“America today,” John Agresto laments, “seems a place where liberty has lost her loveliness” (164). With the Trump-Clinton presidential race in full swing (I write in the summer of 2016), there is not much “seeming” about it. A candidate manifestly unfit for any significant office has a real chance of becoming president in large part because his opponent is so uniformly disliked and distrusted. If the candidates are not bad enough, their campaigns have featured some of the most dangerous and harmful types of democratic rhetoric: class warfare, racial and ethnic demagoguery, and thoughtless nationalism. “We are… at a turning point in our national self-understanding perhaps as great as in the years before the Civil War” (166), Agresto writes. If that was not true when he composed the line a year or two ago, it certainly feels true now.

In Rediscovering America: Liberty, Equality, and the Crisis of Democracy, the former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe argues that for America to restore her political health, her citizens must rediscover America's founding principles. Toward that end, he offers civic lessons on the founders’ understanding of equality, natural rights, democracy, and liberty.

Equality, Agresto writes, means that “no one is created subordinate to another,” that no one is “superior by nature,” and, therefore, “that you may not force me to give up what is rightfully mine, or take away from me what I achieve through the use of my talents, or force me to submit to your schemes without my consent” (51). Rooted in human nature, equality is the foundation of our rights, including our natural right to property. This notion of equality stands opposed to the egalitarian and the redistributionist impulse to eliminate income disparities or differences in standards of living: “The Founders’ justice does not envision a ‘more equal’ distribution of wealth simply because we are all born equally free,” Agresto explains. “Rather, true social justice demands that people be allowed to possess what they earn, and enjoy the fruits of their own individual exertions” (73).

The Founders’ concern for justice led them to be wary of democracy. “The Founders had no interest in making the world safe for democracy,” Agresto reminds us. “If anything, their goal was almost the opposite—to make democracy safe for the world” (83). We tend to forget that creating a democratic government was not the Founders’ sole or even primary goal. They sought to secure individuals’ natural rights and the blessings of liberty, which required limitations of democratic rule.

None of these observations is particularly novel, but originality is not Agresto's intention. He wrote the book for “parents” and “ordinary citizens,” with the purpose of showing them that America's founding principles are “just, rare, and worthy of transmission from their generation to the next” (167). Understanding precedes devotion, he observes, so the better Americans understand their political heritage the more likely they are to preserve it.

Accordingly, Agresto keeps the work free of academic jargon or scholarly pretentiousness. The book's simple and sometimes lyrical prose will be ideal for the young student reading on her own or homeschooling parents instructing their children in civics. The book also could be useful as supplement for “American Government 101” classes, especially those that only spend a session or two on the Founding.

One hopes that students will read to the end of the work, because the last chapter, “Liberty, Equality, and the Character of American Life,” offers uncommonly thoughtful reflections on the relationship between politics and character. The book begins and ends with Agresto recalling his time in Iraq, where, after the fall of Bagdad in 2003, Agresto served as senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and then as interim provost and chancellor of American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. Many of his Iraqi friends were uncertain at best about the merits of political freedom:

In 2004, President George W. Bush proclaimed that “the desire for freedom resides in every human heart.” That may be true, but Agresto's story is meant to reveal that freedom is unlikely to be the only or most fundamental thing we seek and that the order of desires can be deeply affected by the laws under which we live.

Just as Saddam Hussein's tyranny truncated many Iraqi souls, Agresto fears that the libertinism of our law, coupled with a welfare state that encourages personal irresponsibility, has debased American character. We are becoming (or have become) self-absorbed subjects, not independent citizens who govern ourselves. We wallow in feelings of entitlement, rather than take responsibility for solving our own problems. Law influences character, and over the last two or three generations, Agresto contends, our laws have favored immorality and dependency over moderation and responsible self-sufficiency. Declines in religious practice and affiliation have only made matters worse.

Other conservatives have made similar arguments supported with robust social scientific evidence (see Charles Murray's Losing Ground and Coming Apart) and deeper philosophical reflection (see Mark Blitz's Duty Bound and Conserving Liberty). But this is not really a fair criticism, as Agresto's purpose is to teach students, citizens, and parents at a more elementary level.

Agresto writes confidently as a self-identified conservative because he believes conservatism can make a better moral argument than either liberal egalitarianism or libertarianism. That stance will undoubtedly turn away some readers. But in this time of Trump, perhaps young liberals and libertarians will find it refreshing to learn that conservatives actually can make good arguments, and that there exists a moral case for self-reliance, limited government, ordered liberty, and equality before the law. These ideals used to make America great, as John Agresto helpfully reminds us.