"We Stumbled Into Modernity Accidentally, not by Any Divine Plan"

"The Founding didn't apply these principles as universally as its rhetoric implied. But that rhetoric was transformative. When the Declaration of Independence was written, some dismissed the beginning as flowery boilerplate; what mattered was the ending: Independence! But the boilerplate became a creed, and America's story is the story of that creed—those mere words—unfolding to its logical conclusion. That is what Lincoln did at Gettysburg when he reconceived the meaning of America, what Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to when he called on Americans to live up to their own story's highest principles. A civilization is simply a story: the story the people tell themselves about themselves."

National Review runs an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy.