OAN Commentary by: Theodore R. Malloch
Friday, June 19, 2026
To truly celebrate our monumental American birthday of two and a half centuries, we should honor our past by preserving and advancing its future. The best way to do so, is to ask how we as citizens can renew our American ideals.
Lists… now we all have our own lists.
To-do lists, action lists, shopping lists, lists for this, and lists for that.
Whether it is Ten Commandments, seven habits or nine suggestions, people have been making lists to keep score or form culture since time immemorial.
Some lists nailed to cathedral doors in the form of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses actually changed history. Others are merely motivational or aspirational.
What’s on your list for America?
In the mid-1980’s Peter Berger, the late, renowned sociologist took on the Marxists and provided a tough-minded, provocative analysis of how capitalism, as the great engine of change, had revolutionized modern life, in America and elsewhere.
His empirical findings laid a basis for a powerful and testable new idea that was shaping what he termed “economic culture”.
The core idea was simply that the modern market economy we call ‘capitalism’ transforms every other aspect of society—for the better.
In his final analysis, Berger postulated Fifty Propositions about prosperity, equality, and liberty.
Marxism was proved conclusively — wrong. It still is in every form or experience. It is also essentially anti-American, by definition. Our future is not bettered by Leftist ideologies, wokism, or anything other than our original Judeo-Christian values.
In a similar vein but not nearly so theoretical, given the date, it is time we focused on July 4, 2026, to forge a large argument, a case so to speak about the need to renew American culture while keeping very much to the framers’ intention about their central concern — “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Here then are THIRTY-FIVE PROPOSITIONS that taken together could do nothing less than bring about the very renewal of American culture commencing in 2026 — looking long into our bright and shining future.
1. The Pursuit of Happiness is a uniquely American dynamic and positive outlook that should continue to shape our destiny and now also affects freedom-seeking people around the world.
2. This transcendent right, like life and liberty, is not derived from any government, institution, or individual and is unalienable.
3. The Founders’ bold wager that the purpose of society is supporting each individual’s definitive right to live freely and happily is the most monumental experiment in human history. It must abound and continue.
4. It follows that the central purpose of constitutional republican government, culture and work is to put power in the service of human flourishing and prosperity
5. The rapid, interlinked dynamics of technology, the growth of knowledge and globalization have created a perfect storm of change—all unleashed by this still unfolding dynamic American experiment.
6. Trade in ideas and products and the movement of people, are leading the way to a more integrated, yet complex technological civilization. The world’s operating system is in effect being rewritten and updated today.
7. Moving through this economic transition, a new Schumpeterian cycle of “creative destruction” and intense entrepreneurial competition and repositioning is sweeping through like a tornado. It is literally a revolution of Intelligence itself. America is well-positioned to succeed and continue its prosperity, if we maintain a market economy and project our strength – militarily, economically, and spiritually.
8. The prospects for civility are grounded in notions of human flourishing and conditioned on the premise that private, public and social sectors each have something unique to provide the American future.
9. The humanities need to be rethought to become a keystone to hold together the converging forces of commerce, technology, the explosion of knowledge, as well as the interaction of different cultures and religions.
10. As moral animals, humans are inescapably interested in and guided by normative cultural orders that specify what is good, right, true, beautiful, worthy, noble, and just in life, and what is not. This is what America is all about. A loyal patriotism should prevail.
11. Human beings, in distinction from physical, biotic and psychical entities, function as active agents in the entire range of fundamental dimensions: they think; they speak; and they believe. No other creature can claim this, natural or artificial. Families and marriage bonds are what make life possible and must be defended.
12. As liberty, leadership and happiness all depend on a well-developed self-regulating system of character, so creative intellectual, entrepreneurial, and artistic work requires self-delineation and self-control. Being digital may be the new reality but with it come great responsibilities.
13. America needs to befriend technological change and tame its darker side, since technology advances the prospects for human flourishing, empowers individual learning and innovation, places learning at the core of economics. The humanities comprehend and record that fact, including the all-important human dimensions.
14. The world is now akin to a series of local area networks that form a cybernetic wide area network, accessible through the World Wide Web. Being outside the loop is to be cut-off from the forces shaping the future.
15. American civics need to befriend technological change and tame its darker side, since technology advances the prospects for human flourishing, empowers individual learning and innovation, places learning at the core of economics, including the all-important and irreducible human dimensions.
