We are at the end of a civilizational cycle. Technological change is undermining established norms and institutions. The post-Cold War international order is fracturing. Societal trust is collapsing, and political volatility is escalating. Coming years will bring turmoil and peril, but also great opportunity—perhaps the first in nearly a century—to forge new models and institutions that can shape the direction of Western civilization.
The major trends driving these disruptive social forces will strike at the heart of the legacy system and the institutions in which the Left’s power principally resides. This in a sense reshuffles the deck, opening new paths to those seeking to change societal direction: instead of facing long uphill battles in established institutions, we can focus on projects and strategies that will have the greatest impact in the new order. This can mean conserving—preserving what is good and valuable—and it can mean disruption—leaning on levers that harness or even accelerate some of these trends to shape their trajectory.
At New Founding, we aim to understand these dynamics—and the risks and opportunities they pose—to define a path forward for Americans who share our principles. We do this by 1) offering a clear positive vision, 2) forging a network of people drawn to this vision, and 3) pursuing business and investment initiatives that build on and reinforce this network.
A CIVILIZATIONAL MOMENT
Three major ideologies—globalism, managerialism, and radical liberalism—defined the 20th century. These intertwined to shape both the form and values of America’s leading institutions, and by extension the global order. This inherently progressive global order also grew anti-Christian and anti-human. It did so implicitly by replacing Christian norms and institutions with liberal ones. And it did so explicitly by advancing ideological claims in direct conflict with Christian morals and anthropology, both of which served as core pillars of Western Civilization—of Christendom. This rejection of Christianity thus became a quasi-suicidal rejection of the entire Western heritage, leading to widespread self-doubt and self-hatred among Western elites.
The core traits of this order are now being challenged by countervailing trends: growing global disruption, bureaucratic stagnation, and cultural and political alienation. As these trends accelerate, they will threaten our society’s dominant institutions—from US governmental agencies to multinational corporations, universities, and NGOs—and undermine their capacity and credibility. These institutions are so defined by their global reach, managerial organization, and liberal ideals that many will be unable to adapt to these countervailing trends and will lose their positions of power.
The legacy order’s loss of credibility is visible both globally and domestically. The failed anti-Russia sanctions and the emergence of a competing Sino-Russian axis are evidence of the US’s loss of geopolitical power. Cultural conflicts with Muslim immigrants are rising across Western Europe. The incumbent US regime is unwilling to enforce the basic border controls that are a fundamental element of any polity. Organizations from Boeing to the US Secret Service embrace DEI even as they fail at core functions. And the credibility and dynamism of the US-led financial system have not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, with independent investors increasingly displaced by bureaucratic asset allocators like BlackRock.
Technology
Digital technology drives these macro trends by disrupting 20th-century modes of communication and institutional hierarchies. Digital networks introduce risks that can spread rapidly in a global system. AI and other technologies allow leaner organizations and more loosely structured networks to challenge large bureaucratic institutions. The proliferation of ranking and sorting algorithms undermines the prospect of neutrality so central to liberal dogmas, just as digital networks undermine legacy media control of public discourse.
Many are pursuing opportunities directly in digital technology, but this should not be the sole focus. New technology companies will be sources of great power in the digital age, but they will not be independent of politics and human application. Political actors who master these technologies—and the political and social phenomena emerging from them—may be as influential as the technologists themselves.
Religion
As algorithms and digital networks supplant the liberal order’s centralized institutions, religion will rise as both a crucial coordinating mechanism and a successor to the purported “neutrality” of liberal systems. Alongside recognized religions, two prominent secular ideologies in this digital order are gaining power and increasingly functioning as de facto religions.
Wokeism, a radical victim/outlier-focused ideology, is an outgrowth of the legacy order’s ideological liberalism. Its strongest proponents are young university-indoctrinated ideologues and legacy managerial institutions hoping to preserve their power following the digital transition, often making explicit calls for technological deceleration. Given its obsession with guilt over any privilege, wokeism is ultimately anti-human and finds its terminus in the leftist cult suicide of Jonestown.
Transhumanism, in contrast, often rejects liberal ideologies and the legacy order. It is associated with pure technological accelerationism and the celebration of achievement. Its tendency can be toward techno-utopianism or technology-worship. Such a path finds its terminus in the hubris of the Tower of Babel.
