The 5 Biggest Threats to America’s Principles and Way of Life

In thinking about the practical and philosophical threats to America’s principles and way of life, I thought it might be useful to look back to a notable American’s description of such threats in an earlier era. And since I come out of Claremont, you won’t be surprised that the person whose thoughts I chose to examine is Abraham Lincoln. 

When Lincoln addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, in January 1838, it was at a key moment in our history. It was just over 18 months after James Madison, the last surviving Constitutional Convention delegate, had died. This left the young country to fend for itself with no more living assistance from our true Greatest Generation, the one that forged a new nation. 

As he surveyed the political scene 50 years after the 1788 ratification of the Constitution, Lincoln expressed concern for “increasing disregard for law.” He emphasized the importance of “civil and religious liberty,” which he characterized as the proper object of government and as “the noblest of cause[s].” 

And he warned that if we were to be destroyed, it would not be from without, but rather from within, declaring, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” 

Lincoln warned that American citizens’ creeping disregard for the Constitution and laws risked exposing the nation to threats from talented but unscrupulous men who burn with ambition and would gladly tear down the handiwork of our founders to satisfy their dark desire for distinction. Our only protection against such men, whom Lincoln warns will inevitably come, are the Constitution and laws. If we weaken these legal protections, he warns, when we turn around and see that they are required, they will no longer be there to save us. We will lose our republic, and with it our civil and religious liberty.

Ultimately Lincoln says in his address that maintaining our freedom depends primarily upon three things: our general intelligence, our sound morality, and above all our reverence for the Constitution and laws, which he implores us to make “the political religion of the nation.”

While these qualities can save us, if we flip them around I believe we can also see what Lincoln saw as the greatest threats against us—all of which come from within: the failure to cultivate or exhibit general intelligence, the failure to cultivate or exhibit sound morality, and the failure to cultivate or exhibit a reverence for our Constitution and laws. Against a citizenry that avoids these failings, that demonstrates these republican virtues that Lincoln describes, tyrants cannot prevail; against a citizenry that lacks these virtues, one eventually will.

Nearly 200 years later, as I look around at our current politics and society, I think Lincoln’s list still holds.  But I would supplement the threats of insufficiencies in the areas of general intelligence, sound morality, and reverence for the Constitution and laws, with two other great threats: the consolidation and centralization of power—generally in the hands of the federal government, but also in large corporations—and technological advances that have, or threaten to have, profoundly adverse effects on human industry, human worth, and even human nature. These five things—Lincoln’s three plus my two—strike me as the biggest threats to America’s principles and way of life.

It’s interesting that Lincoln’s three points of emphasis all relate to our citizenry or our culture. Aside from the possible rise of a tyrant, he doesn’t express concern about our government or our elites. This makes sense, as Lincoln was living at a time when the careful precedents set by George Washington still guided us; when Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still roamed the Senate; and when Joseph Story still served on the Supreme Court. 

Nowadays, we can no longer truly say that our government and elites pose little threat. Today, our deficiencies in general intelligence, sound morality, and reverence for the Constitution and laws are usually more evident among our so-called elites than among our general citizenry, and it seems clear that Main Street Americans are more devoted to America’s principles and way of life than our coastal “elites” are. To give just one example, elite disrespect for our laws is the main reason we have an illegal-immigration problem.

The worst of the influences infecting our elites is the influence of woke leftism. At the start of the policy blueprint put out by an obscure and rarely discussed group called Project 2025, I wrote, “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” 

Borrowing a term from John Fonte and Tom Klingenstein, I added, “Conservatives—the Americanists in this battle—must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake.”

Americanists should be under no illusions as to whom we must fight. The Left has exacerbated each of the five threats I have raised, and the leftists’ project is anti-Western and opposed to the American way of life. They seek to tear down or transform that which we seek to conserve. 

