The lost frontier: how America mislaid its moral compass

For centuries, America’s identity was shaped by the frontier, the promise of new horizons and the freedom to begin again. Now, with no wilderness left to conquer and no shared myth to unite it, the nation turns inward, struggling to rediscover purpose, balance, and belief in its own experiment in liberty, argues Michael Bedenbaugh

For most of its history, America defined itself by motion. From the colonial tidewater to the Pacific Ocean, each generation believed there was always another horizon, another chance to begin again. The frontier was a state of mind, a shared myth that made a restless people cohere. “If you don’t like where you are, go west,” became both proverb and creed.

Influential history professor Frederick Turner recognised this in 1893 when he warned that the closing of the frontier would transform the American experiment. The wilderness had been the crucible of self-reliance and democracy. Once the frontier disappeared, the nation would have to find new ways to express those same virtues within the confines of a settled, industrial, and increasingly centralised society.

For a time, Americans kept that myth alive through storytelling. In darkened theatres and later in living-room flicker, John Wayne, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke offered moral clarity to a vast and diverse people. The Western gave ordinary citizens a language for justice, courage, and redemption. It was civic glue disguised as entertainment, a unifying myth that said: freedom is difficult, but worth the fight.

Today that shared story has faded. Politics are tribal, institutions distrusted, and the sense of belonging fractured. Yellowstone, the last great modern Western, resonates because it dramatises cultural grief and not because it glorifies ranch life. The Dutton family’s battle to preserve their land mirrors a deeper struggle: America wrestling with the ghost of the frontier, still fighting to live by an old code in a world that no longer honours it.

“Yellowstone resonates because it dramatises cultural grief and not because it glorifies ranch life.”

Unlike Europe’s ancient monarchies or ethnically bound nations, America was never designed for unity in the Old-World sense. Most of its people descend from those who left unity behind — who fled kings, crowns, and conformity to live free as individuals (at least those ancestors from Europe who were in their nations’ leadership). The Union they built was deliberately loose: a federation of states, joined by consent and balanced by scepticism of central power. The Founders believed that liberty flourishes best when sovereignty is shared, not surrendered.

That tension has never disappeared. The Civil War resolved the question of disunion by force, but not the question of scale. As the federal government expanded through industrialisation, the New Deal, and two world wars, it accumulated authority that earlier generations would have reserved for the states or local communities. The rise of America’s global hegemony after 1945 only intensified that centralisation. Power followed responsibility — and the United States assumed responsibilities on a global scale. Yet domestically, many Americans still ask whether a republic can remain free once so much decision-making has migrated to Washington.

Europe’s post-war story, by contrast, is one of deliberate convergence. After the devastation of two world wars, as well as an existential threat from the east, unity was born not of idealism but of necessity. The European Coal and Steel Community, the Treaty of Rome, and eventually the European Union were designed to make another continental conflict impossible. Economic interdependence replaced rivalry; bureaucratic co-ordination replaced nationalist passion.

For Europeans, this centralisation represented survival. For Americans, a similar process feels like a betrayal of the founding bargain. The political DNA of the United States remains federal — rooted in local control, private enterprise, and suspicion of distant authority. Where Europe’s systems encourage conformity for the sake of stability, many rural Americans view conformity itself as a kind of captivity.

“Power followed responsibility — and the United States assumed responsibilities on a global scale.”

I have seen that conflict up close.

As someone who has worked in historic preservation and rural development in red-state South Carolina, I have experienced the heavy hand of modern bureaucracy — zoning codes, environmental regulations, and planning boards that, while well-intentioned, often crush the individuality and adaptability that small communities depend upon. The same impulse that built Europe’s structured landscapes now shapes rural America, sometimes with jarring results. What Europeans regard as prudent land management can feel, to many Americans, like cultural displacement — a foreign form of social engineering imposed on open country that still imagines itself free.                                   

The reaction against such overreach is not simply obstinacy or ignorance; it is civilisational memory. For centuries, Americans believed problems could be solved by movement — by leaving, homesteading, or starting anew. When there is nowhere left to go, that impulse turns inward. It becomes anger, distrust, or retreat into ideological tribes. Political extremism is, in part, the aftershock of a nation that has lost its safety valve.                   

That same cultural dislocation explains much of the modern Republican Party’s turmoil.

