A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Announcing The Thread of Liberty — my new documentary, released this Fourth of July for America’s 250th

On July 4, America turned 250.

Two and a half centuries.

That is a long time for any nation to endure. It is an extraordinary length of time for a free one.

And it is worth stopping, on this, of all birthdays, to ask a question we too rarely ask.

Where did all of this come from?

Most Americans grow up believing the founding was a revolt. A clean break. A handful of colonists who threw off a king and invented something the world had never seen.

That is a stirring story.

But it is not quite the true one.

The truth is deeper and, in my view, far more remarkable.

The American founding was not the invention of new ideas, per se. It was the culmination of old ones—the distillation of millennia of Western political and philosophical thought, argued over and paid for in blood across centuries, and finally codified into law by serious men who held a clear-eyed and unsentimental view of human nature. All of which led our founders, for the first time in the history of the world, to establish a rights-based republic in which the people are sovereign.

That is the story I set out to tell.

This Fourth of July, I released a new feature documentary, The Thread of Liberty, to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

The film follows a single thread—the idea of ordered liberty under law—as it runs across the centuries, passed from generation to generation.

To trace it, we borrowed a guide: Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who came to America in the 1830s to see with his own eyes whether a free people could actually govern themselves.

We follow his journey and insights from the intellectual origins of American liberty, through the crucible of the founding, to the America Tocqueville witnessed in the 1830s, to the slow erosion of constitutional limits over the last century and the rise of the Administrative State, and finally to the fight to restore the Constitutional Republic in our own time.

I did not want to make a partisan film.

I wanted to make an honest one.

Honest about the nation’s flaws.

And confident, still, in the enduring power of the framework the founders left us.

I was not alone in this.

The Thread of Liberty is built on conversations with eleven of the finest historians and constitutional scholars in the country—among them Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Arnn, Wilfred McClay, Paul Rahe, and Roger Kimball.

What they have to say about who we are, and how we got here, is worth far more than the price of admission.

Because there is a price of admission, and it is not money.

Benjamin Franklin named it at the close of the Constitutional Convention.

Asked what kind of government the delegates had produced, he is said to have answered:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it.

It was an understood question—and Franklin’s challenge to those who would follow the founding generation:

Can you keep it?

Every generation of Americans has stood where we now stand, handed a republic it did not build and asked the same silent question:

Will we keep it, or will we let it slip?

Do we still feel an obligation to the experiment?

The men who signed their names in 1776 answered that question with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

The question now belongs to us.

I made The Thread of Liberty because I believe this generation can still answer it well—but only if we remember what we were given and why it is worth keeping.

The film premiered on the Fourth.

It’s available now.

You can watch it, learn more about it, and share it at threadofliberty.com.

Watch it this week.

Watch it with your children.

It’s time for a rebirth of instinctive patriotism—that inborn love of country—and I sincerely hope this documentary becomes part of that rebirth.