicans, the blue slip amounts to unilateral disarmament dressed up as principle.

Trump and Vance should keep attacking this practice publicly. The only antidote to procedural cowardice is exposure. Voters who support a mandate deserve to see whether their senators will carry it out — or hide behind tradition while returning to business as usual in Washington.

Even if Republican senators ultimately vote against these nominees, at least the votes would happen in the open. Accountability begins there.

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The manual for life is dead and gone — and no one told your kids



A colleague of mine recently told me a story about his grandfather. When he was a boy, his family would wait for the iceman to arrive. The iceman — an actual person — would come to their home with a block of ice for the family’s icebox. It was a regular event, like the milkman or the postman, and part of the rhythm of life.

That story stuck with me — not because it was quaint, but because it triggered a deeper realization.

We are watching in real time the collapse of intergenerational continuity.

My colleague’s grandfather relied on the iceman, and his father probably did, too. And his father’s father? Almost certainly. For generations, their lives likely looked the same. They shared the same routines, occupations, habits, expectations, and assumptions about how the world worked.

The world changed — but it changed slowly. Generational continuity was a given, not a gift. Not so anymore.

My colleague’s own life bears little resemblance to his father’s. He works remotely, reads the news on a device in his pocket, and navigates a culture reshaped by social media, digital platforms, and technologies that didn’t exist when he was born. The pace of change has gone from a gentle trickle to a roaring cascade — and with it, the chasm between generations has widened.

The generational delta

To frame this, let’s talk about what I call the “generational delta”: a rough percentage of how much one generation’s way of life differs from the last.

A thousand years ago, that delta might have been 1%. Your father’s life was your life. You tilled the same land, spoke the same dialect, and obeyed the same customs. You learned how to live by watching your parents and doing what they did. The knowledge they passed down was 99% applicable to your world.

By the early 1900s, that rate picked up a bit. Industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization changed everyday life. Still, the average person’s habits and values bore a strong resemblance to those of their parents. Maybe, the generational delta had climbed to 4%.

In the early 2000s, the pace accelerated. The internet reshaped work, entertainment, and communication. Kids no longer congregated at the mall, and many aspects of daily life were beginning to diverge from the experiences of their parents.

New standards were emerging in work, education, relationships, and even identity as digital life began to supplement — sometimes outright replace — traditional experiences. These shifts, while still gradual, began to create noticeable differences between generations. The generational delta may have risen to around 10%.

Today? It feels closer to 30% — maybe more.

Fading generational relevance

We are watching in real time the collapse of intergenerational continuity. Parents can no longer reliably prepare their children for the world they will inhabit because that world is changing too quickly for wisdom to keep up.

A major reason is the all-encompassing nature of modern digital life. Social media has become not just a pastime but a primary lens through which many people experience the world. Trends, ideas, and cultural norms now evolve at the speed of a swipe.

Add to this the advent of artificial intelligence, which is accelerating shifts in education, employment, communication, and even human relationships. These forces are reshaping society so quickly and profoundly that inherited wisdom, once reliably passed from parent to child, struggles to remain relevant for even a single generation.

Let’s use a metaphor. Imagine that every generation passes down an “operator’s manual” for how to be a functioning, successful adult. This manual isn’t written down but rather transmitted through advice, discipline, storytelling, and observation. It tells you how to find work, how to behave in public, how to marry, how to raise kids, how to handle suffering and success.

It’s not that parents don’t have wisdom; it’s that the world keeps moving the goalposts.

For most of human history, that manual changed very little from generation to generation. The instructions your great-great-grandfather had still worked for your great-grandfather. And the manual your father left you was probably mostly useful. Sure, a chapter here or there might be outdated — maybe the bit about walking uphill to school both ways no longer applied — but most of it was solid.

Today, huge sections of that manual will be obsolete by the time a child becomes a teenager.

A parent warns their child not to spend too much time watching TV — only to realize their child doesn't watch any TV at all but instead consumes algorithmically generated content on three different apps they can’t name. A father explains the importance of in-person communication, while his son is navigating a dating landscape shaped by swipe culture, ghosting, and AI companionship. A mother gives her daughter guidance on writing college essays, unaware that large language models are reshaping the entire application process.

It’s not that parents don’t have wisdom; it’s that the world keeps moving the goalposts.

As this trend continues, something more corrosive begins to happen. Children begin to suspect — not entirely wrongly — that the wisdom of their parents is not only outdated but irrelevant. They stop reading the operator’s manual entirely. They toss it aside and begin writing their own from scratch, guided not by time-tested principles but by whatever voices are loudest in the moment.