That’s what makes it so senseless and perplexing when conservatives or libertarians—supposed Americanists—get so worked up over tariffs or the comportment of President [Donald] Trump that they lose sight of the Left’s overarching project, in Barack Obama’s words, of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” 

So, how are we doing in maintaining our general intelligence, sound morality, and reverence for the Constitution and laws in this age of centralized power and technological advancement, and at a time when the extreme Left has broken out of the radical coffeehouses where it belongs and has infested mainstream society? Well, as machines take over thinking and doing for us to the point where we can’t read maps and might soon not be able to write, as social media saps our attention spans and weakens our genuine connections, as the expectations for students continually diminish and store clerks struggle to make change from dollar bills, as the Left denies the sexes’ very existence and claims that sex is “assigned at birth,” we seem to be getting stupider by the day. 

Meanwhile, our morality is a mix of laudable republican virtue and last-days-of-Rome excess and debauchery, while our reverence for the Constitution and laws is wavering, as most citizens don’t know what’s in the Constitution or why, and as the Left wishes that that document could be shredded.

One sign of our limited supply of republican virtue is that we don’t even use the term, and we generally couldn’t define it if we did.  In his dedication to the citizens of Geneva at the start of his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose brilliant insights into human nature conservatives neglect at their peril, writes that liberty requires virtue; otherwise, it morphs into “unbridled license,” which he calls “its opposite.” 

Rousseau contrasts the republican virtues of chastity, “simple and modest attire,” and “high-spirited courage”—virtues evoking Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of life on the prairie—with the decadence of “vain luxury,” “pretended grandeurs,” and “the childish and fatal taste” for “the brilliance which dazzles most eyes”—all of which are more appropriate to royal courts than to free citizens. 

Rousseau also emphasizes instilling “the maxims of the Gospel,” much as Washington suggested in his Farewell Address that religious faith is indispensable for the widespread cultivation of virtue. 

At the least, there can be little doubt that religious faith affects one’s worldview and a nation’s politics. In the recent election, exit polling found that among the 5/8 of voters who said they are Christian—whether Protestant or Catholic—Trump won by about 25 percentage points.  Among the other 3/8 of voters, Harris won by about 40 percentage points. 

Fox News’s separate exit polling listed five categories of religious attendance. Trump won among four of these categories, ranging from those who attend services at least weekly to those who attend as little as once a year. Harris won only among those who “never” attend religious services—but she won by enough among them to come within 2 points of Trump in the popular vote.

Whether connected to religion or not, Rousseau makes clear that good taste and virtue must be cultivated—and are linked to self-government, both in the individual and communal senses of that term.  He writes, “The Roman people itself—that model of all free peoples”—had to acquire “by degrees that severity of mores and that high-spirited courage which eventually made them, of all the peoples, most worthy of respect.”

Such “high-spirited courage” was in relatively short supply during COVID, as cowardice was often portrayed as a virtue.  Indeed, the COVID response helps illustrate the existence of the five threats I’m emphasizing. 

The virus was likely the product of technologically advanced scientific experiments. Consolidation and centralization put people like Anthony Fauci into a position to abuse power and stoke fear. Such fear revealed a dearth of general intelligence, as many people became convinced that natural immunity somehow didn’t apply to COVID, and that covering one’s face somehow didn’t undermine human social interaction. Meanwhile, neglect of the separation of powers resulted in governors—and later President [Joe] Biden—issuing kingly decrees, while legislatures remained sidelined and citizens remained silent. 

In Federalist 51, Madison said the separation of powers and the division of power between the federal government and the states provide a “double security…to the rights of the people.”  Both parts of that double security—the separation of powers and federalism—broke down during COVID, particularly the former, as power-hungry governors shut down stores and schools, ordered free citizens to don masks, and trampled over even constitutionally specified rights like the free exercise of religion—often ordering people not to attend church or not to sing hymns if they did.

Environmental alarmists rely on this same combination of fear, consolidated power, and neglect of the separation of powers. This combination allows them to impose things that they could never get through Congress, let alone 50 state legislatures. 

