The Myth of the Propositional Nation

The Founders Knew America Was More Than a Bundle of Ideas

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance touched on a growing political dispute. He maintained that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.” Vance was implicitly targeting the popular idea that America is a proposition nation. Michael Anton has described this as the claim that America can be summarized “in a few words and phrases”: “‘Equality,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘proposition,’ ‘America is an idea,’ ‘Constitution,’ [and] ‘nation of immigrants.’” Upholding abstract ideas simply is what matters to the health of the United States. In Joe Biden’s address immediately following his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential election, he also described America as an “idea.”

On the surface, the term “proposition nation” seems like a cheap rhetorical shot taken at one’s political opponents. Much like how neoconservative can be used sloppily, painting one’s political enemies as believers in a propositional nation seems like an overly broad term that is functionally meaningless. Who actually thinks that America can be reduced to ideas alone?

But the propositional nation claim is not hyperbole. It is in fact an apt description of how a group of high-profile members on both the establishment Left and Right talk about America. In a 2021 message before Congress, President Biden stated, “America is an idea—the most unique idea in history: We are created, all of us, equal. It’s who we are, and we cannot walk away from that principle and, in fact, say we’re dealing with the American idea.” Meanwhile, in his book Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal, former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse wrote that “America is an idea—it is a creed. The American idea is a commitment to the universal dignity of persons everywhere.” 

According to proponents of the proposition nation, since America can be described by abstract political principles alone, anyone in the world can become an American in all but legal status. Citizenship simply becomes a mental checklist of key terms and phrases rather than assimilating into a complete way of life—a way of the mind that lacks any connection to the thick web of social bonds that human beings create by nature.

On this account, the essence of America quickly becomes a cardboard cutout version of a nation. Rather than cultivating a home for yourself and your family, America is instead about attaining a pure and undiluted idea of individual freedom. In this retelling of the American myth, since all men are equal in nearly every way imaginable, then no one is better than anyone else. An implication of this unshakable belief in this leveling equality is that all people are therefore entitled to the political franchise. Each person should be allowed to seize their own destiny—to make use of their liberties and talents as they see fit and define and pursue their own happiness however they see it, without moral constraint or interference from others. Or, as the U.S. Army’s former marketing slogan put it, you are free to “Be All You Can Be.”

The American Founding Heritage

The founders of America did not think that the new nation could be reduced to a political theory or an aspirational cliché. To a man, they would have utterly rejected the two-dimensional interpretation of their political principles that is influential on both the Left and Right today. They did not understand America to be a propositional nation and thus an open invitation for the world’s poor, tired, and huddled masses in order to live their best life now.

Though oft quoted, John Jay’s sentiments from Federalist 2 are nevertheless a key summary of the founders’ thoughts on the matter (that is, the people’s character) that upholds the form:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Jay called attention to the myriad commonalities that formed the bedrock on which the founders made their case for revolution. Their arguments for breaking away from Great Britain rested on the truth that the colonists were politically one people. The revolution could never have been undertaken absent the countless ties that bound the colonists together.

In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington reiterated Jay’s account of the unity shared among the people of the young nation:

With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits & political Principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together—the independence & Liberty you possess are the work of joint councils, and joint efforts—of common dangers, sufferings and successes.

Even James Madison, often extolled in our times for his enlightened, pluralistic political thought, warned his fellow Americans in Federalist 14 that in order for a union of republican states to succeed, Americans must remember their common origins and shared experiences:

Hearken not to the unnatural voice, which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many chords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. Hearken not to the voice, which petulantly tells you, that the form of government recommended for your adoption, is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors; that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish. No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys. The kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defence of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.

For Madison, it was the “kindred … [and] mingled blood” of the colonists that cemented their political union. 

The founders emphasized these themes especially when it came to the subject of immigration. In a critique of Thomas Jefferson’s liberal proposal for granting citizenship, Alexander Hamilton anonymously wrote in the New-York Evening Post,

The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.