Assertive older systems can also fill this vacuum: Islam will be a growing contender in the West. Its adherents often employ a potent combination of savvy digital media use with pre-modern practices resistant to digital threats. Westerners who embrace multiculturalism often incorrectly assume that Islam shares other religions’ foundational traits with merely cosmetic differences, leaving them unprepared for the challenges it can pose to Western societies.
Christianity is the true alternative. Its moral, metaphysical, and anthropological presuppositions about the world have proved sound, serving as the foundation for the diverse thought and culture that emerged from Christendom. Its promises, both earthly and spiritual, transcend any technological transition. In an era of moral and epistemological chaos, a solid and confident Christianity will have a renewed appeal. It will play a central role in the future of Western civilization in the digital age.
The Cultural Realignment
Many Americans recognize the stakes of the conflict we face. They have been organically realigning their lives away from companies, schools, and jurisdictions that threaten their way of life and toward friendly—or at least non-hostile—alternatives.
This cultural realignment reflects a return to true politics. Politics, in its rawest form, is a conflict between parties that ultimately threatens at least one party’s way of life. The liberal order, in contrast, has often seen politics in practice as a matter of technocratic policy differences or as a disagreement over different means to compatible ends. But the revolutionary nature of the tyranny and violence that struck the country in 2020 made the stakes of the conflict clear.
Americans instinctively recognized that such a political conflict was a regression to a state of nature, to an environment where they could not count on incumbent institutions and procedures to protect them. The instinct in this environment is to find and ally with friends. Without any central coordination, Americans began this realignment.
The Way Forward
This cultural realignment is burgeoning, but it remains sporadic. Many people shift one or two aspects of life but cannot find aligned alternatives in others. Most people struggle to find opportunities to shape the world meaningfully in ways that advance their vision and principles, even as they take steps to protect themselves. In sum, their day-to-day contributions to the institutions they work for and associate with do not help advance the world they want to live in—leaving one of the most fundamental human drives unfulfilled.
The central need of our day is to organize this movement and to channel people toward meaningful projects. This requires understanding the major emerging political conflicts and the lines that will divide people in the digital era, rather than those that divided people in past decades. It also requires identifying practical efforts and collective actions that can have meaningful impact given the trends reshaping our society.
NEW FOUNDING
New Founding is an investment company harnessing this cultural realignment to build an alternative vision for America. We operate business initiatives built around a core network of people drawn to our vision. We aim to unite Americans to develop and acquire politically, culturally, and economically meaningful resources to advance our way of life.
Private Sector Focus
Our mission is statesmanship. So why are we structured as a business and focused on the private sector?
First, we face structural and cultural handicaps in many legacy institutions (including government), making these difficult and unpleasant places to build careers and accrue power. Private sector endeavors, in contrast, offer opportunities for rapid growth outside of legacy institutions. They can serve as vehicles to compound resources and cultivate leaders to usher in a new future for America.
Second, the private sector is not categorically separate from governance. In the US, the digital layer of life remains largely independent of current federal and state governments, in part because the First Amendment doctrines structurally limit many forms of control. But companies that control digital monopolies often exercise significant power over users. As these digital platforms mediate an ever-larger share of our lives, they can grow into de facto governments. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter illustrated this: it was closer to a feudal lord’s capture of a strategic domain than a traditional private equity deal. The political consequences of his control have made this clear.
Finally, a private-sector effort can serve as a platform to articulate a positive vision for our movement and society. Unlike the Left’s vision, ours is not state-centered: we will not have a Red New Deal counterpart to their Green New Deal. Politicians will play an essential role in realizing any vision, but given the constraints of electoral politics, many GOP priorities must be shorter-term and more defensive. In contrast, an investment company with a venture focus is well suited to help spearhead an aspirational vision for our way of life.
Exit to Disrupt
Compared with many political strategies, our focus is inward: we first work to acquire resources for our people and our movement, rather than immediately seeking to transform the country. This approach is strategically prudent for two reasons.
First, leftists control most major incumbent institutions. They use this power to suppress non-conforming efforts and to attack our way of life. We must use our capital (political, financial, etc.) to prioritize our own protection.
More importantly, in a world facing broad disruption of incumbent systems, this focus on building solid, independent networks and institutions will allow us to survive the shocks of system-level disruption and to position ourselves for digital age leadership. Rather than fighting to sway decaying institutions largely stacked against us, we can invest that energy into building the types of institutions that will survive the transition period and ultimately replace legacy incumbents.
