The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life. Par

I made a few hundred bucks that summer. I started to understand that there were reliable connections between good choices and good outcomes and bad choices and bad outcomes.