America’s story
FreeCons mark the Semiquincentennial by defending the nation’s timeless ideals
The American Experiment in self-government and ordered liberty is one of the greatest stories in human history.
At the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in Washington, multiple speakers and panelists discussed how FreeCons can defend that experiment from its skeptics — found on both the Progressive Left and Populist Right — while broadening its benefits to include all Americans.
Constitutional order
The final panel of FreeCon 2026 was entitled “America at 250: The Founding Principles and the Future of American Conservatism.” Moderated by Kent Lassman, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the discussion explored how the country’s founding principles can and should guide policymakers today.
Freedom Conservatives repeatedly reference the “Founding Era,” Lassman observed, citing famous phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the unique structure of the U.S. Constitution, and the powerful arguments found in the Federalist Papers for the “constitutional order” America’s initial leaders sought to create and preserve.
“When I think about our Founding, what is really compelling is the idea of the pursuit of happiness,” said Beth Anne Mumford, vice president of state operations at Americans for Prosperity. “How do we make sure freedom and opportunity give a way for people to be able to build the life they want to build and flourish in a way they can find and pursue their own happiness. That’s really what this work is all about, right?”
“The struggle right now is that Congress is voluntarily giving up its role in the Constitution,” said Mark Strand, former president of the Congressional Institute. “Freedom has been protected in our country by a Constitution that has checks and balances, that has limited government, and that prevents any one of the branches from exceeding it.”
“There is definitely a lot of energy and interest in these ideas beyond the federal level,” said Ben Klutsey, executive director of the Mercatus Center. “There are some challenges there, but across the states there is so much hunger.”
You can watch or listen to the entire panel discussion here.
Patriot frames
The approaching 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence has inspired dozens of Freedom Conservatism signatories to write about the health of American institutions, the ongoing threats to American liberty, and the fate of the American Dream.
Here are some great reads about America 250:
• At Civitas Outlook, the journal he edits, FreeCon signatory Richard Reinsch explored the goals the Founders hand in mind when drafting and promulgating the Declaration of Independence.
“The Declaration was built on centuries of law, history, philosophy, and theology that inspired the Second Continental Congress to ratify and proclaim the document,” Reinsch wrote. “The Congress’s bravery and insight are forever reflected in the Declaration of Independence, establishing America as a new nation committed to liberty and law.
“The ideas and arguments in the Declaration are timeless; they remain true across each generation of Americans. They are our heritage and a source of pride and living memory that must — and will — continue to guide us as we live as citizens of this great country.”
• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Bradley Thompson focused readers’ attention on the momentous first sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
“By publicly declaring the ‘causes’ which impel them to the separation and by showing their ‘respect to the opinions of mankind,’” wrote Thompson, a professor of political philosophy at Clemson University, “American revolutionaries demonstrated that reasoned discourse and moral principles guided their actions.”
“Twenty-first-century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.”
• At The Daily Economy, FreeCon signatory Adam Millsap celebrated the classical liberalism of the Founding, an essential part of what today’s American conservatives seek to preserve and expand.
“The Declaration of Independence clearly articulated a set of principles that had been developing for centuries,” wrote Millsap, a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, “namely, that people are born free and possess an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“Seven years later, after a long and arduous war, they realized their dream, and the United States of America began its grand experiment: a nation governed by its citizens rather than a monarch or dictator, with liberty placed firmly at its center.”
• At The American Spectator, FreeCon signatory Donald Devine clarified that as the Founders saw it, consent of the governed required more than regular elections. It required limits on power.
“As important as are the Declaration’s ends and the moral legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed,” wrote Devine, a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies, “the Declaration’s own justifications rest primarily upon its higher moral powers — Nature and its God, a Supreme Judge, Providence, and Creator.”
• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Kimberly Ross urged her fellow Americans to heed George Washington’s warnings against the excesses of political faction.
“Problems arise when loyalty to one’s party, politician, or brand takes the place of loyalty to our nation and its principles,” wrote Ross, a columnist for the Examiner and the Magnolia Tribune. “Despite claims to the contrary, this is a bipartisan tendency. It was not new in Washington’s day. Human beings are much the same as they were when this country was founded. Warnings against what might cause us to crumble are every bit as applicable now.”
• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Joe Pitts chronicled the recent movement to reinvigorate civic education and create institutes of civic thought on public and private campuses across the United States.
Leaders of the new civic-education movement “refuse to be bystanders,” wrote Pitts, a public policy professional working in Washington. “They recognize that neither renewal nor decline, dawn nor dusk, is inevitable — America’s genius is that we make our own luck at least as often as we stumble into it.”
• At Constituting America, FreeCon signatory Randolph May discussed the ratification debates that following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, pointing out that the battles in the state conventions between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists were “heated.”
“The vigorous debates among the elected delegates in those conventions were the devices by which the Constitution itself envisioned that the new government would rest on a foundation of popular consent,” wrote May, president of the Free State Foundation in Maryland. “The conventions were how ‘We the People’ gave our assent to be governed by a new Constitution.”
In the mix
• At The Hill, FreeCon signatory Garion Frankel decried the arrival of the “Taylor Swift University,” meaning the proliferation of college course devoted to pop culture rather than core subjects and abiding truths.
“Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research,” wrote Frankel, an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and his coauthor Daniel Buck, “but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.”
“Universities were once places where students and faculty alike pursued higher aims — truth, beauty, ethics and even the divine. What are they now? Too often, they resemble four-year summer camps, designed to make students comfortable with a participation diploma at the end.”
• During his remarks at the National Review Institute’s Regional Seminar in Dallas, FreeCon signatory David Bahnsen stated that “the free society is worth defending because the human person is worth defending.”
“The great crisis of our time is not merely inflation, debt, regulation, political polarization, and technological disruption,” wrote Bahnsen, the managing partner of a wealth-management firm. “Those things matter. But beneath them lies something even more dangerous: a growing loss of confidence in the moral capacity of free people.”
“My professional life has been and will continue to be in the capital markets, stewarding wealth, and utilizing the miracle of markets toward the achievement of financial aims. But accompanying the blessing that is my professional life is my moral duty to continue studying economic history and doing all I can to defend free enterprise for what it is: a moral architecture that promotes human dignity, constrains human nature, and feeds responsibility and flourishing of creatures made in the image of God.”
• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Alex Salter argued that good governance and self-governance are complements, not substitutes.
“The aim of government is to maintain the institutional and moral architecture of self-rule,” wrote Salter, the Georgie G. Snyder Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. “That is why political economy cannot be reduced to either technocratic management or reflexive anti-statism. It is the study of how liberty and order reinforce one another through institutions that respect human dignity and harness dispersed knowledge.”