America Has A Culture — And It Is Worth Defending

“Americans have no culture,” decry the progressives, the activists, the woke leftists, smug Europeans, and the most spoiled individuals alive today.

This is the latest sentiment from our culture-deniers. They excuse their hatred, disdain, and active dismembering of our nation by claiming we’re on stolen land with nothing of our own worth defending. They are dead wrong.

To understand American culture, one first has to understand how it took root — and why it could only have happened here. In 1776, with the help of God, the Bible, an esteemed moral compass, a fiery yearning for freedom, and the long memory of what tyranny looks like, our Founders granted independence to the United States of America.

They did something no people in history had ever done: they created a nation not by inheritance or conquest, but by deliberate choice and reflection. As John Adams wrote in 1776, Americans were among “the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.” George Washington called the republican model “an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Benjamin Franklin, stepping out of the Constitutional Convention, famously answered a woman asking what had been produced: “A republic, madam — if you can keep it.”

America became the first modern republic explicitly grounded in natural rights, limited government, and biblical morality. This was rare. Unique. A risk. And it paid off spectacularly.

While Europe was dominated by monarchies and the Old World was bound by inherited hierarchy and colonial absolutism, people in the West were sitting down to create a creed-based nation. Soon, anyone could become an American by embracing the ideas of 1776, rejecting Old World hierarchies, and building a culture of opportunity, personal responsibility, and generosity.

Today, America remains the greatest country in the world — the freest, most prosperous, most decent, and most opportunity-rich society on earth — where individuals of any background can still become the architect of their own destiny through hard work, faith, and the unalienable rights endowed by their Creator. The United States still produces over a quarter of the entire world’s wealth with just 4% of its population. Freedom of speech and religion remain sacred — 81% of Americans say speech should be protected “at all costs.” Our military remains the most powerful force for good in history, deterring tyrants and keeping the global order stable so freedom can flourish. She leads the planet in innovation, patents, and Nobel prizes, and offers the ordinary person the highest standard of living anywhere in the world.

Her success proves the Founders’ creed-based experiment in self-government under God continues to deliver more liberty and human flourishing than any other nation in history. 

America was, and remains, the rarest and most exceptional thing in political history.

The United States is where people come to live a better life. That is why non-Americans are clamoring to get inside the minute they get the chance. But according to many on the Left (and some on the Right), America doesn’t have a culture. I beg to differ.

To me, American culture is playing in the yard with neighbors, running home when Mom calls you for dinner, saying prayers before a meal and before bed, church on Sunday, working hard and playing harder, football, freedom, hot dogs, friends, family, traveling, sharing laughter, and being able to do and say whatever the hell you want. If our culture had a theme song, Rascal Flatts’ “Fast Cars and Freedom” would play well.

But that is what is so incredible about this nation: American culture can look different to everyone. For some, it means never settling down, hitchhiking across all 50 states, starting a travel business, making millions, and donating a portion to the charity of your choice. For others, it means falling in love with whoever you want, raising a family, choosing how and where they grow up, living on a small plot of land, going to work, and tending a garden. It can mean choosing burgers, pasta, tacos, or sushi for dinner. It can mean flying to space with your fellow astronauts and reaching farther than any human being has ever gone before. It can mean choosing to serve your country at age 17, fighting our enemies abroad, and defending our sacred freedoms at home. It can mean losing everything and starting from scratch after hitting rock bottom. It’s Girl Scout cookies, space expeditions, bloody hockey champions wearing the American flag — it’s being immensely proud of our nation, despite its flaws. American culture is perfect and imperfect. It’s customizable to oneself.

John Adams wrote that he had to study politics and war so that his children could study mathematics and philosophy, so that their children could study painting and poetry. That inheritance is ours. We are the generation he was writing for, and we are lucky enough to live inside the culture he made possible.

Yet universally, it is a culture that protects natural rights, rewards merit and hard work through the freest markets on earth, and safeguards the freedoms of speech and religion that no other society has ever guaranteed at this scale. It would behoove us to remember what our martyred American champion Charlie Kirk said about this culture — the culture of the American settler: faith-driven, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and generous, born from people who fled oppression to build something better under God. It is a culture of opportunity and virtue. And this has cultivated the most innovative, charitable, and upwardly mobile society ever known, where immigrants still pour in because nowhere else lets the ordinary man rise so far on talent and effort alone.

So when you ask, “What is American culture?” Put simply, it is living proof that the rarest political experiment in history actually worked.

My culture cultivates greatness. To be American is to know that, feel it in your bones, and wake up every day grateful for it.

As I write this from my deck — sun on my face, country music in my ears, the Capitol standing tall before me — I am reminded that none of this was an accident. It was built, fought for, and paid for in blood and belief by people who had every reason to quit but didn’t. That legacy landed in our hands. What we do with it is on us. 

The next time someone tells you America has no culture, no soul, nothing worth saving — look around. Really look. This country gave ordinary people an extraordinary life. It still does. It will keep doing it as long as we have the spine to stand up and say so.

I do. I will. And if you don’t — there’s a plane leaving tonight.