National Interest

by Mohammed Soliman

    The idea of “the frontier” has long defined American identity and secured the conditions of its dynamism.

    In the closing days of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin expressed a sentiment that has stayed with us for more than two centuries. When asked what the Constitution had produced, he reportedly responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional proposition contains the entire arc of American possibility and anxiety. It is not an assurance of permanence, but a challenge, a wager that the American people possess the capacity for perpetual renewal.

    At 250 years, America confronts that challenge in a new form. The question is not whether we have created a republic; that is a historical fact. The question is whether we can sustain it through an era of extensive transformation: technological revolution, great-power competition, internal polarization and the redefinition of national identity. The answer depends not on whether we can preserve what has been, but on whether we can access the frontier spirit that has historically established American character and reimagine the republic for an age that would have seemed incomprehensible to the founders.

• The Unfinished American Experiment

    The American project was never conceived as a finished thing. It was, from its inception, an experiment—a deliberately tentative expedition into uncharted political territory. “We are in the midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations,” John Adams wrote in 1776. The revolutionaries were not simply rebelling against British rule; they were testing whether a large-scale republic could function without a monarch, without a hereditary aristocracy, without the traditional structures through which power had been organized for millennia.

    This understanding is critical to the arc of American history and to the American self-conception. The founders did not believe they were creating a permanent solution to the problem of governance. They believed they were building a framework within which each generation would have to reimagine itself. “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed and more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths are discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must also advance to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, arguing that each generation had the right to recreate its fundamental institutions.

    The Constitution itself was an expression of this experimental mindset. It was not written to be immutable but to be amendable. It established a system of separated powers not because the founders believed they had discovered perfect institutional arrangements, but because they believed that power must be distributed to stop any single actor from imposing his will on others. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison observed. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

    America was built on the assumption of human shortcomings and the necessity of perpetual vigilance. It was built to be difficult, to require ongoing effort and to demand that citizens remain engaged in the project of self-governance. It was built, in other words, as an experiment that would require perpetual recommitment.

• The American Frontier as Spiritual Reality

    But there was something else animating the American founding, something that goes beyond institutional design and reaches into the world of cultural psychology: the frontier. The geographic frontier—the vast continent stretching westward, seemingly infinite in its possibilities—was not representing purely physical space but a state of mind. It was a zone of opportunity where what had been done before was not binding, where persons could begin again, where the future remained unconstrained by the past.

    Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the frontier’s role in shaping American character was written in 1893, looking back at a frontier that was already closing. But it conveyed something real: the sense that America was a place where you could escape the constraints of Europe, reinvent yourself and pursue possibilities that seemed foreclosed elsewhere. It was this frontier spirit, less about geography than about the psychology of endless possibility, that animated American ambition and shaped American identity.

    “Here individuals of all nations are merged into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world,” wrote John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the French American intellectual of early America, describing what it meant to be American. This sense of America as a place of perpetual newness, where people could begin again and create something unprecedented, was embedded in the nation’s self-conception from the beginning.

    Yet this frontier was always double-edged. It promised liberation and opportunity, but it also reflected an assumption about unlimited possibilities and limitless resources. It embodied a kind of optimism that could slide into recklessness, a confidence in progress that could blind its adherents to real constraints. And when the geographic frontier closed, when America had expanded across the continent, the question became whether the frontier spirit could be sustained without the physical fact of an open frontier.

• The Renewed Frontier of Technology

    At 250 years, this question has returned with immediacy. America no longer has a geographic frontier on its horizon. But the frontier as a psychological reality, as a sphere of possibility, as a space where old rules do not constrain new ambitions, as a zone of perpetual reimagining, remains available. It has simply relocated.

    The frontier today is technological: in artificial intelligence, in space exploration, in biotechnology, in the renewal of American manufacturing capacity. It is also cultural and political: in the possibility of reimagining what it means to be American at a moment when immigration and demographic change are remaking the nation’s composition. And it is economic: in the possibility of building new models of prosperity that do not depend on the extraction of resources or the dominance of finance capital, but on invention and the creation of things.

    What distinguishes this frontier from its geographic predecessor is that it cannot be accessed through simple physical movement. It requires intellectual engagement, technological capacity and institutional innovation. It requires exactly the kinds of capabilities that America has historically excelled at developing. But it also requires a fundamental change in how Americans think about themselves and their possibilities.