This breakdown in generational transmission doesn’t just lead to confusion — it breeds arrogance. When you believe the past has nothing to teach you, you don’t just ignore it; you mock it. Tradition becomes a punchline. Elders become artifacts. The voices of the dead are silent under the noise of the now.

This is not progress. It’s a form of cultural amnesia.

From manual to compass

This is not a Luddite’s lament. I’m not calling for the return of the iceman. I am marveling at — and grieving — a rupture that feels both inevitable and unsustainable. We are now in the strange position of raising children for a world we cannot envision, using tools they no longer recognize.

What, then, are we to do?

Perhaps we return to something older than the iceman, older than the operator’s manual itself: virtue. The habits of heart and mind that transcend technological context. Courage, honesty, discipline, humility, faith — these don’t go out of style. They are not bound to the machinery of the age.

We may not be able to write the next generation’s manual, but we can give them a compass.

Because when the pace of change makes everything else uncertain, what matters most isn’t whether your advice is up-to-date.

It’s whether your children still trust you to give it.

David Brooks says Trump buried virtue. He’s ignoring the real killer.



New York Times columnist David Brooks’ recent essay in the Atlantic mourned the corrosion of America’s moral fabric. Naturally, Donald Trump is to blame.

Trump’s “narcissistic nihilism,” Brooks argues, is driven by a single philosophy: “Morality is for suckers.” Christian virtues are for the weak. Nietzschean pagan values of power, courage, and glory are for winners. And although many in Trump’s administration “have crosses on their chest,” they harbor “Nietzsche in their heart.” This “deadly cocktail” has transformed America into an entity unrecognizable from the “force for tremendous good” that, according to Brooks, was laid in its coffin on January 20, 2025.

Trump’s appeal to many wasn’t that he embodied virtue. Rather, it was that he promised to protect what remained of the institutions that made virtue possible.

Brooks isn’t the first to hurl such accusations against the president, though, admittedly, he does so in a manner that tickles my philosophical fancy. America’s moral decline has been an issue of concern long before Trump took office.

But is Trump — or any single political leader — really to blame?

Politics follows culture

Like many veterans of the political class, Brooks puts too much faith in institutions. Both parties cling to the comforting illusion that culture flows downstream from politics. Spend enough time inside the D.C. bubble, and even sincere conservatives start to believe that electing the “right” people or passing the “right” laws can do more than govern — that politics can redeem souls from moral collapse.

But pretending policy carries no moral weight is equally foolish. Ask anyone who’s lived under a truly corrupt regime. Still, culture shapes politics more than Washington bureaucrats care to admit.

Diagnosing America’s cultural decline requires more than scolding a single president or passing a bill. It means examining the social landscape that produced such politics in the first place. To understand Washington, we must first look to the soul of the voters who send their leaders there.

Yes, speaking of a national “soul” risks painting in broad strokes at the expense of nuance. Even Brooks would likely concede this much. Americans are desperately reaching for moral touchstones that the culture once upheld. Those touchstones — faith, family, tradition — have been torn down by the very ideologues Trump was elected to oppose.

Up from disillusionment

Brooks concedes a sliver of the truth, admitting that the left has built “a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent.” But his diagnosis barely touches the depth of America’s moral confusion.

More than 40 years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre warned in “After Virtue” that modern society had gutted the moral framework needed to make moral language coherent. Today, we still invoke that language — justice, dignity, meaning — but with no shared foundation beneath it. Efforts to rebuild those foundations now face open hostility.

When public figures like Jordan Peterson face censure for reviving moral guidance once common in homes, churches, and civic life, it reveals something darker. Americans have lost access to the moral raw materials required to build a meaningful life.

Trump’s appeal never rested on personal virtue. It rested on his willingness to defend the institutions that make virtue possible. For millions of voters, he stood as a bulwark against moral collapse — not a saint but a protector of sacred ground. That’s what won him the loyalty of Americans disillusioned by the left’s assault on the moral structures they once relied upon.

The government’s job isn’t to redeem souls. It’s to safeguard the conditions under which people can pursue goodness, truth, and a flourishing life. That means defending the cultural space where moral frameworks can take root — and keeping vandals from tearing it apart.

Brooks calls this “narcissistic nihilism.” In reality, it’s something far rarer: hope — the hope that virtue can still grow in the soil that remains.