George Will looks at America in 1876 looking at America through the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Two slices:
The exhibition foretold the mechanization of agriculture, which produced urbanization and industrialization. Hitherto, a farmer’s scythe could harvest only an acre a day. Machines would make the vast Great Plains bountiful, and send farm labor to higher-productivity factory jobs.
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In 2026? Today, Americans’ low pain threshold is the result of unimagined reductions in life’s discomforts. Improvements in material, legal and moral conditions have been accompanied by national hypochondria and irrational anxieties.
Unlike in 1876, there is gloominess about new technologies. Pessimists exhort Americans to fear a jobs famine caused by artificial intelligence. Yet as the Economist notes, “never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labour.”
Optimists, equally speculative, say AI will so dramatically boost economic growth, hence government revenue, that we can continue forever our comfortable infantilism. Last week, the government announced that in just the first eight months of fiscal 2026, its spending exceeded revenue by $1.2 trillion.
Fear of AI might be symptomatic that Americans, bored by a surfeit of improvements, have a thirst for the excitement of future dangers from disruptive developments. They should remember this:
In terms of social and political upheaval, no subsequent technology has equaled Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type. In time, it democratized literacy, leading to democracy and freedom’s unending turmoil that we should not want to end.
John Hillen celebrates the space and embrace that Americans give to entrepreneurship. A slice:
The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.
SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.
These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.
Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.
Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.
The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.
In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people.
Clare McHugh talks with Tom Holland – the historian, not the actor – about history, including the American Revolution. Two slices:
“It’s very unfashionable, I think, to attribute the success of the revolution to the remarkable qualities of the Founding Fathers,” Holland says, then pausing a beat. “So what? Their quality was recognized at the time, even by their enemies. And it’s rare for people who have been defeated to acknowledge the stature of those who have defeated them.”
Holland notes how stupefied King George III was to learn that Washington had given up the presidency and, like Cincinnatus, returned to his plow. But America’s founders consciously emulated the Romans, he explains, because as members of the transatlantic British elite they were steeped in classical history. “There are multiple lessons that can be applied from classical history — that’s the joy of it,” Holland says. “If you are in rebellion against a king, you can look back at the palmy days when the Romans expelled a monarch and established a republic.” They knew how that project ended, of course, “so there’s an immense emphasis in the early decades of the American republic on the virtues of the early Romans as they are properly understood.”
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Asked to name his favorite Founding Father, Holland fulsomely praises Franklin for lining up the French on the colonists’ side — “the great diplomatic achievement in the whole of American history” — before admitting that no colonial leader surpasses Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. “The genius of the Declaration is that it draws on what are clearly Christian ideas of the inherent dignity of mankind — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he says. “But there is no overt Christian framing of it, which is brilliant, because it allows all kinds of people to buy in.”
What of the current antipathy for Jefferson, owner of 600 slaves, a man who sired children with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings? Holland responds passionately: “Jefferson knew in his marrow that slavery was a moral abomination. He knew this because he had read the New Testament, because he was steeped in the liberalism of the English Enlightenment, because for him the ideal of liberty was the most vivid ideal he had.”
And yet the historian admits “it’s such a mystery” that Jefferson lived in conflict with his own values. “My solution is he basically wants to be Cicero; he wants to retire to enjoy otium cum dignitate, as the Romans call it, leisure with dignity, but he needs the slaves for that. All the Virginian aristocracy is going bust at that time. If he frees his slaves, he will lose Monticello, and Monticello is the great love of his life.”
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi applauds George Washington. A slice:
In the final days of the American Revolution, Continental Army soldiers gathered in Newburgh, New York, to demand that Congress fund their back pay and promised pensions. Anonymous letters circulating among the troops suggested that they might refuse to disband, and might even overthrow Congress, if their benefits weren’t forthcoming.
Some of the generals and politicians egging the soldiers on hoped that George Washington would take up his men’s cause and in doing so replace a weak Congress with a powerful new federal government. Instead, Washington ended the mutiny with a few words and some brilliant political showmanship.
In the middle of an address to the restive soldiers in which he urged them to respect Congress, the aged general conspicuously reached into his pocket for his glasses.
“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country,” he said to the assembled soldiers. There wasn’t a dry eye left in the house after that.
The so-called Newburgh conspiracy collapsed instantly. American history did not begin with a military coup; instead, Washington gave the new nation a powerful image of republican self-restraint and a tradition of military submission to civilian authority.
That’s a lot to accomplish just by putting on one’s glasses.
Libertarians can certainly find much to criticize in George Washington. At the beginning of the War of Independence, some wanted to use voluntary militias to fight the redcoats. Washington demanded instead that we stand up a European-style army, which in turn necessitated European-style martial discipline, taxes, and inflation. After the war, he agitated for replacing the decentralized government established by the Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal government with its own robust powers to tax. As the first president under the new Constitution, Washington was hardly a small-government man. He supported a permanent standing army and put down a tax revolt at the point of a sword.
Despite all that, the highlights of Washington’s military and political career show him time and again walking away from power when he had every opportunity to seize or retain it. The Newburgh conspiracy is a prime example.
George Leef looks at two reports on the decline of American higher education.
The Trump Administration is campaigning against racial preferences in hiring, but watch out or they could arrive through the back door—with the help of Republicans. The vehicle is the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA), which would aid Big Labor in imposing its progressive agenda on American business.
The House recently passed the FLCA with the support of 20 Republicans, and Josh Hawley of Missouri is promoting it in the Senate with Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) as co-sponsors. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has called Mr. Hawley “labor’s biggest ally in the Senate Republican caucus.”
These Republicans are promoting much more than the FLCA’s mandated arbitration after 120 days of collective bargaining. The bill gives the whip hand to unions in negotiating labor contracts, and along with that comes the left-wing cultural agenda that unions like the Teamsters and the SEIU have adopted.
Take DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which unions have made part of their social-justice mission and collective-bargaining agreements. The General Teamsters Local Union No. 174 made DEI a feature of its negotiation with the Port of Seattle. The Writers Guild of America, East, included DEI targets for the hiring process and a formal diversity committee in its bargaining with Vox Media.
The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists 2025 National Board resolution calls DEI a “moral imperative” and says that “systemic barriers to full and fair inclusion, equal employment opportunity, and accessibility persist, requiring continued vigilance and advocacy.”
Or how about anti-Israel policies? In June, the United Auto Workers in Michigan voted to divest from Israel. The resolution cites the “billionaire class” and Israel’s contribution to “undermine global worker unity by furthering settler colonialism, apartheid, dispossession, and genocide.” Who knew the UAW had a Gaza policy?