• The Question of Renewal

    This brings us to the deepest question facing America at 250: Is the republic capable of renewal  Not in the sense of reforming existing institutions, though that matters. But in the more fundamental sense of reimagining what it signifies to be American, of accessing the frontier spirit that has historically sustained American ambition, of creating new possibilities even as old possibilities close.

    The pessimists point to genuine difficulties. American institutions are under strain. The social bases for national commitment have eroded. Elites and masses have become estranged. Democracy itself, understood not simply as a system of voting but as a framework for resolving disagreement through reasoned deliberation, seems to be corroding. The technological environment that once allowed people to encounter different viewpoints now algorithmically reinforces tribalism. The circumstances that allowed the postwar consensus to hold- economic growth, a clear external threat and relative social cohesion—have all changed.

    Yet history suggests that America has always been capable of renewal at moments of apparent crisis. The Civil War seemed to threaten the republic’s existence. The Great Depression seemed to discredit capitalism entirely. The Vietnam War and the social upheavals of the 1960s seemed to tear apart the social fabric of society. And yet, in each case, America found ways to reimagine itself, to adapt institutions to new circumstances, to generate new energy for national purpose.

    What allowed this renewal was not the lack of crisis, but the presence of frontier consciousness, the sense that the future could be different, that new things could be built, that the chances were not foreclosed. It was the capacity to believe that this moment, for all its difficulties, was not the end of history yet perhaps the beginning of something new.

• The Conditions for American Renewal

    If America is to access this ability for renewal at 250, certain conditions seem necessary.

    First, there must be a genuine recommitment to the institutions that the founders established. Not because those institutions are perfect, but because they represent a hard-won wisdom about how to constrain power and preserve liberty. The separation of powers, the defense of individual rights and the distribution of authority between federal and state governments are not holdovers of a previous age. They are guidelines within which democracy can function even when citizens are deeply divided.

    Second, there must be a restoration of elite responsibility, the sense that those who have achieved prominence and power have obligations to the wider society. The postwar consensus was sustained not just by institutions but by shared understandings about what the wealthy and powerful owed to those less fortunate. The erosion of this sense of obligation has been catastrophic. It is not enough to have formal democracy if elites regard ordinary people with contempt or if ordinary people see elites as hostile to their interests.

    Third, there must be authentic investment in the renewal of American capacity. This means rebuilding manufacturing, restoring technological leadership, building pathways for social mobility, allocating more resources to education, infrastructure and healthcare, revitalizing communities that have been hollowed out by deindustrialization. It means, that is, creating the material conditions within which Americans can believe that the future offers genuine possibility.

    Fourth, there must be a recommitment to the frontier spirit itself, to the understanding that America is a place where people can begin again, where new things can be built, where the future is not only an iteration of the past. This is not about nostalgia for westward expansion or conquest of indigenous peoples. It is about recovering the psychological orientation that drove American ambition: the sense that the frontier is always ahead, that the work of building civilization is never finished, that each generation has the capacity and responsibility to create something unprecedented.

    Benjamin Franklin’s conditional “if you can keep it” was not a threat but his way of saying that the republic is not something that is given once and then maintained. It is something that must be continually recreated by the citizens who inhabit it. Each generation must recommit to the principles, must rebuild the institutions, must reimagine what is possible.

    America at 250 faces genuine challenges. The international order that America helped construct is eroding. Great-power competition has returned. Domestic polarization has deepened. Technological change is changing the conditions of human life in ways we do not yet fully understand.

    But America also retains the capacities that have allowed it to navigate previous crises. It retains institutions that, for all their flaws, embody hard-won wisdom about how to preserve liberty in the context of power. It retains a tradition of invention and technological achievement. It retains, most importantly, a frontier spirit, a sense that the future need not be merely a repetition of the past, that new things can be built, that the American experiment is perpetually unfinished and therefore perpetually open to new possibility.

    The question Americans have to face is what form America’s endurance will take, what it will have become, whether it will have fulfilled the promise implied in its founding while adjusting to circumstances the founders could not have imagined. The answer depends not on forces beyond American control, but on whether Americans have the wisdom to remember what they have inherited, the courage to acknowledge what needs to be changed and the imagination to believe that the frontier, whatever form it now takes, remains ahead, available to those with the will to reach for it.

    Franklin’s republic remains ours to keep. It depends, as it always has, on whether we choose to do the work.