Even the Declaration of Independence itself, often cited as the document proving propositional nationhood, chided America’s “British brethren” for being “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity”—in other words, principles of justice and ties of blood attest to the same truths. The particular claims of political justice made in the Declaration were inextricably linked to the “one people” who “dissolve[d] the political bands” that had formerly connected Americans and the British. Without a people of a certain character, abstract political principles, however true theoretically, would never have been realized. 

A Particular People with Universal and Particular Principles

The American founders saw the country as a blend or hybrid—a particular people who appealed to political principles that were partly universal and partly particular based on the colonists’ historical circumstances as Anlgo-Protestants. To borrow Aristotelian categories, while the form was the political theory, the matter was the particular people who shared a common life: traditions of self-government, the Christian religion, unspoken customs and mores, and shared loves and affections.

As Thomas Jefferson makes clear in his 1774 tract, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, the colonists based much of their argument on securing the rights they were due as Englishmen. But as an inevitable break with the British drew near, they eventually appealed to natural principles of justice and the right to vindicate a long-standing historical tradition of self-government that took a particular English-American form—representation, bicameral legislatures, a preference for the common good, and legal protection of historic rights and liberties. In other words, the Americans’ appeal to natural rights was in addition to their previous appeal to tradition, not in place of it. They simply went one step deeper—to the very ground of that tradition itself, arguing that English constitutional law was, in its essence, also just according to natural and divine law (something not even all English jurists and philosophers agreed with). This held true even after the Americans rejected certain English parliamentary forms and structures of government.

The American colonists appealed to universal principles-–both natural and divine—in their separation from the British and the founding of America. Their appeal to political principles itself was not novel, but very ancient. Aristotle made it clear (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI) that the political virtue that enabled correct judgment and moral action was prudence. Prudence as an intellectual virtue is a mean between two vicious extremes (deficiency and excess). Intellectually, the virtuous mean is an orthòs lógos—a “right reckoning/account,” sometimes translated as “right reason”—that allows a person to discern the right thing to do in specific circumstances, and to do so at the right time in the right way for the right motive and for right ends.

Thus, by their nature, prudential judgments are both universal and particular: they draw upon universal principles of justice and right, but always for the purpose of applying them in particular, and often unrepeatable, circumstances. Since prudence is the crowning virtue of the political statesman, all good statecraft is thus simultaneously universal and particular. A purely universal politics results in a city in speech, an idealistic utopia unable to be realized. A purely pragmatic politics results in an unjust city, the city of pigs fit only for mens’ baser appetites.

Therefore, principles alone, though important to the revolutionary cause, were never a sufficient foundation on which to achieve the proper conditions of true liberty. David Azerrad of Hillsdale College best captures the American synthesis when he writes,

America, in other words, is both particular and universal. We are particular in our own way, just as Lesotho, Lithuania, and Laos are particular in their own ways. But we are exceptional in making certain universal ideals a constitutive component of our national identity (many countries today affirm these ideals too, but only we make them an inextricable part of who we are).

We need to go farther, however, in understanding universal political principles. Late medieval and early modern political theorists made the distinction between God’s eternal law (the mind of God) on the one hand, and natural, divine, and human law on the other. Only the eternal law which exists in God is immutable and unchanging forever; all other laws are informed and declared in time. The natural law, which the founders’ talked about the most, is a temporal law: it is the human being’s participation in God’s eternal law. Since humans in their substantial form are both body and rational soul, they fuse the particular, material life of the body with the transcendent, spiritual life of the soul. This means that the natural law, properly understood, is both general (applying to all humans at all times) and particular: at the level of general precepts, it is universal; so too, the conclusions that can be drawn from natural law precepts. But the application of precept and conclusion—the determinatio—of the natural law is always particular.

