Last fall, I was supposed to be at the event where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. As my class neared its end, a text reached me: Charlie Kirk has been shot.
My professor noticed I'd gone somewhere else in my head and asked if I had anything to say. I told the room what had happened. A classmate's face lit up as she exclaimed "yes!"—nearly jumping out of her seat.
I went back to my dorm and could do nothing but sit there. As days went on, I grew more troubled that Charlie's killer lived two blocks from my family home, and that he'd done it in Orem—a town I'd always thought of not just as safe, but as an example to the rest of the country. I lost more than a role model; my optimism and admiration for my communities were called into question. But it didn't end there. Later, friends of mine explained in a group chat why he had it coming—rationalizing a man's murder for expressing ideas I hold myself.
This changed the way I think. I'd never wanted a life in politics. I didn't believe it was an ethical way to make money, so I'd kept my ambitions in the private sector: do the right thing, build value, and call that my part. After that day, a calling emerged that I couldn't turn away from. A man had been killed for speaking his mind, and I could no longer be quiet about the defense of that freedom. As my motivations changed, I began getting more involved in government and politics, and even seeking a career in it.
Taking it up, though, meant reckoning with what it is. Government is, by nature, society's way of distributing force. In a democracy, government is how we resolve conflict without it. How a people chooses to use this force matters, and that choice can be everything.
As this country turns 250, I ponder our future, and I'll be candid: it feels bleak, unless we're willing to work for it. The trouble with force is that it's so often wielded by one tribe against another. I had watched people I knew celebrate the death of their countryman because he'd been pushed to their outgroup. If it wasn't clear before, it is now: we are a nation of two tribes, not one. To heal that, we have to restore a shared American identity, and it has to be rooted in our heritage.
Whenever someone says that, however, some of us get nervous, and sometimes we should: people invoke "heritage" to justify coercing a set of ideas onto others. Fortunately, in America's case, our heritage is one of battling voices. We can embrace that disagreement as part of who we are, and still hold that some things cross a line. The argument is sacred; cheering a man's death for entering it is not. That line has always been there, and Americans have always searched for a precarious balance among these constraints. Government best serves a single people, not a fractured one, and nobody is better than us at finding that oneness among disagreement. Still, our unity has most often been forged against a common enemy.
For the founding generation it was the British Empire. Later it was the World Wars. Most recently it was 9/11. Every one of those came before me. Notice that COVID-19 does not make the list. My generation has not yet had its unifying trial—we've grown up taking division for granted.
I came to this conviction by an unlikely road. I converted from atheism to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Book of Mormon gave me another lens for reading society. It tells of a people moving through what we've come to call pride cycles: when they are righteous, they prosper; when they grow proud, they fracture and fall, until calamity finally humbles them. At the peak of their pride they split into two tribes. Humbled, they became one again. A handful of generations, however, managed to humble themselves before a disaster, and they were spared.
The easy move here is to name my tribe the righteous one. I won't—but not because I lack convictions. I have strong ones. The left's instinct is toward a philosophy that centralizes power, and a coalition that increasingly defines itself by group identity. The first is what worries me most: if government is force, then every concentration of state power is an expansion of that force and a shrinking of agency. I openly think the left is more drawn to that concentration.
Despite that, my own tribe is not innocent. The right has its own authoritarian streak, and it too expands the state whenever it calls the shots. Agency continues its decline and we continue to wage wars across the world no matter who's in power. Neither tribe has clean hands. Questions of agency and conscience trouble us both. The day I'm sure my side is the righteous one is the day I've joined the pride that's pulling us apart.
That is the nature of a pride cycle: it spares no one. The United States is at a cycle's peak. We've prospered for a long time, consuming more than we produce. In many ways we are a wicked people born of righteous generations—and we have not yet been humbled.
My fear is that our humility will only follow calamity, and that in the wreckage we'll lose the things worth saving: the founders' framework of decentralized force, the meritocracy, the marketplace of ideas, the city on a hill we were meant to be. We don't have to wait for that. We can humble ourselves now.
Humbling ourselves means returning to what the founders actually built: a negative conception of government, whose only job was to protect the life, liberty, and property of every individual—and to go no further. As Yuval Levin argues, the institutions that truly form us are the ones that aren't about force. To the left, however, government has become the cultural institution. The problem is that using force to arbitrate the quality of ideas is maladaptive, letting bad ideas proliferate and guide behavior.
I've come to believe that the highest pursuit in this life is human refinement, and that agency is both its prerequisite and the defining purpose of this stage of our existence. In my religion there is no exaltation without refinement, and no refinement without agency. A people can improve itself by choice—or be refined by trial. Our founders built a nation that protects that choice.
So as we mark 250 years, we don't need a catastrophe to remind us who we are. We can look to our own past—to why this country was formed, and to what it asks of us now. It asks us to build: not through the machinery of the state, but through the institutions that make a people—full churches, strong families, active communities, etc. We must resist the urge to use government to define our culture. We must stand our ground, and make our shared challenges—not one another—our common enemy.
It isn't enough to tell people to go to church, to volunteer, to raise families, or to share the symbols of our country, our heritage, and our shared identity. We have to do it. I have to do it. Be the example, be a patriot, and be an inspiration. If we want to remain a light on the hill for another 250 years, the answer is never to wait until we're humbled. Rather, we must answer the call to righteousness, and live it.
Carsen is from St. George and currently attends the University of Utah. He is the field director of the Utah Federation of College Republicans.
