Remarks at Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Award Dinner, May 6, 2026
No, the virtues for a life well lived are taught, modeled, and practiced in the daily life of society’s smallest but most important platoons, …chief among them the family.
… if AI continues to progress as it has, America is going to have a big, messy debate about UBI, universal basic income. And in its long-term implications, this debate is going to dwarf the fights we had …. I am strongly against UBI. I think it’s terrible policy.
Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln’s metaphor, it’s the golden apple in the silver frame. Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center. The state’s job isn’t to define that, but it’s to secure the preconditions, the silver frame that enable all the little platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples. That’s what needs to be protected.
Emotional intelligence and character are going to matter more than they’ve mattered in the past because the hardest things to automate are the things that depend on relationships.
What I’m suggesting tonight requires us to reject the relatively new but culturally pervasive assumption we have that school is the primary institution of character formation. If there’s a villain in my story, it’s John Dewey. As Americans, we have sleepwalked into a culture now defined by one man’s bureaucratic thinking. … too much of childhood today is defined by Dewey’s vision of an institutionalized childhood.
We have led the next generation on a path to more soul-deadening complacency, and this is the institution we’ve decided to outsource habit formation to? Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults.
Fewer than half of Americans read a book last year. That is a national crisis. We have to develop the intentional habit of reading. A nation that does not read will not thrive. Shorter attention spans are killing our imagination.
Character, whether the character of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility, and daily striving. This may sound like idealism until you realize it’s what America has always been about.
Disembodied consumption, digital gluttony, and cultural lethargy will rob us of the joy at a moment when incredible discovery and adventure await. The digital revolution can bring big pieces of heaven, but it will drift toward hell unless we steer it and form the right kinds of habits. What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We cannot expect to remain free without being virtuous.
The biggest divide in America will be between the people who figure out how to harness these tools of technology and AI, …versus those who outsource their affections and their habits to the tools and the algorithms. For the first group, the future is thrilling. Life will be miserable for the second. It is our job to help steer more people into group one. We must fight Huxley’s dystopia. We must master these tools rather than be mastered by them.
We must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they, too, like all Americans past in the greatest tradition, can be creators, doers, and thinkers embracing the next frontier.