The key is to realize that no natural law precept or conclusion is applicable apart from a particular determination, or the judgment of the suitability of the principles of natural law to one’s particular context. In other words, without a particular social matter—a people with a shared history, geographic homeland, language, religion, laws, and customs—natural law is inert. Without human law, natural law is powerless. If the natural law is man’s participation in God’s eternal law, then human law is the application and completion of the natural law—God’s eternal law made incarnate among men. As James Poulos summed it up well, “[America] is an incarnate idea, one embodied in a particular people who share a growing and shifting but specific and concrete body of deep, devoted recollection.”

To give an example, a common precept of the natural law is that one should seek his own self-preservation and species propagation. The conclusion from this precept is that humans should marry and procreate (understood in the traditional, creational sense of one man and one woman united together, exclusively, for life). The determination of this conclusion, however, may look different given the particular culture. 

In America, this took the form of jurisdictional oversight by the civil magistrate even though the ceremony itself was performed by ecclesiastical bodies; the banns of marriage would be pronounced in church prior to the wedding with the expectation that silence conferred the community’s approval of the couples’ fitness; vows and rings would be exchanged in a public ceremony as testimony to the lifelong covenant being formed; sexual chastity, then consummation were expected to validate the marriage; the rights of marriage and parenthood were contingent upon sexual fidelity and care of one’s offspring; and divorce or other means of interference in the marriage and family were reserved for extreme cases. None of these things were universal at the level of precept or conclusion; they are all determinations particular to the English, European, and American cultures. 

The American founders appealed to the precepts and conclusions of the natural law for the sake of preserving, protecting, and justifying the determinationes of their inherited ways of life.

Since the vast majority of the founders were Protestant Christians, their political statesmanship also uniquely reflected Protestant political theology. The essence of that tradition was that politics, as a natural science, was knowable by man’s reason: men are endowed by God via reason, sense perception, and experience to know God as Creator, to know themselves as possessing both a body and an immortal soul, to know and discern patterns and causes in history, and to obtain a reliable knowledge of the natural moral law. At the same time, since man’s natural reason is fallible and the natural law is general and in need of wise application, Protestants often appealed to scriptural revelation to affirm reason’s deliverances, to correct its waywardness, to give insight to its ignorance, and to provide the means to man’s heavenly, eternal end.

For example, the founders argued that reason can know that men are created “equally free and independent” of political slavery: no man has the right to politically rule over another as a master would dominate his slave. Since men were equally endowed with the same constitutive nature—including natural faculties, liberties of thought and motion, and mutually reinforcing duties and rights—all men were equal in this sense. Since all men were representatives and vicegerents of God himself, no man had the right to enslave another divine representative as a permanent, political subject. This was the only way the founders’ believed that men were “created equal.” In all other respects, such as men’s physical attributes, natural talents, inclinations and dispositions, abilities, fortune, and opportunities, men were unequal. Government, therefore, must allow for self-government, the consent of the people, and the protection of men’s liberties and rights, but not force a rigid egalitarianism that expects parity of outcomes. These were the deliverances of reason.

While most of the founders believed that the form of government—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, polity—was variable depending upon the circumstances, and that each were, in their own way, compatible with representative self-government, some founders’ argued that Scripture could teach reason that republicanism specifically was the best kind of government. Looking to the Old Testament and the history of Israel, they argued that “political Hebraism” (distinct from modern Judaism) was foundational for the formation of modern commonwealths. The result was a turn away from hereditary monarchy and toward the political participation and consent of the people. This was a deliverance of revelation as an addition and perfection of reason.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not describe in detail the universals and particulars of the American tradition. One way to do this is through Samuel Adams’s 1772 tract, The Rights of the Colonists, in which Adams divides the colonists’ rights between those of mankind in general, of Christians in particular, and then of Englishmen. The rights of colonists as men are well known: life, liberty, property, provision, defense, worship of God, joining political society, and happiness. Adams traces the rights of Christians—besides the liberty of conscience to worship God—back to Magna Carta (1215). These include reasonable revenues and dues, no destruction to men or property, care for the land against merchants, social marriage and the rights of widows, debtor rights and protections, and basic juridical rights. The rights of Englishmen emphasized legislative priority in government, no arbitrary rule, independent judges and uniform justice, and the protection of ancient rights, liberties, privileges, and immunities. In the decades that followed, American law would fuse these three strands into a single and unique constitutional and federal tradition. America, then, is not merely a “natural rights republic.”

