America at 250: An analysis and a challenge

A Jewish perspective on the United States can unlock insights that most of us miss

As the US gears up to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I thought it would be appropriate to look at what makes America successful and what the looming dangers are.

While I don’t emphasize it, I am using my Derechology framework for this analysis. Because it turns out that America has been using some of its concepts from the beginning. It is a very useful prism to understand the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is the preface to a series that will become a book for the occasion. I plan to publish a chapter twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. The full articles will be available to paid subscribers.

I think that this provides a unique and valuable perspective on what America means. I hope you agree.

Preface: The Moment Demands It

The occasion of America’s 250th anniversary is the perfect time to take stock.

The United States has done a great deal that is amazing and it is a magnificent achievement. Yet if we want it to navigate the next 250 years successfully, we need to take a view of where we are at,where we are going and what we can do, today, to keep the American experiment a success.

America at 250 is, by any honest accounting, a remarkable nation. While we see plenty of criticism from the rest of the world, people vote with their feet, and the number of people wanting to become citizens vastly outnumbers those who want to leave. Across the world, in circumstances ranging from desperate to merely uncomfortable, human beings make the calculation that this is the place to live — where effort connects to outcome, where identity does not foreclose opportunity, where the law applies to the powerful as it applies to the powerless, where a person can arrive with nothing and become something. That calculation, made by millions of people with no stake in American self-congratulation, is the most reliable measure of American greatness available.

The evidence beyond the immigration line is equally striking. America’s economy, despite every prediction of decline, remains the largest and most innovative in human history. Its military underwrites the security of allies on every inhabited continent. Its culture — its music, its films, its language, its technology — saturates the world in ways that would have seemed like imperial fantasy to any prior civilization. Its foundational documents remain the template against which other nations measure their own constitutional aspirations. When human beings imagine political freedom, they reach, more often than not, for the vocabulary America invented.

Why? What makes America special? And, more importantly, how can it stay that way?

Every great civilization in history believed its greatness was self-sustaining. Every one of them was wrong. The Roman Republic did not collapse because Romans stopped being talented or energetic or capable of great things; It collapsed because the structural features that had made it great — the balance of powers, the civic culture, the obligations of citizenship — were eroded gradually, then suddenly, by forces that understood how to use the republic’s own language against it. The language of freedom was invoked to concentrate power. The language of tradition was invoked to destroy the norms that tradition had built. The citizens who might have stopped it were not paying sufficient attention, or did not understand clearly enough what was being lost, or had been persuaded that the erosion was actually progress.

We are not Rome. But we are not immune to the dynamics that ended Rome.

This series is an attempt to do three things. First, to understand precisely what makes America great — not in the vague language of inspiration and ideals, but structurally, specifically, in terms of the founding design that produced 250 years of extraordinary results. Second, to name what threatens that greatness today — from the left and from the right, from forces that use the language of American values to undermine American values, from a civic culture that has forgotten what citizenship requires. Third, to map what faithfulness to the founding vision demands in a world the founders could not have imagined — a world of global supply chains and social media and weapons of mass destruction and challenges to democratic governance that were not imaginable in 1776.

The argument centers on a single concept: covenant. In this context, covenant is the specific kind of agreement that defines membership by what you accept rather than what you are. America was the first nation in history to make this covenant the explicit basis of national membership, open to anyone willing to accept its terms regardless of their race or religion of what they believe or where they came from, That founding move — radical in 1776, still not fully understood in 2026 — is what produced everything else worth celebrating about the American experiment.

The analytical tools I use throughout this book come from a framework I have created called Derechology. “Derech” in Hebrew means a path that applies to people and nations as well as geography. America has a derech and it is worthwhile to examine it and see whether it is still consistent with its derech when it was conceived twelve score and ten years ago. Readers who want to understand the framework more fully will find it discussed in an appendix. Everyone else will find it doing its work quietly throughout the text.

Benjamin Franklin, at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, was asked what kind of government had been produced: His answer was, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” A nation does not run on inertia. It requires constant energy to stay the course. Roads require maintenance; without upkeep they decay. The same goes for derech.

The 250th anniversary is not a moment for a victory lap. It is a moment for the question every major anniversary demands: do we understand what we have clearly enough to keep it?

This series is an attempt at an answer.