It's Our Generation's Turn to Re-Found America

It won't be easy. And we may fail. But the outcome is up to us.

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Re-Founding America

In Episode 3 of The Rising, we introduce the topic of “re-founding” America to contextualize the scale of what’s in front of us. I chose the term “re-founding” as opposed to recalibrating or resetting because founding something requires agency, effort, and boldness.

Please watch and share this week’s episode. Below is my essay on the concept of re-founding America, which goes into more depth and gives more context than we had time for on the show.

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Re-Founding America

Introduction: The Broken Promise

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.

They were the most audacious words ever written by a group of imperfect men sitting in a hot room in Philadelphia. They weren’t just writing a declaration - they were writing a promise. A promise that a government could exist for the sake of ordinary people’s flourishing.

Happiness, in the eighteenth-century sense, didn’t mean pleasure. It meant *flourishing* - a life with dignity, purpose, and room to grow. The founders believed that if citizens were free to think, work, speak, and worship without coercion, they could build a society that produced moral and civic happiness for all.

That was the American wager: that freedom, guided by reason and compassion, would yield a good life.

But two-and-a-half centuries later, the pursuit of happiness feels out of reach for millions of Americans. We are not flourishing. We’re exhausted - working harder for less, drowning in debt and noise. Surrounded by abundance but starved for meaning. The dream that liberty would lead to happiness has decayed into a grind for survival.

And yet - the story of America has never been one of perfection. It’s been one of *correction.* Every time the promise failed, another generation stepped in to repair it. Once a century, it seems, the country breaks - and the people re-found it.

The Founding

The Founding was the first great leap of faith.

In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from the entire idea of inherited power—from the belief that truth or authority could flow from a throne or a church. The founders were children of the Enlightenment. They believed that reason could govern emotion, that evidence could restrain superstition, and that ordinary citizens could govern themselves.

Their revolution was less about muskets than about ideas. They replaced divine right with human rights. They replaced hierarchy with consent. And in doing so, they made “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the moral north star of a new world.

But they also wrote freedom with blind spots baked in - enslaved people, disenfranchised women, land stolen from Indigenous nations. They gave us principles more perfect than they were willing to practice.

The Constitution they built was half blueprint, half time bomb.

Still, it contained within it a mechanism for self-correction—a structure that could evolve if future generations had the courage to evolve it.

And that’s exactly what happened the first time the country broke apart.

The First Re-Founding: Reconstruction

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the gap between America’s ideals and its reality had become unbearable. A nation founded on liberty was built on bondage. The Declaration said “all men are created equal,” and four million human beings were owned as property. The contradiction detonated into civil war.

When the smoke cleared, Abraham Lincoln stood over the ruins and asked the oldest question in the republic: *Can a nation conceived in liberty endure?*
His answer was the first re-founding: Reconstruction.

Lincoln saw the Constitution not as scripture but as an instrument, something meant to be tuned and retuned until it produced harmony. He called for “a new birth of freedom.” The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments tried to finish the work the founders had left undone—ending slavery, defining citizenship, guaranteeing equal protection and the right to vote.

For a few fragile years, it looked as if the promise might finally be kept. Newly freed Black Americans built schools, businesses, newspapers, governments. They pursued happiness in the truest Jeffersonian sense - not as pleasure, but as *flourishing* after generations of enforced silence.

But re-foundings are fragile. The backlash came swiftly: Redemption, Jim Crow, the rise of white terrorism. The old order reasserted itself with new costumes and new laws.

Even so, the moral vocabulary of the nation had changed forever. The idea that equality was intrinsic to liberty had been written into the American genome. The pursuit of happiness could no longer be understood as an individual privilege - it had to be a collective right.

Reconstruction failed politically, but it succeeded philosophically. It planted the seed for the next re-founding. It taught us that the pursuit of happiness cannot exist while some people are chained or silenced - that freedom divided is freedom denied.

The Second Re-Founding: The Long Twentieth Century

If Reconstruction was America’s first attempt to make freedom real, the twentieth century was the long, slow attempt to make it *work.*

The Great Depression shattered faith in both capitalism and democracy. Banks failed, jobs vanished, breadlines stretched for blocks. For the first time since the Founding, millions of Americans looked at the system and wondered whether self-government could still feed its own people.

