Last week, City Journal honored Ben Shapiro—commentator, public intellectual, and co-founder of the Daily Wire—with the 2026 City Journal award. We are pleased to publish Shapiro’s remarks.
It’s a true honor to be given this award by City Journal, perhaps the finest intellectual publication in America. I’ve been a longtime City Journal devotee, both because of its incredibly thought-provoking and well-researched investigations and because of its courage in stating that which must be said. But there’s something else that makes City Journal and Manhattan Institute unique: their optimism.
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I am an enormous fan of both City Journal and Manhattan Institute because of their unflagging, unwavering optimism about America. That optimism shines through in their particular focus: solving concrete problems. To solve problems, you see, requires that a few presuppositions be true: first, that we live in a system in which problems can be solved; second, that problems can be attributed to discoverable and cognizable causes; and third, that curing such problems isn’t a Sisyphean, nihilistic task, but a life-improving and life-affirming one.
Unfortunately, we now live in a time in which solving problems has become passé.
Both the Left and significant segments of the Right—call them the horseshoe Right—are no longer interested in solving concrete problems. Instead, both are fascinated with the idea of a simple, magical pill that will wipe away all problems at once.
That’s because both the Left and this swath of the Right have decided that our problems are unsolvable. Both have decided that our system is fundamentally flawed; both have decided that our problems are systemic and diffuse; both have decided that curing problems is not merely a fool’s errand, but counterproductive, since solutions tend to uphold the very systems they despise.
And make no mistake: the Left and the horseshoe Right despise America—the ideas of its Founding; the nature of its history; and what it is today. To the Left, the Founding represents a preservation of dark systems of power and exploitation; to the horseshoe Right, the Founding represents the shattering of the common good as preserved by a vast paternalistic power. To the Left, American history represents an unbroken chain of sins springing from our original sins—capitalism, religious intolerance, racism; to the horseshoe Right, American history represents fragmentation, a shift toward radical godlessness, and imperialistic overreach. To the Left, America today represents inhumanity, brutal to the weakest at home and even more brutal to those abroad; to the horseshoe Right, America today represents collapse, dedicated to selling out its own citizens while spreading a peculiar form of ugly godlessness abroad.
The solution, according to both Left and horseshoe Right: power.
Not the sort of power sufficient to solve problems, which is to say the sorts of power the Founders envisioned, divided between branches and levels of polity. But a sort of unbridled and unchecked power sufficient to overthrow everything. The Left seeks a collectivist utopia in which freedom from consequence is guaranteed; the horseshoe Right seeks a revanchist, pre-Enlightenment blood-and-soil tyranny. But the Left and the horseshoe Right will hold hands to achieve their common aim: tearing down the system they see as fundamentally evil. As Tucker Carlson and Cenk Uygur recently agreed, “the people rigging the rules are the ones with all the wealth and power up top.” Their disagreements, they agreed, had to be put aside in favor of revolution.
Now, I’m not arguing that we’re on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. Totalitarian takeovers require preparation; they require groundwork. No, we are merely in phase one of that attempt, the convergence of Left and horseshoe Right on behalf of a centralized government, promising utopia and invariably coming up short. A government, in the words of Zohran Mamdani, that can “replace the rigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”; a government, in the words of Adrian Vermeule, that will “enjoy a capacious scope of public discretion to promote the common good.”
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitudinous condition that could arise in such a situation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
This hits too close to home. Far too close to home.
A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion.
But that is merely the first step. Because once the people are made subjects—once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.
Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”
Unless.
Unless we fight back. Unless we work to rekindle in the hearts of our fellow Americans bravery and optimism. As the Manhattan Institute, City Journal, and the Daily Wire do day in and day out, we must encourage conservatives to embrace what it means to be an American once again—what it means to dream the American dream.
The American dream isn’t a dream of a Marxist commune or a feudal estate. It’s not the dream of a tutelary power presiding over a vast redistributive scheme, or of a self-appointed moral elite coercing us all into their quasi-integralist vision of a common good. It is the dream of a free and ethical people, crossing oceans and mountains to build better lives for themselves, carving communities from wilderness, trading with and giving to one another . . . and most of all, making better lives for their children. The American dream is the dream my great-great-grandparents had, and that all of our ancestors had: to solve the problems of life using the liberty and virtue and determination granted to us by our Creator, in the freest and most prosperous governmental system ever crafted by human minds.
That dream is with us still—it has not been stolen by some shadowy elite. In fact, it is right there for the taking.
So, we must rekindle that spirit, the spirit of our founders and forefathers, in our own hearts, and in the hearts of our children—before it is too late.
With the help of God—and with the truthful optimism of institutions like Manhattan Institute and City Journal—we will.
Top Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images