Ashbrook Center

In 1783, at Newburgh, Continental Army officers proposed marching on Congress to demand the back pay they were owed. Their grievance was real. Washington could have led them and become the arbiter of American politics. Instead he gathered the officers, told them he had grown old and nearly blind serving his country, and the whole thing dissolved.

That was the first of three times he walked away from power. Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, joins host Cara Rogers Stevens to explain what made a young officer who once begged for a British commission into the man Europe could not understand.

New episode of The American Idea, available now. Link in comments.

What made George Washington our first citizen?

On this episode of The American Idea, host Cara Rogers Stevens talks with Dr. Steven Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, about the character behind the marble statue.

Washington had a ferocious temper as a young officer. He was thin skinned enough that he once drafted a bitter farewell address lashing out at his critics, then threw it away. What set him apart was not the absence of flaws but his willingness to see them and work on them for the rest of his life.

Knott also explains why Washington walked away from power three separate times, what he learned from the soldiers he commanded, and why he ranks Washington above Lincoln as our greatest president.

It's live. Our new episode asks a question most of us think we can answer until we're pressed on it: what is a republic, and why did the founders choose one?

In 1776, choosing a republic meant rejecting both the monarchy the founders were born under and the direct democracy of the ancient world, the kind Rome had tried before collapsing into civil war and empire. Professor James Stoner of LSU walks through what representation actually solved, why the founders trusted a broad citizenry the ancients would have feared, and the civic habits they believed a republic cannot survive without.

Listen now. Link in comments.

Ask most Americans whether we live in a republic and the answer comes fast. Ask what a republic actually is, and things get quieter.

The founders faced a world where monarchy was simply assumed to be the natural order, and where the one great republican experiment everyone knew, Rome, had ended in civil war and empire. Choosing a republic in 1776 was closer to reckless than obvious. So what did they see that made the risk worth taking, and what did they believe it would ask of ordinary citizens?

Professor James Stoner of LSU joins us on the new episode of The American Idea, dropping Wednesday. Link in comments.

Is it true that gridlock in Congress is proof that 'the system' is broken? And is there anything wrong with our tendency to see virtually every issue as national, instead of local? Here's the twist — James Madison would tell us the first complaint is misguided and the second one is dead right.

In Federalist 10, Madison argued that a slow, contentious, gridlocked government is exactly what protects a free people from the tyranny of any single faction. What he never envisioned is a politics where every question, from schools to speed limits, gets settled in Washington, raising the stakes of every election until half the country dreads the outcome.

The new episode of The American Idea is out now, featuring Professor Joe Postell of Hillsdale College on factions, human nature, and what a Madisonian fix might look like. Link in comments.

The Anti-Federalists said a republic as large as America could never survive. Too many competing interests, too much conflict, no common good. James Madison read that argument and made a stunning reply: the conflict isn't the problem. It's the protection.

This Wednesday on The American Idea, we dig into Federalist 10 with Professor Joe Postell of Hillsdale College: what a faction actually is, why Madison believed the causes of division are "sown in the nature of man," and whether his 18th-century solution can handle our 21st-century politics.

Subscribe now so you don't miss it. Link in comments.

Jefferson found hope in it while dying. Lincoln built the Gettysburg Address on it. Coolidge defended it against the idea that founding principles had grown obsolete. King used it to indict segregation. Reagan warned that its freedom is always one generation from extinction.

The new episode of The American Idea is out today. Jeff Sikkenga and Dr. Jason Stevens open a year-long conversation on the Declaration of Independence at 250, and on what it still asks of Americans who want to understand their own country.

Listen link in the comments.

Home - Ashbrook Creating Informed Patriots The Ashbrook Center strengthens the capacities of the American people for constitutional self-government. Read more about Ashbrook’s mission. The Crisis Confronting America America’s current crisis is not simply a crisis of facts and information. It is a crisis of unde...

What did Jefferson see in the Declaration of Independence at the end of his life that gave him hope, even when the country around him seemed to be coming apart? What did Lincoln find there in 1863? Coolidge in 1926? King in 1963? Reagan in 1964?

This week on The American Idea, Jeff Sikkenga sits down with Dr. Jason Stevens to open a year-long conversation on the founding principles, beginning with the document that gave the nation its birthday. Subscribe link in the comments.

Out today on The American Idea: "Our Right to Privacy and the 4th Amendment."
Constitutional scholar Jeff Sikkenga joins host Cara Rogers Stevens to trace the amendment from colonial Boston, where writs of assistance let British officials search at will, to the unsettled questions of our own moment: aerial drones, drug-sniffing dogs on the porch, warrantless searches of old emails, and what counts as a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in 2026.

The Supreme Court has swung between property-based and privacy-based readings of the amendment for a century. Where things stand now, and what the founders might say about it, is worth an hour of your time.

Link in the comments.