How a civilization built by giants is being squandered by heirs who neither understand nor value it.
There is an old adage in the world of business: the first generation builds it, the second maintains it, and the third ruins it. Half of second-generation businesses fail. Ninety percent of third-generation businesses collapse altogether. The cause is not mysterious. The founders, having labored in the soil of hardship and necessity, understood every bolt, every gasket, every ledger, every client. They knew the soul of their enterprise because they had poured their own into it.
The second generation, if fortunate, was spared the trauma of building from nothing, but then also, its benefit: the lessons, the education, the relationships. They inherited not wisdom but a client base, a brand, a reputation — living, in a sense, on the moral capital of their predecessors.
By the third generation, the end is usually foreordained. The client base ages and evaporates. The intricate skills and savage pragmatism of the founders have atrophied. The third heirs, knowing nothing of the conditions that produced their fortune, and instead enjoyed only its benefits, imagine it eternal and inexhaustible. They live not on reputation, but on credit. They consume what they neither earned nor could replicate. In their hands, the thing rots.
This, more than any other analogy, captures the American condition today.
The first generation of America — stretching from the Founders through the architects of victory in the Second World War — was a generation of builders. Not merely builders of physical wealth and armaments, but of a civilization: a moral, political, and economic framework that married liberty to duty, ambition to gratitude. These men and women plowed a wilderness, designed a republic, abolished slavery, industrialized a continent, and defeated fascism. They made, quite literally, the modern world.
The second generation, the children of the Greatest Generation, were raised amid the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years. By the 1950s, the United States stood alone — unmatched economically, militarily, culturally. The postwar boom created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. Yet with that inheritance came a profound, almost adolescent restlessness. The counterculture of the 1960s was not the rebellion of the oppressed, but the tantrum of the cosseted. Only a society fat on its own success could afford the luxury of despising its own foundations.
And now, the third generation — spiritually, if not chronologically — has taken the stage. This generation has inherited a world of endless conveniences, protections, and entertainments they had no hand in creating. They sip lattes brewed by global trade networks, rail against “oppression” on devices that communicate at the speed of light, and denounce capitalism while wearing shoes stitched together by greedy capitalists operating a dozen different supply chains. They live not only on fiscal debt, though our $34 trillion national deficit testifies well enough to that, but on civilizational debt — a reckless borrowing against the moral and material capital accumulated by their forebears.
But the tragedy now is not merely neglect. It is rejection. Today’s heirs do not simply ignore the values that built their inheritance — they scorn them. Hard work is denounced as a form of exploitation. Self-reliance is mocked as selfishness. Discipline is cast as cruelty. Education — once the hard-won ladder out of poverty — has become a grotesque parody, a mechanism for grievance-mongering rather than enlightenment. Being law-abiding and upstanding, once the minimal dues of citizenship, is now treated as suspect — or worse, as evidence of some unexamined privilege. Family, religion, social norms — all these pillars are now scorned as antiquated shackles, relics to be smashed in the name of liberation.
Worse still, America itself is now seen not as the culmination of human striving, but as the very embodiment of injustice. There is no aspiration on the Left to revive yesterday’s greatness, no ambition to build upon the extraordinary achievements of Western civilization. Instead, there is only contempt: contempt for the republic, for the culture, for the very idea of the West itself. In a staggering feat of historical amnesia, a generation made comfortable and free by the triumphs of Western ideals now regards those very ideals as the root of all evil — a posture possible only for those so privileged, so mollycoddled, that they can afford to sneer at the civilization that shields them.
This is not mere drift; it is deliberate self-destruction, carried out with a zeal that borders on the ecstatic. Open the borders? Of course — let anyone in, vetting optional. Run up astronomical debts? Why not — future generations can sort it out. Ship our factories, our jobs, and our capital overseas? Fine — cheaper goods for now. Invite into the country those who despise its very existence? Absolutely — diversity is strength, after all. Teach our children to loathe their own history, to see the Founders as villains, and to view Western civilization itself as a long crime against humanity? What took us so long?
Above all else, demand rights and privileges, and reject anything even resembling responsibility. And when all that fails — when the entitlement, the grievance, the endless accommodations still fail to produce a standard of living superior or even equal to that of one’s parents — then take the final step: declare that the system itself was corrupt from the beginning, that the business was rotten all along, and that the only solution is to rip it down entirely.
Each choice, taken individually, might seem reckless. Taken together, they form a manifesto: an open declaration that America as constituted — its borders, its economy, its culture, its ideals — is unworthy of survival, and demands to be looted.
The spasmodic return of Donald Trump — or more precisely, the furious insistence upon his return — is not the cause of this decay but its inevitable backlash. It is the clumsy, imperfect, but unmistakable demand of a wounded nation that the deliberate march toward self-destruction be halted. Trump is no architect of renewal; he is a battering ram against the gates of managed decline. His political reemergence, despite every institutional attempt to exile him, is a sign that a significant portion of the citizenry longs not merely to remember the past, but to salvage something of its inheritance before it is finally burned to the ground.
I don’t know that Trump will be successful. His attack on American institutions seems quite contrary to preserving them. A politics long on grievances is often short on solutions, and the first hundred or so days of Trump II have been characterized more by tearing down than building up, by antagonizing rather than reconciling. This seems more a temporary receivership than a true revival.
But whatever the result, it is impossible to miss the meaning behind the movement: an insistence that the American family business be saved from its prodigal heirs, lest when the final notice comes due, we look up in dumb astonishment, wondering why the lights have gone out.
