On August 20, 2001, I arrived in the United States with my family after leaving Brazil, the country in which I had been born, educated, and built my professional life. Three weeks later, I watched in horror as terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11. Like millions of Americans, I experienced a mixture of grief, shock, and disbelief. Yet what surprised me almost as much as the attacks themselves was the reaction I saw in portions of the Brazilian press and among intellectuals back home. Too many commentators seemed unable to express solidarity with the victims without immediately turning to explanations that shifted moral responsibility away from the murderers and onto the society that had been attacked.

　　At the time, I wrote an op-ed arguing that the attacks were directed not simply against particular American policies, but against something larger: the civilization represented by the American constitutional order. Looking back twenty-five years later, I still believe that the deeper conflict revealed on September 11 was between free societies rooted in individual liberty and movements hostile to those principles.

　　My admiration for the United States did not arise from the expectation of material gain. Life had been good for me in Brazil. My family’s story reflected the opportunities the country could offer. My grandparents arrived there as Jewish immigrants escaping persecution in Europe, carrying little more than hope and determination. My father and grandfather worked in real estate development, and I eventually followed the same path, later founding a real estate finance company that I sold before moving to America.

　　Yet despite the success I had enjoyed in Brazil, I always felt a stronger sense of intellectual and emotional affinity with the United States than with the country of my birth. That attraction emerged long before I understood political philosophy in any systematic way. As a child and teenager, I absorbed America through its culture. I watched films about the Second World War and grew up admiring the role the United States had played in defeating Nazism. Movies such as Casablanca, The Longest Day, and Sands of Iwo Jima shaped my imagination. I remember watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on television with wonder. American literature also opened a world to me. Mark Twain, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Ayn Rand all helped create an emotional connection to a society that appeared dynamic, self-confident, and profoundly free.

　　Later, in my twenties, I encountered the ideas of classical liberalism and began to understand intellectually what I had already sensed emotionally. Thinkers such as Tocqueville, Hayek, Mises, and Merquior helped me appreciate the uniqueness of the American experiment. What distinguished the United States was not merely wealth or military power, but a constitutional order grounded in the dignity of the individual, the limitation of political authority, and the conviction that human beings should largely be free to direct their own lives.

　　This was especially striking to someone formed in a Latin American environment. Brazil possesses many virtues, but it has long struggled with deep authoritarian tendencies. During much of my life, the country oscillated between military rule, populism, and technocratic centralization, resulting in ideological polarization. Even in supposedly democratic periods, there remained a widespread assumption among elites that society should be directed from above by enlightened experts, bureaucrats, or political saviors. The notion that the state exists primarily to protect liberty rather than to organize society never had deep roots there.

　　That contrast helped me understand something fundamental about America: one becomes American not only by birth, but by embracing a civic creed. The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution created a nation unlike others in history. America, the creation of British Christians, was never based on blood, ethnicity, or religion. Instead, it invited people from many backgrounds to participate in a political order centered on liberty under law.

　　Most societies throughout history have been organized around hierarchy, tribe, empire, religion, or centralized authority. Stable constitutional liberty has been the exception, not the rule.

　　This does not mean culture is irrelevant. On the contrary, institutions do not sustain themselves automatically. Tocqueville observed nearly two centuries ago that America’s free institutions rested upon habits, associations, moral beliefs, and civic virtues developed within society itself. Constitutional government requires citizens who believe in restraint, responsibility, and the legitimacy of law, all of which were aided by the English political tradition and the Protestant ethics brought to the colonies.

　　That insight also explains why free societies can become fragile. Laws and constitutions cannot survive indefinitely if the underlying culture ceases to support them. When intellectual elites teach generations of students that law is merely an instrument of power, that objective justice does not exist, or that constitutional restraints are obstacles to enlightened administration, respect for free institutions gradually weakens. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences of Positivism, Socialism, and Marxism in their many variants, such as cultural Marxism and critical legal theory, are corrosive.