We have particular advantages here. Legacy models of trust are collapsing, and people will look for alternatives upon which they can rebuild. The smaller, trusted communities and networks (e.g., local churches, fraternal organizations, and even group chats) that exist in many conservative spaces will be strong contenders. If we embrace a more independent and inward-focused strategy today, we can position these institutions to offer something scarce and widely valued in the future.
Our inward focus is not a retreat but a strategic focus on efforts that will offer outsized long-term success. This reflects the “exit to disrupt” strategy that is popular in Silicon Valley. We are exiting legacy institutions with the clear intent not just to build small parallel alternatives, but to create disruptive alternatives that can challenge legacy institutions for supremacy.
Approach to Technology
As noted, many—especially in Silicon Valley—are taking a technology-centric approach to digital-age power. Control of critical technologies will confer both profit and political influence, but this will be far from determinative. Technology will shape the array of possible outcomes, but both political and religious factors will have a profound impact on the ultimate outcome.
Our particular focus is on understanding the political-cultural dynamics resulting from technological change and pursuing the corresponding opportunities. We seek to attract aligned people looking for vision and strategy in such a chaotic environment, and to help them apply both old means and new technologies to achieve ends that ultimately transcend technology. We know tech-driven disruption will create enormous opportunities, and we intend to exploit these in pursuit of our broader mission.
Finally, the digital domain is a central focus as we acquire meaningful resources for the coming era. Political, cultural, and economic territory within this domain extends beyond the technologies to the networks that will dominate this space. An immediate example is influence on X. The nature of X’s platform allows messages to bypass legacy gatekeepers and reach a wide array of potential allies. Longer-term, Bitcoin may be the primary digital “territory” that will shape the coming era. It could affect everything from the financial system to the nature of the internet itself, especially in a world where current trust systems break down and skin in the game becomes a necessary substitute. The cultural and religious principles that shape Bitcoin could play a central role in shaping the digital age.
Our Business
New Founding combines a core network of people drawn to our vision with a set of business initiatives that build on and reinforce this network.
Our network’s purpose is to organize people who seek to realign their lives and efforts to advance our way of life—to build the America we want to live in. It thus builds on the cultural realignment movement, organizing people around a unifying vision and identifying people willing and able to fill concrete needs.
We then leverage our network to match the best talent to initiatives that will help acquire politically, culturally, and economically meaningful resources.
Concretely, this includes several core business units New Founding directly owns.
Our venture fund makes early-stage investments into startups that advance our vision. Examples include an ad network for the firearms space, an aligned/pro-life health insurer, and a symbolic AI company building an unbiased foundation model well-suited to replace bureaucratic functions in many critical industries. Venture-backed companies will have an outsized impact on the future of the West: a startup involves envisioning a future that does not exist and willing it into existence. What future is pursued often has profound political implications.
Our real estate unit is developing the Highland Rim Project. This is a regional real estate development play that draws people from our network into a community that will model a distinct way of life aligned with our vision. It extends our venture approach to the local community level, where a sufficient concentration of aligned people will allow the innovative pursuit of an array of local institutions and practices.
Beyond these core business units, we facilitate a range of connections and projects that advance our broader mission and strengthen our network. We have a talent network focused on placing members with aligned employers. We also support initiatives—including new businesses and nonprofits—that we do not run directly. American Reformer, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting a vigorous Protestant Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day, grew from such efforts and has contributed significantly to our network. We have also been closely involved with the Society for American Civic Renewal, a fraternal organization, since its inception.
Finally, we strengthen our network by offering formation programs designed to help members build the skills needed 1) to navigate the chaotic transitional period we are entering, and 2) to step into leadership roles in a post-managerial era where executive agency becomes a defining trait of elites. These will include programs designed to cultivate the foundational skills and traits a sound educational system should provide but that our current system has largely neglected. It will also include forums to develop specific strategies and organize members and allies around concrete opportunities and projects.
Network Union:
Our business initiatives have established analogs, but at the organizational level, we are spearheading a new category: one could think of New Founding as a “network union.” Balaji Srinivasan describes this as a network with a purpose, as opposed to a network simply defined by a capability or function, as many technology- or product-driven networks are. We maintain this shared purpose as we organize people drawn to our vision into a network. We reinforce the network’s unity as we orchestrate actions to further our purpose. Such a network becomes a flywheel with enormous potential energy that we direct to serve members’ interests and advance our shared purpose.
