Aaron Renn:

Michael Lind recently published a provocative piece in Compact called “Forget the Founding Fathers.”

What would the Founding Fathers think of today’s America? How would they advise us to address the great domestic and foreign challenges of our time? Would they be proud of contemporary Americans for preserving their handiwork, or would they despair at what has become of the United States in the 21st century?

The answer to all of these questions is the same: Who cares? Seriously. Who cares what James Madison would have thought about internet regulation? Who cares what Thomas Jefferson might have said about the war in Ukraine?

The cult of the American founding has no parallels in other English-speaking democracies. A British prime minister who declared that 21st-century Britain must turn for guidance to Robert Walpole or Pitt the Younger would be considered daft.

While there’s a lot one could debate about this piece, it gets at something important. Americans on the right need to spend much more time looking forward than they do looking backward.

We should venerate the Founding Fathers, but they don’t have the answers to today’s problems.

To the extent that American postwar conservatism has a positive vision, much of it is a retro one. It’s about getting back to the Constitution. (Indeed lots of people call themselves “Constitutional conservatives,” even though the Constitution they cherish has been dead and gone for decades). Or getting back to the principles of the American Founding. Or restoring “classical liberalism.” Or populists thinking that we will “bring back the jobs” through onshoring.

There are good impulses here. We shouldn’t be afraid of pointing back to what was good in the past. The past is the source of American identity from which we need to build the future. And not all changes in our society have been good ones to say the least.

At the same time, America has always been a restless, protean, forward looking country.

One of the key paradigms of American culture and identity is the idea of the frontier.

The geographic frontier was declared closed in 1890, but we’ve continued to be a frontier nation in many ways: expanding empire during and after World War II, the suburban “crabgrass frontier,” the space exploration frontier, and the technological frontier. It’s no surprise that the leading edge of AI research is here in America, for example.

Elon Musk is an example of this kind of forward looking person, trying to open the interplanetary frontier on Mars, and driving incredible technological advancement created right here in America along the way.

The American right has largely become backwards looking and has no future vision for either the country or itself. It is certainly not a frontier movement – rural homesteading is fine, but is a retreat not an advance – and in that sense it is missing something important about America.

To the extent that conservatism has ideas, they are mostly small ball, like tweaking child tax credits and the like.

What would a proper 21st America look like, one that is healthy, growing, pushing forward? What does that vision look like for Americans on the right? What does the authentically American idea of the frontier look like today?

These are the questions that today’s right should be seeking to answer. Those answers won’t be found by looking back to a bygone era.