Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is out with a new book aimed at young Americans entitled The Heroes of 1776. Reminiscent of our ancestral Greek heritage, his book is a compilation of the great deeds of our forefathers, the stories of men and women who fought the American Revolution and forged a new nation.
As I do in my coming book, An American Slave in Barbary, Gorsuch heralds our founding but issues a sobering warning. In a recent television appearance, he said the greatest danger to our country is our lack of knowledge of our own past. It is not a peripheral concern but a foundational crisis. He spoke of the embarrassing fact that most native-born Americans would be unable to pass the basic civics test required of those seeking to become naturalized U.S. citizens. This creates our present crisis, where our dangerous ignorance of our founding renders our republic vulnerable to collapse from within.
Justice Gorsuch’s argument is drawn from his new book, in which he explains that the Declaration of Independence contained three “radical” ideas that inspired the American experiment. One, we’re all created equal. Two, we have unalienable rights that come to us from God, not from government. Three, we have a right to rule ourselves, and we are not subjects of a king.
These principles, once ensconced in our new nation, shook the foundations of nineteenth-century global powers. But today they are taken for granted, like the air we breathe. This illiteracy is not an accident. Our education system, entrusted with the sacred duty of forging educated patriots, has openly failed at this fundamental task. It has systematically discarded the curricula that celebrate American exceptionalism.
Rather than teaching the heroic stories of 1776, many of our educators teach a revisionist history that paints the nation’s founding as inherently flawed and shameful. It has produced generations who are disconnected from the nation’s core ideals and, therefore, unable to defend them.
I agree with Gorsuch, who argues that the media, together with our educators, bear the blame for this national crisis. They consistently mock and dismiss anyone who speaks of patriotism, American values, or the heroics of the Founding Fathers.
While Justice Gorsuch pleads for renewed unity through our shared history, our press treats his entreaty with contempt. Their assault on traditional American values ultimately creates a culture that makes us less able to resist both external threats and those from within.
It bears remembering that in 1917, only a few thousand Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin took over Russia, a country of 91 million.
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