The particulars of American nationalism are not hard to identify. America is primarily English and Protestant in her traditions and heritage. English has been the language of the land for over 400 years. Christianity has been the dominant religion, shaping moral laws, forms of government, and unspoken customs. American legal rights as codified in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments are explicitly English in their origin. Even the American concept of liberty—corporate, political liberty and spiritual liberty—made distinctions between true freedom and personal licentiousness according to Christian morality. Thus, one was not free merely because of the absence of external restraints; true freedom required living as one ought to, according to the moral law and in harmony and cooperation with one’s family and neighbors (that is, the common good). Religious liberty in the founding period was explicitly inherited from the Protestant Reformers as well as the tradition of religious diversity and tolerance experienced in the American colonies. American constitutionalism was deeply influenced by English constitutional and common law.

These are the particular habits of life that have shaped America for over four centuries, and thus without these things America would not be America. This heritage is what Americans must learn, must love and cherish, and must seek to preserve at all costs. It is what immigrants must be taught and what they must integrate into, leaving behind their disparate and incompatible traditions and customs.

Nationalism and Ontological Individualism

The best argument for the propositional nation is what we might term “ontological individualism.” This view claims that the fundamental unit of political life and organization is the individual person. Accordingly, political life begins as a legal contract among equal individuals in a state of nature, in which each person has an equal say in whether he wants to be part of that political society and what the laws governing it should be. Political representation is by individuals on behalf of individuals. Statutory legislation is written for the sake of individual citizen constituents. Laws that favor groups, denominations, or other associations over the individual are frowned upon, and legislation that intrudes into the private lives of citizens is decried. On this view, associations of men do not have true ontology or being; they are fictions in the minds of men, propelled along by naming conventions. For example, on this theory the company Apple is not a thing or being beyond the individuals and bylaws that compose it. The aggregation of the individuals who work there is what we conceive of when we think of Apple, but that aggregate notion only exists in our minds.

Similarly, given ontological individualism, nations are the sum of their individual components; like a business, the “nation” is a necessary fiction, the aggregation or collection of the individual persons that constitute it. What makes these individuals into a collection? What commonality brings them together? The commitment to a set of propositional statements regarding the “nation”: that all men are created equal, that each possesses a bundle of natural rights, that the government exists to protect those rights, that happiness is determined by the individual, and so forth. The core of the propositional nation is that this is all that’s necessary to make a nation. Thus, all that citizen naturalization requires is that immigrants pledge allegiance to these ideals. Once this is done, they can live as they please. Since anyone is capable of discarding and adopting beliefs at will, the propositional nation theoretically makes it possible for anyone—or everyone—to become part of the nation. The belief in a propositional nation is not identical to ontological individualism, but the latter is the ground of the former while the former is the instrument of nationhood.

The problem with the propositional nation idea, however, is that it is insufficient to create a nation, let alone support and sustain national life. Propositions, as indicative statements, are abstract objects. While philosophers debate the exact ontological status of abstract objects (Are they fictions? Do they exist in the mind of God? Are they Platonic Forms?), all agree that they are causally effete: in themselves, they have no power to move physical bodies or change material life. Instead, they are the ways in which humans describe states of being they consider to be true. Thus, the idea that a nation can be reduced to an intellectual doctrine is absurd, and is akin to claiming that a people and nation have no material reality but exist only as a fiction in the minds of citizens. The propositional nation is therefore the negation of the nation. It is unsurprising, then, that the evolution of mass democracy, global governance, and the push for a universal and homogenous state has followed from this idea.