Trumpism, at its core, is less a coherent ideology than a cultural revolt — a yearning to restore meaning through strength, to reassert control in a world that feels ungovernable. Project 2025, the movement’s policy blueprint, is a perfect illustration. It envisions a stronger central executive — a kind of managerial populism — designed to “take the country back”. The irony is striking: a faction that claims to defend the tradition of liberty now proposes to save it through concentration of executive power.

This inversion — nostalgia masquerading as reform — betrays the very foundation of the American idea. The greatness of America was never in rigid uniformity, but in the experiment of E pluribus unum — “from many, one.” Diversity was never its weakness; it was its genius. The danger today lies in those who mistake unity for obedience and who would rebuild a national identity by demolishing its pluralism.

“Trumpism is less a coherent ideology than a cultural revolt — a yearning to restore meaning through strength.”

Trump’s bombastic impulses — even down to his desire to demolish the historic East Wing of the White House — fit perfectly into an old American pattern: the constant remaking of self, the tearing down to start anew. But unlike the frontier spirit that once built communities from nothing, this new version destroys without direction. It is movement without meaning — a rebellion against the loss of the very frontier that once gave rebellion purpose.

In this sense, America is becoming more like Europe than it cares to admit: a collection of semi-autonomous regions bound uneasily to a central power. The difference is that Europe chose its unity through treaties; America drifted into it through crisis. Every major upheaval — civil war, depression, world war, terrorism, pandemic — has tightened federal authority while eroding the space for local self-government.

Yet the debate continues because the federal model still holds moral power. Many Americans instinctively believe that liberty must be protected at the state and community level, where citizens can still look one another in the eye. They do not oppose national purpose; they oppose national control. In their view, the Republic can survive only if sovereignty flows upward from the people, not downward from the bureaucracy.

So where do we go from here, in a nation that has conquered its continent and its enemies abroad? After subduing the wilderness and organising the world, what remains to conquer?

Our own fears.

Our cynicism.

Our loss of faith in one another.

The next frontier is not a territory but a temperament — the courage to build community without abandoning liberty, to accept interdependence without surrendering individuality. We must learn, as Europe has, that coexistence requires structure; but also remind Europe — and ourselves — that structure without spirit breeds stagnation.

“Many Americans instinctively believe that liberty must be protected at the state and community level, where citizens can still look one another in the eye.”

Liberty in the twenty-first century cannot mean perpetual escape. It must mean responsibility — the freedom to govern ourselves wisely, locally, and together. The American story will not end because the frontier is gone; it will end only if we forget that the real frontier was never a line on a map, but a test of character.

If we can rediscover that balance — between independence and obligation, between self and society — then the Republic can renew itself once more. The pioneers of the future will not cross mountains or oceans; they will rebuild trust, restore faith, and revive the institutions that make freedom possible.

We have conquered the world.

Now we must conquer ourselves — our fears, our cynicism, and our temptation to trade liberty for comfort.

The great work before us is not empire, but equilibrium: to prove once more that a free people can govern themselves without bipolar parties or demagogues.

It is the harder frontier — the one within — where courage must triumph over fear, empathy over outrage, and faith over despair.

If we can chart that unseen territory, if we can again believe that liberty and responsibility belong together, then the Republic will not merely endure; it will shine again as proof that self-government is not a relic, but a revelation.

Only then can we offer the world what it truly needs from America: not dominance, but example.

Author and political thinker Michael Bedenbaugh is a respected voice in constitutional principles and American governance. Based in South Carolina, he is deeply involved in his home state’s development while contributing to national discussions on governance and civic engagement, most recently as standing as an independent candidate for Congress. He is the author of Reviving Our Republic: 95 Theses for the Future of America and the host of YouTube channel Reviving Our Republic with Mike Bedenbaugh.

READ MORE: ‘The age of unreason in American politics’. Once the world’s model of civic restraint, the United States now teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, warns Mike Bedenbaugh. Our U.S political analyst traces how the corrosion of republican virtue, fuelled by vengeance and spectacle, has in his view hollowed out the moral foundations of American democracy, and argues that only a revival of citizenship itself can restore the Republic.

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_{Main image: An abandoned frontier town in the American West — a silent monument to the restless spirit that once defined the nation.}

_{Strange Happenings/Pexels}