　　In Brazil, I witnessed the long-term effects of those attitudes. Political polarization increasingly encouraged the idea that legal norms mattered only when convenient. Corruption scandals became so common that many citizens lost faith in institutions altogether. Political actors across the spectrum often treated constitutional limits as technical inconveniences rather than binding principles. The result was cynicism, distrust, and the gradual erosion of confidence in the rule of law.

　　When I first moved to the United States in 2001, I believed America remained largely immune to those tendencies. In retrospect, I was naïve. At the time, the country appeared remarkably strong and stable. The Cold War had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy. The federal government was even running a budget surplus. Technological innovation seemed poised to transform human life for the better. The United States looked to many observers like the natural culmination of constitutional self-government combined with economic freedom.

　　The disputes surrounding the 2000 presidential election actually reinforced my admiration. From abroad, it seemed extraordinary that such a contentious political crisis could ultimately be resolved through legal and constitutional procedures without institutional collapse. In much of the world, a similar situation might have provoked military intervention, street violence, or a constitutional rupture. In the United States, the system held.

　　Over the years, however, I gradually came to see signs of institutional and cultural deterioration. Some of these changes were small and personal. I experienced incidents of dishonesty, dysfunction, and irresponsibility that surprised me because they contradicted my idealized image of American civic life. Other developments were far more significant. I observed growing distrust between citizens, increasing political tribalism, and a weakening commitment to constitutional restraint.

　　Perhaps the most important long-term change has been the steady expansion of the administrative state. Beginning in the Progressive Era, many reformers became convinced that democratic self-government was too inefficient and irrational to manage modern society. They increasingly transferred authority from elected representatives to permanent bureaucratic institutions staffed by experts. We would never know the sort of arrangement that could have arrived in the absence of government intervention to create the coordination obviously necessary in a modern nation, but the cumulative result of those interventions has been the growth of an immense apparatus often insulated from democratic accountability.

　　This transformation altered the balance originally envisioned by the Constitution. The separation of powers, federalism, and legislative responsibility weakened as executive agencies accumulated rulemaking, enforcement, and quasi-judicial authority. At the same time, fiscal discipline eroded. The federal government now operates under debt levels and monetary practices that earlier generations of Americans would likely have regarded as incompatible with constitutional government.

　　None of this means America has ceased to be a free society. It remains vastly freer and more stable than most of the world. Nor does it mean that all political disagreements should be interpreted as signs of impending collapse. Democratic societies naturally experience conflict. Free institutions are resilient precisely because they allow peaceful disagreement.

　　Still, it would be foolish to ignore the cultural and institutional pressures now facing the country, festering discontent. Universities, media institutions, corporations, and parts of the political class increasingly embrace leftist ideologies that view the American founding tradition primarily through the lens of oppression and power. Some critics certainly raise legitimate historical questions. No serious person should deny the injustices that existed in American history. Yet when a society loses confidence in the moral legitimacy of its own constitutional order, to the point of, for instance, downplaying the immense sacrifices made to correct those injustices, it risks undermining the very principles that made reform and progress possible in the first place.

　　This concern becomes especially important in discussions about immigration and assimilation, and let’s be clear: assimilation must be the goal. One of America’s greatest strengths has always been its ability to integrate people from different backgrounds into a common civic culture. I am myself a beneficiary of that tradition. But successful assimilation requires confidence in the civilization newcomers are joining. A society uncertain about its own values cannot effectively transmit them.

　　Europe’s recent struggles illustrate the problem. Large-scale immigration from regions with weak to nonexistent liberal traditions has created tensions that political leaders were unwilling to confront honestly. The issue is not ethnicity or race. Human beings from any background can embrace liberty. The real question is whether liberal societies still possess the cultural confidence necessary to expect newcomers to adopt constitutional norms, equality before the law, and the separation of religion from political coercion, which characterize the societies from which most of them come.

　　America remains, despite all its imperfections, one of the greatest achievements in political history.