Yet we all know from experience and observation that this is untrue. People groups from disparate regions of the world are materially different. They speak different languages, practice different religions, have different law codes grounded in distinct principles, eat unique foods, and have different national calendars, social norms, ways of greeting, dancing, celebrating, and mourning. What creates and preserves distinct peoples and nations are these cherished ways of life—the bonds of kin, of shared affections, and of common life endeavors. Of course, all humans have beliefs, and belief and action are mutually forming: material life shapes the kinds of things we believe (or want to believe), while beliefs influence our choices and actions. Adopting a new set of national and citizen beliefs can shape and reform our material life, directing us toward higher and nobler ends; but just as easily, these beliefs can be held loosely or retrofitted to justify a previous way of life. This is why assimilation is extremely difficult and takes generations to be even marginally effective. People cling dearly to what is theirs and are reticent to adopt a culture not their own. Pledging allegiance to a set of national doctrines does not confer automatic assimilation or guarantee that newly minted citizens will, in fact, ever integrate into the host nation.

The founders of America had a different idea of what makes a nation. While not denying the importance of political principles and truths, they instead followed the teachings of the Law of Nations in proclaiming that nations are “moral persons.” This was the belief that a pre-existing people with a unique way of life could form a political unit with a will and understanding particular to itself. Only upon that basis could a people act as a singular and united entity. Nations, as moral persons, are accountable to the Law of Nations—the natural law applied to national entities. In other words, they are accountable to God.

In Federalist 62, James Madison declared that “One nation is to another, what one individual is to another.” John Jay, in his 1793 decision in Ware v. Hylton for the Circuit Court for the District of Virginia, argued that nations as “moral persons” are akin to “the natural body”: “whatever rights belong to the hand belong to the man, and every injury offered to the hand is offered to the man.” Thus, the sovereign “is bound to protect [the people], and consider all injuries done to them by such imputation as done to himself; that is, as done to the whole nation. Every judgment, therefore, against a subject, grounded on such imputation, is a judgment mediately against the sovereign or moral person with whom the treaty was made, and which moral person is composed of all the people or nation collectively considered.” Along with Madison and Jay, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also spoke of the American nation as a “moral person.” The New York Antifederalist Melancton Smith explained the nation simply, saying that “individuals entering into society become one body, and that body ought to be animated by one mind.”

The founders certainly believed that individuals played a role in forming and then administering a political community. But the means by which a loose collection of people became united into a single, national body was not through a legal contract of individuals, sustained and legitimated merely by the will of men; but through political covenant-making. The covenantal tradition in politics had deep roots in America, going back to the earliest colonies. What distinguishes a political covenant from a mere social compact or legal contract is that it acknowledges a divine power and higher law that men are accountable to. It then utilizes oaths or pledges of allegiance between men with God as witness and creates perpetual obligations that outlive those who originally enter into the covenant—effectively binding future generations to the political community. John Adams described it best in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution: “The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.” It is through the political covenantal process that individuals are united into a single, political body, and their common good is known, achieved, and protected. It is this political form that best describes the Declaration of Independence.

It is unsurprising, then, that we discover that America’s political structure post-1776 denied a thoroughgoing ontological individualism. The primary political entities represented in the Continental Congress, Declaration of Independence, and Articles of Confederation were the states—independent and sovereign political communities in their own right. Even the U.S. Constitution, which fundamentally altered the legal form of the Articles (that is, from a league of confederate friendship among the states to a partially consolidated federate republic) and allowed for the national Congress to legislate for the people at large, still retained a federal structure. Only the specifically enumerated powers in the Constitution were given over to Congress as legislative right; all other traditional powers (for example, domestic legislation of economics, religion, morals, police powers, etc.) were reserved to the states by way of the Tenth Amendment. The franchise as a political right was primarily restricted to male heads of households and those who owned productive property, which had the effect of maintaining the family as a political unit. Thus, America at the founding was a fusion of individuals, the family, local governments, the states, and the nation, organized in implicit traditional social hierarchies to create a harmonious whole.

The Dangers of Propositionalism

As mentioned above in several places, the idea of the proposition nation has helped introduce key errors into our politics. With the help of Carson Holloway’s chapter in Up From Conservatism, we will shed further light on these problems.