16. The old, traditional gulf between the spiritual and the economic can be bridged, as there is a spiritual basis for economic activity, a “spiritual form of capital” which is linked to human and social capital. This is virtuous.
17. Genuine economic growth is creative management of endowed resources by stewards acting on their commitments, guided by normative laws, character, principled habits and practices. These are embedded across the American experience.
18. Markets influence and are influenced by the moral character of culture. Put simply: markets matter.
19. The State alone is not able or willing to fund everything: including the arts and humanities. Publics, as customers, are being asked to pay for services and goods on a contributory basis or in competitive, real markets.
20. The humanities must be re-engaged with intellectual renewal and re-engagement with science, the arts, and religion in a constructive effort to envision and articulate a positive vision of future of human prosperity and flourishing in the American nation-state. America a continental power is our home. We are not homeless. Only select legal immigrants are welcome.
21. In a robust knowledge economy driven by innovation, the not-for-profit sector needs to be rethought, including the role it should play in helping to define both purpose and strategies. Americans are generous and philanthropic acts should be encouraged.
22. Leaders in the private sector must articulate the larger goals of commerce, and leaders in the social sector should come to understand the practical methods and rationales of knowledge-based economics and artificial intelligence. Serving humanity primarily America’s citizens, must be the pinnacle of American achievement.
23. If personal happiness consists of well-fitted energies of individual character, then social happiness or justice consists of well-fitted arrangements of a differentiated and pluralistic society and the skills and actions made possible through the mechanisms of finance and money. We need to embrace our deep Christian roots as they are both who we are and worth defending.
24. The integrated knowledge economy of global proportions is freed of the conflicts and shackles of the past. It may be becoming more and more boundary-less. But nation states as actors more than ever guide its future. Globalism is an unacceptable option, empirically shown to be suboptimal (not to mention chaos-inducing for those nations already ahead of the curve).
25. As dynamics in economics, knowledge and culture become increasingly powerful, a complementary power develops for decentralized localities that understand their role in the emerging order. Ironically, globalization results in a need for enlarged value for the local.
26. Human-rich communities that succeed in linking leadership, education, and cultural assets are more competitive and offer the prospect of a greater state of well-being and wellness for citizens. Multiculturalism is unworkable.
27. Cultivating the potential for enlightened and responsible leadership appropriate to the new context of action means envisioning and designing curriculum for leadership. deregulation, experimentation in fifty state laboratories and the freedom to explore new horizons and novel solutions.
28. Victimhood as a model of social/political analysis is a variation on the same ideas of “conscious detachment” that created rationalism and romanticism, and, like them is an intellectual dead-end. Victimhood as a universal model paralyzes action and hope for future good.
29. In the past decades the plethora of new laws, rules, and practices have made all organizations more accountable. The spread of higher standards for governance and accountability is laudable and should continue.
30. The future of democracy and civil society depend on the success of corporations as key structures through which people freely associate and work together in a highly diversified and productive society. Corporate organization, in the for profit and nonprofit sectors is the primary organizational structure to create free, plural and productive societies. Low taxes, deregulation and economic growth are to be encouraged.
31. Both the humanities and religion are a critical source of social capital. The adage that societies with an abundance of such are: healthier, more democratic and more prosperous, is proven.
32. As the wellspring of civic mindedness, universities and churches, achieve their intended purpose when they help to build more and lasting social and spiritual capital. America is called to be a “city on a hill”. It is our destiny and calling as a people. influencing public discourse for the good, our laws must be based in a philosophy of the good.
33.There is an urgent cry for humaneness, civility and a restored sense that human persons and the cultures they form and interact in should be rooted in a theory of development anchored not just in ever growing material wealth, necessary as that may be, but also in a philosophy of human flourishing.
34. Practical people may disagree about virtue or which virtues to exalt but religion is the keeper of wisdom and personal narrative that allow and encourage such dialogue and contain it in the public sphere. 35. More than ever in a complex and technological setting, and on a lonely planet, we seek wisdom, a dialogue grounded in the good. Only then we can renew our American culture so that it will last another 250 years.
35. More than ever in a complex and technological setting, and on a lonely planet, we seek wisdom, a dialogue grounded in the good. Only then we can renew our American culture so that it will last another 250 years.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, scholar-diplomat-strategist, former professor at Yale and Oxford, has published twenty books over a long career, including Doing Virtuous Business, Common Sense Business, and his latest, GREATNESS: The Trump Revolution and the Coming Golden Age.
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