As America approaches its 250th birthday, one begins to wonder whether we are witnessing the natural fatigue of a late-stage republic or merely the rebellious turbulence of a nation chafing against the rules of its founders. Modern societies tend to imagine liberty as a permanent inheritance — self-renewing, self-evident, self-defending, and maintenance-free. Yet the historical record suggests something far more fragile: national-scale freedom rarely lasts more than a few centuries before dissolving through internal exhaustion or being replaced by a new ideological faith. Republics decay not only through foreign assault but through the gradual abandonment of the civic habits that once sustained them. The true historical surprise is not how many nations have lost their freedom but how remarkably long the United States has managed to preserve its own.

American exceptionalism has always been misunderstood. The country was never perfect, but it was — through most of its history — relatively free, prosperous, and stable. Most Americans recognized this intuitive truth; thus, the nation remained largely impervious to utopian calls for “revolution.” The lived experience of raising families, building communities, and passing knowledge and wealth to the next generation created a natural immunity to radical politics. For revolutions to take root, a population must be divided by class and convinced that the existing system is intolerable. In an America still governed by reason and truth, that case was difficult to make.

But ideological dissatisfaction expands to fill the space left by civic forgetfulness. As public memory of the American constitutional order thins, a growing share of citizens no longer see freedom as a complex, delicately balanced system of law, restraint, self-government, and pluralism. Instead, they increasingly redefine it as the removal of any obstacle to personal or political desire. Laws duly passed, majorities duly constituted, and institutions expressly designed to check momentary passions are now denounced as “authoritarian” — not because they are despotic, but because they frustrate immediate ideological ambitions.

This psychological shift is profound. When a people begin to reinterpret limits as oppression and responsibilities as shackles, they prepare the ground for the very autocracies they claim to resist. A republic cannot survive when half its citizens view its constitutional architecture as an impediment to be bypassed rather than an inheritance to be defended.

Into this widening void, competing ideologies rush. They are not new. Theocratic extremism and authoritarian collectivism have reappeared across centuries, appealing to societies that have forgotten the patient, incremental work that self-government requires. Both promise clarity, unity, and moral certainty — precisely what fraying republics find most tempting.

America has traditionally been insulated from such temptations not only by its institutions but by its culture: assimilation, civic participation, localism, and a shared expectation that newcomers adopt the norms of the society they enter. But in recent decades, the political class — fractured by partisanship and paralyzed by fear of giving offense — has abandoned the old assumption that assimilation is both necessary and beneficial. The result has been a migration policy that conflates humanitarian concern with the admission of large numbers of people who neither know America’s constitutional tradition nor have been encouraged to adopt it.

Most migrants, historically and today, come seeking opportunity and stability. Yet the United States has also admitted groups whose ideological commitments run counter to liberal democracy — whether religious fundamentalists drawn to separatist theologies or political actors steeped in authoritarian models of governance. We compound this by failing to articulate that American citizenship requires a civic, not merely geographic, transformation. The country once expected newcomers to assimilate into a culture of ordered liberty. Today, it hesitates to expect anything at all.

With a substantial fraction of native-born Americans themselves disenchanted with constitutional limits, the combination becomes combustible. Radical ideologies — whether framed in religious or revolutionary language — thrive wherever the host society has grown uncertain about its own legitimacy. And at the moment, much of the cultural elite is engaged in a project of national self-denigration, describing the United States not as a flawed but extraordinary experiment in liberty but as a crime scene in need of structural overthrow.

The result is predictable. The kind of street violence and class conflict once associated with unstable nations now seems increasingly possible here at home. Every attempt to restore public order will be interpreted by radical utopians as further evidence of “authoritarianism,” reinforcing their revolutionary narrative.

The challenge, then, is not merely to resist imported extremism or domestic radicalism but to restore the nation’s confidence in the principles that once unified a diverse people. A republic endures only when its citizens — native and immigrant alike — agree that its foundational rules are worth upholding. Liberty, in the American sense, is not self-sustaining. It must be chosen, taught, reaffirmed, and defended against the ideologies that inevitably emerge when a people forget what made them free in the first place.