The book presents a compelling argument for revitalizing America by addressing economic stagnation and moral decline through a fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism. It critiques the impact of progressivism on the political landscape, suggesting that both parties have lost sight of the Constitution's success, which lies in balancing freedom with tradition. By advocating for this new approach, the author aims to offer a pathway to restore America's foundational principles and promote recovery from its current challenges.
The book explores the challenges facing American values and institutions amid external terrorist threats and internal skepticism about the superiority of American traditions. Donald Devine examines the resilience of these values in a Western context that increasingly questions all established traditions, probing whether they can endure and be defended in today's complex landscape.
"Western civilization fashioned a capitalism that created a worldwide cornucopia but produced few grateful beneficiaries. Indeed, the market's creative destruction and individualist autonomy have become a challenge to capitalism's legitimacy. Even a sensitive person like Pope Francis called capitalism's "limitless" freedom a "fundamental terrorism against all humanity." The sympathetic economic historian Joseph Schumpeter had identified capitalism's "crumbling walls" a half-century earlier and predicted approaching civilizational collapse. Capitalism only survives today in what Schumpeter's classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy called a "fettered" form, harnessed by bureaucratic regulations that impede productivity, compound the problems they were designed to fix, and dissolve the moral structure that underlay capitalist civilization's creativity and moral legitimacy. A response to these challenges must begin with capitalism's defining author Karl Marx accurately setting capitalism's roots in feudalism and the implications of that historical inheritance, predominantly what Walter Lippmann identified as Rousseau's "Christian heresy." That revolution converted heavenly perfection into impossible to fulfill demands on earth, culminating in what F.A. Hayek considered the "superstition" that science could rationalize markets to achieve social perfection. To unravel this capitalist enigma, we identify the historical roots of the confusion, review the alternative rationalized solutions, and provide a pluralist John Locke-inspired legitimizing-synthesis to fuse a freedom and tradition moral scaffolding sufficient to hold the walls and preserve the best of capitalist civilization"-- Provided by publisher