　　The United States still possesses that possibility because the American civic tradition remains stronger than many critics acknowledge. Thanks to my teaching position at Hillsdale College, I can vouch for that. Even after years of polarization and institutional decay, millions of Americans continue to believe deeply in constitutional self-government, free enterprise, federalism, freedom of speech, religious liberty, and the rule of law. Those principles are not abstractions. They shape everyday life by limiting arbitrary power and preserving space for individuals, families, religious communities, and civil society to flourish independently of the state.

　　My own life reflects the power of that tradition. I became an American citizen not because I was born here, but because I consciously chose to identify with the ideals of the Founding. That choice carried both emotional and moral significance. America represented to me not perfection, but aspiration: the attempt to create a political order in which human dignity is protected by limiting power rather than concentrating it.

　　The older I become, the more I appreciate how rare that achievement truly is in human history. Most societies throughout history have been organized around hierarchy, tribe, empire, religion, or centralized authority. Stable constitutional liberty has been the exception, not the rule. It survives only when citizens are willing to defend it intellectually, culturally, and politically.

　　History offers sobering reminders of how fragile civilizations can be. The collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe did not occur in a single dramatic moment. It unfolded gradually through institutional exhaustion, declining civic confidence, and the inability of elites to preserve political order. The Byzantines, too, ultimately collapsed despite clinging admirably to their Christian civilizational identity. These examples should not be treated as exact parallels to contemporary America. History never repeats itself mechanically. But they do remind us that free or freer societies are not guaranteed permanence.

　　For that reason, I reject both despair and complacency. Some critics, notably our foreign adversaries and domestic socialists, portray the United States as irredeemably corrupt or oppressive. Others, mainly on the right of the political spectrum, insist that its institutions require no serious reform and will survive automatically regardless of cultural conditions. Both attitudes are mistaken.

　　America remains, despite all its imperfections, one of the greatest achievements in political history. Its constitutional order created unprecedented opportunities for human flourishing, scientific innovation, economic mobility, religious pluralism, and individual liberty. Millions of immigrants, including myself, were drawn to this country not merely because it was prosperous, but because it represented a moral and political ideal.

　　At the same time, ideals also require leaders to be at least minimally committed to those values. Constitutional government depends on habits of self-restraint, civic trust, and respect for truth that post-Modernists and many other segments of the intelligentsia deny. A society cannot remain free if every institution becomes subordinated to ideological warfare or if political victory is pursued without regard for constitutional norms.

　　My affection for America, therefore, has become less naïve over the years, but also deeper. When I first arrived, I loved an idealized image of the country. Today, I love a more complicated reality. I have seen dishonesty, political extremism, bureaucratic excess, and cultural fragmentation. Yet I have also seen extraordinary generosity, patriotism, entrepreneurial energy, religious vitality, and resilience, both in my capacity as a Liberty Fund fellow and as an instructor at Hillsdale.

　　Most importantly, I still believe the American experiment remains worth preserving. Within American society, a large and often quiet population continues to cherish the principles of ordered liberty inherited from the founding generation. They may disagree passionately on policy questions, but they retain a common belief that legitimate government must be limited by law and accountable to the people.

　　The future of American liberty will not depend on nostalgia or slogans. It will depend on whether citizens can recover the moral confidence necessary to sustain free institutions in an age of polarization, bureaucracy, and ideological confusion. That task requires humility as much as conviction. It requires recognizing both the greatness of the American tradition and the reality of its imperfections.

　　As an immigrant who chose this country freely, I remain grateful for what America has given me: not simply opportunity, but belonging. The United States taught me that a nation can be united not only by ancestry, but by shared political principles and a common commitment to liberty under law.

　　That achievement is precious. It deserves criticism when it fails, reform when it strays, and defense when it is threatened. Above all, it deserves citizens capable of preserving it for future generations.

　　Imperfect as all human creations are, the United States remains the clearest example of a society organized around the ideal of individual freedom. For that reason, despite all its flaws and uncertainties, it remains a country worthy of loyalty, gratitude, and hope.