The Daily Signal By Kevin Roberts
The following is an excerpt from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” released Nov. 12.
Have you ever driven through a blizzard in Wyoming?
Your field of vision doesn’t extend more than twenty feet. There are only the storm and the road, except for the occasional butte or buffalo. Silence descends on the glacier-carved valleys as ice and snow pile up and muffle all sound. The grizzlies seek shelter. You want to do the same.
The frontier is dangerous. It is majestic yet simple. It is imposing yet liberating. It is, in short, the most American thing there is.
And like those ancient glaciers that permanently reshaped the landscape of the West, Americans have been carving civilization into the stone since the Pilgrim fathers’ “errand into the wilderness.”
Still, the frontier has changed us much more than we will ever change it. Land shapes behavior. Western blizzards formed a people with distinct habits and customs; westerners couldn’t survive in such a land if they didn’t have a spirit of perseverance, toughness, and adaptability. The very unavoidability of nature gave people a healthy appreciation of mortality and chance.
Other American landscapes did the same. The Cajun culture of Opelousas, for example, is indelibly intertwined with the forests and bayous where my ancestors settled. The same is true of the descendants of the brave men and women who followed Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap and settled large swaths of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee—and of the pioneers who pushed across the Great Plains, past the Rockies, and to the Pacific Coast. Those mountains made them.
As much as the natural diversity of her people, the variations of America’s landscape created a need for federalism. As each group of people adapted to each unique landscape, America developed diverse local cultures, economies, and institutions that made federalism both necessary and sensible.
At the same time, the experience of settling a wild yet bountiful land was common to them all. The rugged individualism and true grit demanded by the frontier forged the American spirit…
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