Writing at about the same time that Lincoln gave his Lyceum Address, Alexis de Tocqueville spent most of his final chapters of “Democracy in America” warning against the consolidation and centralization of power. He wrote that in the ancient world, people’s everyday affairs generally escaped even Caesar’s control. 

But little would escape the control of “the immense tutelary power” that he envisioned emanating from “administrative despotism.” He cautioned, “A democratic republic…in which…administrative centralization…had [become] something accepted by custom and by law…would become more intolerable than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe. One would have to cross over to Asia to find something to compare to it.” 

The consolidation and centralization of power, mixed with a loss of the republic ethos to live within one’s means, is also the main cause of our astounding and debilitating national debt.  On the eve of our nation’s quarter-millennial anniversary, federal debt held by the public is now 14 times larger than it was on the eve of the bicentennial. That’s even after adjusting for inflation.

In many respects, technology and centralized power have similar effects. The citizenry can’t escape either. Until recently, Americans used to be able to go out to dinner in public without worrying that their free discussions would offend anyone except perhaps those sitting at a neighboring table. Now a socially unacceptable opinion might be picked up by someone at that table’s phone and broadcast on social media from coast-to-coast and around the globe, complete with video. 

In words that Tocqueville wrote about consolidation, but which could also be applied to technology, “So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen.” 

Many people blithely assert that since technological advances have always had their pros and cons, with the pros generally outpacing the cons, this will always be so. But to deny the difference between technology like an airplane, which let mankind do what he could never do on his own—fly—and technology that promises that there will soon be no more need for mankind to think about how to design or fly an airplane, or to think about how to do much of anything—to deny the difference between that which aids humanity and that which replaces it—is to ignore, it seems to me, the nature of the technological threat we now face.

Even human nature itself is at risk. At a conference, Peter Lawler once painted a picture of a not-so-distant future in which free citizens were jailed for refusing to genetically enhance their own offspring.  When the audience laughed, Lawler replied, “I’m not kidding.”

But Tocqueville was more focused on the consolidation and centralization of power than on technology, and he envisioned consolidation potentially leading to an “ultramonarchical” regime in many respects.  We have certainly seen a gradual move toward more monarchical executives in recent decades.  Tocqueville wrote, “The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring [a polity] to ruin; and the people, tired of their representatives and of themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to lying at the feet of a single master.” 

Like Lincoln, Tocqueville suggests that a key way to prevent this is to cultivate reverence for the Constitution and laws. He writes that democratic peoples “feel an instinctive disdain for forms,” when what they really need is to “have an enlightened and reflective worship of them.” 

However, even many conservatives who are committed to battling the Left underrate the importance of this. As the Left takes aim at the American way of life—and at the West as a whole—as it works to centralize, to use technology to suppress free speech, and to undermine general intelligence, sound morality, and a reverence for the Constitution and laws, conservatives—Americanists—cannot win by likewise showing irreverence toward our Constitution and laws. Every departure from our constitutional forms is a win for the Left, which recognizes—better than some on the right—how much of a barrier to its designs the Constitution still is.

The good news—and there is some—is that we now have a Supreme Court that, while imperfect and at times frustrating—such as we’ve recently seen—is more dedicated to faithfully applying our Constitution and laws than any Supreme Court in about the past 175 years. 

We have a citizenry that, with something of a Tea Party spirit, is sometimes willing to provide backlashes against “elites.” And we have a Constitution that most Americans still support, albeit in a generally uninformed kind of way. We also have a budding counterculture on the right that has risen up against an epidemic of bad teaching and bad parenting. 

All of these things should give us hope. America still controls its own fate. 

But the threats of insufficient general intelligence, insufficiently sound morality, inadequate reverence for our Constitution and laws, insufficient diffusion of power, and an insecure rein on technology—threats advanced mostly by the Left—require an effort to combat them that is cultural, social, political, and above all educational, in the broad sense of that term. 

It will not be easy to beat back these threats, but the first step is to recognize their existence and be determined to prevail against them.

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