Franklin Roosevelt answered that question with the second re-founding. He reimagined freedom itself. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he said - and with that sentence, liberty evolved. It was no longer just freedom from tyranny; it became freedom from fear, hunger, and want.

The New Deal built a new social contract. It didn’t destroy capitalism; it civilized it. Social Security, labor rights, public works - the idea that government could be a partner in the people’s pursuit of happiness - these were not giveaways. They were acts of preservation, a reminder that a democracy that cannot deliver dignity will eventually deliver demagogues.

Then came the war. World War II turned Roosevelt’s domestic vision into a global one. Democracy itself was on trial. Could free people stand against the mechanized obedience of fascism?

The nation mobilized, and out of that crucible came a moral blueprint - the Four Freedoms: speech, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

For a brief moment, the American idea shone brighter than it ever had. The GI Bill educated a generation. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. The United Nations promised cooperation over conquest. Democracy had proven it could defeat tyranny - abroad and, for many, at home.

But victory exposed a deeper hypocrisy. Black soldiers came home to segregation, Japanese Americans to internment scars, women to closed factory doors. The same country that preached freedom abroad still rationed it by race and gender.

And that contradiction sparked the next wave of the same re-founding - the Civil Rights Movement. From Montgomery to Selma, Americans forced the nation to confront its unfinished promises. Dr. King’s dream was not a rejection of the founders; it was their completion. “We have come to cash a check,” he said - and that single sentence joined the economic vision of Roosevelt with the moral vision of Lincoln.

Freedom, equality, and dignity had become one vocabulary. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act wrote that new moral grammar into law. For the first time, the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” looked like it might finally belong to everyone.

That forty-year journey - from the breadlines to the March on Washington - was one long re-founding: an age when Americans redefined liberty as fairness, equality as patriotism, and happiness as something you build together.

But refoundings, as always, are fragile. The backlash came again - in the language of tax cuts and “law and order,” in the rise of markets without mercy and politics without shame. The idea of citizenship shrank back to consumption. The pursuit of happiness was replaced by the chase for profit, and somewhere along the way, liberty began to serve power instead of people.

The Third Re-Founding: Now

That’s where we stand today. The structures of the last re-founding are still here, but the spirit has drained out of them. Power has shifted again - from the statehouse to the server farm, from the factory to the feed.

We live in an age when information itself has been weaponized. Truth has become optional. The new kings don’t wear crowns; they own platforms. The new priests don’t preach from pulpits; they whisper through algorithms. The new plantations harvest data instead of cotton, attention instead of labor.

And ordinary people - trying to live, to work, to raise kids - are caught in a kind of invisible cage. Liberty feels hollow because the choices are scripted. Equality feels distant because wealth has warped opportunity. And the pursuit of happiness - that old promise - has been reduced to survival.

But this moment, bleak as it feels, is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the third re-founding. The same forces that tore at the nation in 1776, 1865, and 1933 are tearing again: inequality, corruption, fear, and the fusion of power and dogma. And once again, the cure is the same - a generation willing to expand the meaning of freedom until it fits the world we actually live in.

Liberty must grow from independence to integrity - freedom from manipulation, from debt, from despair. Equality must grow from law to access - equal voice in the digital square, equal claim on the future. The pursuit of happiness must grow from personal ambition to shared flourishing - a society where happiness is public policy again. And reason - that old Enlightenment faith - must become our civic religion: the courage to seek truth, listen, verify, and build.

If the first re-founding made freedom moral, and the second made it practical, this one must make it *meaningful.*

Because a democracy can survive division. It can survive mistakes. What it cannot survive is meaninglessness - a people who no longer believe their lives or their country can get better.

The founders gave us a framework, not a finished product. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and King each stretched that framework to fit their times. Now it’s our turn.

Our job is to rebuild the conditions for happiness: time, stability, and hope. To make “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” not just a phrase we recite, but a reality we live.

That’s the work of re-founding - not nostalgia, but renewal. Not worshiping the past, but redeeming its promise.

Every generation gets this question: *Can free people stay free?*

And every generation has answered yes - through courage, through sanity, through faith in each other.

Maybe what we’re hearing in all this noise, this chaos, this sense that everything’s coming apart - isn’t America dying.

Maybe it’s America being born again.

What happens is up to us.