An old dog on our 250th birthday, America can become young again

Editor’s note: The following is the introductory essay for the August 2026 issue of Capital Research magazine that will be available soon. 

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Anyone with an old dog or cat knows the drill when they bring a new puppy or kitten into the home. The elderly pet begins running around with a spring in its step, lying around less, and generally remembering what it was like to be young again.

While still young in the history of nations, America, on its 250^th birthday, has become an old dog in relation to the high standards we set for ourselves. Our Founding and Constitution were designed to take full advantage of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, even as both pillars of modern civilization were born elsewhere and still relatively new in 1776.

No society leaned into those bold and beautiful ideas like young America, and we still have no rivals. The truth became abundantly clear this summer, when the World Cup soccer tournament came to our shores. Visitors from relatively rich societies across the globe filled their social media posts with astonished and (mostly) positive reactions to the culture that  Americans (at best) take for granted and (all too often) malign as too individualist or greedy and whatnot.

On the most mundane level, nothing became as treasured to our visitors as the discovery of mere ranch dressing. World Cup fans tried to cart so many bottles of ranch back home that TSA issued a cheeky advisory:

Are you kicking around the idea of flying home with your favorite dip? If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4 ounces or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags. Some heroes wear capes. Others bring ranch.

An ABC News report summarized the general phenomena:

Across TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms, fans from around the world are sharing their reactions to uniquely American experiences, from sprawling supermarkets and self-serve ice dispensers to oversized pickup trucks, fire engines and what many describe as exceptionally friendly customer service.

A tourism researcher quoted in the report provided this analysis:

What Americans consider ordinary is often extraordinary to visitors. [ . . .] A giant supermarket aisle, free ice water, refillable drinks or a cheerful grocery clerk may be just another Tuesday for Americans, but for someone visiting from Scotland, Brazil or Japan, these experiences are fascinating cultural discoveries.

In summary, our visitors this summer found us to be a nation of unusually friendly people providing unimaginably awesome stuff to total strangers. Jesus advised us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but it took almost eighteen more centuries before an entire civilization was purpose-built to put that ideal into practice.

The magic of America is that it rewards people who do wonderful things for total strangers they don’t even know and might not even like if they did know them. Even treating your enemies well can make you very rich in America. The reactions from our World Cup visitors reveal that America is still alone on the forefront regarding this revolution in human ethics.

So that is how the world saw America this summer, on our 250^th birthday. It was as if a huge army of Alexis de Tocqueville clones had come back nearly two centuries after publishing Democracy in America . . . and found even more to love.

Too often nowadays that is not how the old dog America has been taught to see itself. This special issue of Capital Research profiles some of the movements that have been teaching Americans to hate what we should love about ourselves.

Kali Fontanilla’s essay examines the work of the Zinn Education Project, a nonprofit that has been injecting the anti-American teachings of Howard Zinn into high school and college curriculums. After analyzing multiple Zinn lessons that impugn the American Revolution, our Constitution and capitalism, plus endorsements from those teaching these toxic lessons, Kali concludes:

That isn’t education. It’s slander with footnotes. And it is precisely what four decades of Zinn have handed America’s children in place of their inheritance.

The American Dream is that inheritance, and in the 20^th century California was the headquarters. But the dream in California has become a nightmare in the 21^st century. In this issue, California-based writer Chris Bray profiles a plague of left-wing nonprofits that have helped fuel the decline.

Unfortunately, as Bray notes, what starts in California doesn’t stay there:

California isn’t separate from America. It’s the bleeding edge of what America threatens to become, the social laboratory for a cultural transition. The state concentrates the dose of the burgeoning American poison. [. . .] California is a cultural leader in the view that private enterprise is cruelty and greed, while anything that doesn’t make a profit is inherently virtuous and decent.

Quoting an industry report, Bray notes that California’s nonprofit sector now accounts for one of every 14 jobs in the state. That’s a lot of not profiting.

Emphasizing the sheer size of this infrastructure is a sidebar report showing that the city of Oakland has 67 decidedly left-wing nonprofits within its borders—or more than one per square mile. Many of them, and possibly all of them, preach “economic justice.” Yet their combined net assets of nearly $1.9 billion would be enough to write a $31,000 check to every man, woman and child living below the poverty line in Oakland.

According to Mike Watson’s essay in this issue, American Big Labor has enjoyed a historical reputation of being more sensible and market-friendly than the more Marxist-inspired European labor unions. In Watson’s analysis, even this charitable history is exaggerated (after all, commies used to run some major American labor unions). And he shows how today’s Big Labor has been racing so fast to the left that it’s difficult to distinguish it from the most stridently left-wing movements America has to offer.

Banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon epitomized the special genius of the American system and, in so doing, left behind one of America’s largest charitable fortunes. Alas, in a too-familiar story, the wealth creator is long gone, and the wealth he built is now being used to tear down the reputation of an America that made it all possible. Robert Stilson’s profile of the Mellon Foundation notes, among other revelations, that the philanthropy bureaucrats spending Mellon’s money today are dishing out $1,000 per minute to prove American history is “an unbroken line of racist oppression.”

Ironically, what these tales all have in common is the inversion of an American virtue de Tocqueville praised. He put it this way in Democracy in America:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but also associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.

What he was speaking of was America’s charitable sector, now known as our nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). That virtuous sector still exists in mighty form, and it’s not difficult to find many (if not most) of today’s charities promoting the American culture that made their good works possible.

But our nonprofit sector is also riddled with anti-American NGOs that portray our virtues as vices, often using the money built from our virtues to try to destroy them. Their version of America isn’t that of a charming old dog that has forgotten its greatness but instead that of a rabid dog that should have been put down before it ever grew up.

Our World Cup visitors this summer haven’t been exposed to that lie, and it showed. On our 250^th birthday, they showed up like happy puppies to remind the old dog of what it once was. And if we pay attention to them, then unlike an actual old dog, America really can become young again.