The propositional nation claim, Holloway contends, “elevates adherence to abstract principles at the expense of loyalty to our nation and to our fellow citizens.” This has led to a disregard of the common good of Americans in favor of greasing the wheels of globalism. As a result, Middle America has been hollowed out, wages have been driven down, and countless families have been dispossessed through a doctrine of economic Hegelianism that conveniently had nothing to do with the choices made by our political class. 

Casually disregarding the rights of citizenship of their own countrymen, the ruling class has imported a new caste of service workers from other nations, which has sowed disunion and dissension among the white working class. Meanwhile, among the cosmopolitan class, there’s been an increase in dual citizenship, which divides one’s loyalty between America and other nations, and a general disdain of the strong gods of patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty to one’s own people that are pivotal for any nation to have long-term success. 

Holloway maintains that the proposition nation claim has also produced “a reflexive moralism” that gives short shrift to the preconditions of republican government. Since America can be reduced to ideas simply, this has helped boost the neoconservative project of exporting democracy all over the world. It grossly understates the necessary habits of character that a citizenry must possess for self-government to operate, confusing the simple act of voting with the preconditions of republicanism itself. It also disarms America in the face of our allies and enemies, none of whom have to play by our rules and can take care of their own people above all other considerations.

Also, as one of us recently noted at American Reformer, it has also undermined our nation’s immigration policy (the world is, after all, full of over seven billion potential Americans). Originally, following the political covenantal tradition, citizenship was automatically conferred upon the children of citizens, not requiring their voluntary consent. Immigrants, according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, had to be ethnically homogenous with America’s British and Western European heritage; and they had to have resided in America for at least two years and prove in court that they were “a person of good character.” Only then were they allowed to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the nation. These residential, ethnic, and characterological requirements for citizenship—all reflecting America as hearth, home, and heritage—lasted until the radical revision of U.S. immigration law with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Henceforth and on the basis of anti-discrimination law, immigrants the world over were welcome to America. The only requirement was a naturalization oath of allegiance.

Finally, the proposition nation argument keeps the Total State humming through its implicit view of anthropology. If Americans simply need to be fed the right programming, they are bots that can be easily replaced. As Pavlos Papadopoulos has noted, the implications of the proposition nation’s view of man as a cog in the machine “empowers the managers, academics, and consultants who staff major corporations, nonprofits, and the administrative state, who appeal to their expert credentials (rather than the consent of the governed) as legitimating sources of their oligarchic authority, and thus undermine self-government in our federal republic.” Our founders instead saw Americans as three-dimensional, flesh and blood human beings with families, homesteads, loyalties, loves, religious needs, and more. If mouthing a few incantations of “liberty,” “equality,” and “rights” is all it takes for one to be an American, then we functionally have no nation.

Conclusion

In this time of political realignment, the idea of the propositional nation must be jettisoned for the language of hearth and home. At bottom, the propositional nation is part and parcel of the present American regime—where an immoral notion of progress is praised, homes are merely charging stations where one watches Netflix and porn and orders DoorDash, one’s closest family lives hours away, and Sunday mornings are for playing golf or watching a Sunday morning political show. The propositional nation flows from a sclerotic and deteriorating regime where the people en masse have lost a good deal of the hard-won virtues that once defined the American character. 

But, crucially, we are not yet at a place where this trend is irreversible.

We need to bring back the ideas of place, tradition, loyalty, and reputation—grounded, of course, on the political ideals that birthed America. While we cannot go back to 1776, we can strive to become a people who value analog life—people who have deep loyalties to family and friends and to their churches; people who work hard for a living and understand that caring about their nation is not worshiping an idol or tossing aside the Gospel in favor of xenophobia. Like our forefathers, we should pledge “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—grounded, of course, on “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”—to rebuild our homes, families, communities, and towns. It will take an immense amount of daring, courage, and fortitude, but the future of our nation is worth fighting for.

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