THE VISION
Our mission is to advance the American way of life. We have inherited an extraordinary society and culture; as stewards, we must pass it on to our posterity. As we transition to the digital age, what this duty entails becomes a question not just of preservation and expansion but of vision and definition. We must identify the definitive American virtues that can transcend past eras and coming changes and help shape our way of life in the emerging era.
Our allies at the Claremont Institute, among others, have written extensively on the American way of life. Key elements include the traditional two-parent family norm, the commitment to self-government, and the celebration of our distinct cultural heritage and legal tradition. They also include a particularly American individualism, and customs of voluntary civic and military service.
The American way of life combines American cultural distinctives with broader virtues that permeate Western civilization. We must maintain these timeless truths and valuable traditions in the new context of the digital age. And while we can articulate core principles now, many specifics—such as which elements of our way of life we should prioritize preserving and how we can adapt aspects of our tradition into a new technological paradigm—require continued discussion and entrepreneurial innovation.
Throughout this process, several themes will define our vision of what it means to advance the American way of life in the digital age.
Rooted in Christianity
Our vision for America will remain Christian. It need not be exclusively Christian, but a Christian ethic and worldview must anchor it. To abandon this would be to abandon the foundation of our civilization. By contrast, a renewed Christian vision allows our movement to advance an attractive alternative to prevailing ideologies. In a time when uncertainty besets so many, Christianity offers a reassuring moral and epistemological basis, because of both its ultimate answers and its central role in our tradition.
A pro-Christian vision will also be pro-human. While both wokeism and transhumanism undervalue the human—what makes humans exceptional, and the fundamental goodness of our design—Christianity offers a full picture that is grounded in our understanding of God’s creation of man in his own image. As AI raises profound questions about the role and distinctives of humans, the Christian view of the person will help us understand how we can emphasize fundamentally human traits, and work with and master technology rather than mirroring or being mastered by it.
Mastering Technology
Technological innovation—and the ambition behind it—is particularly important in American culture. Americans developed a disproportionate share of today’s technologies. American culture is both fluent in the use of newer technologies and innovative at producing more such technologies.
There is some tension between conservative impulses and technological innovation. And given the political ideology of major technology companies today, many conservatives fear technology. But technology is not an inherent threat if we embrace a positive, and not simply conservative, vision. We must develop the knowledge and virtues needed to master technology and use it toward our ends.
And as noted earlier, technology offers us particular advantages: we face structural headwinds in most legacy institutions, but the digital realm remains up for grabs. Competing in this space is thereby strategically necessary and practically favorable. Technology will define the new era. We must be the ones shaping and wielding it.
Post-Globalist Post-Managerial
The three macro trends described above each threaten the current order, and a viable successor to that order must address all three. The solution to our cultural and political alienation has already been named: a renewed embrace of the American tradition and Christian ideals.
The solution to the risk of growing global disruption is household, community, regional, and national self-determination. This fractal approach recognizes that outside connections will remain, but systematically favors local (whether geographically local or an aligned community) interactions when feasible.
The solution to bureaucratic stagnation is multifaceted: new frontiers and organizational models more dependent on ownership and skin in the game than bureaucratic checks will allow the elevation of the human spirit even in a complex world.
Together, these themes will define new institutional and social models that are deeply grounded in the American and Western traditions and that address the central vulnerabilities of the legacy system. By shaping our vision around positive solutions to these threats, we are positioning our ecosystem to be resilient and even antifragile to their advance.
Leading Christendom
America is our focus, but our effect will be global. The internet is deeply American in ethos and design, and Americans will heavily shape any era defined by the internet and digital technology. Western civilization is defined by its Christian heritage, and to the extent it remains distinctly Western, it will retain this Christian element, and Christians will help shape it. Advancing our way of life will mean promulgating technologies imbued with fundamentally American and Christian principles, in direct contrast with woke or Chinese approaches. A resurgent movement that is both American and Christian will thus play a central role in shaping our civilization in the digital age.
CONCLUSION
We are at an inflection point. While the turmoil and transition of coming decades will pose many perils, they will also offer great opportunities to those who can position themselves to survive this upheaval and lead in the new era. For Americans aligned with our principles, this prospect is particularly attractive: legacy institutions are largely hostile and stacked against us, but these disruptive forces will open new pathways to realize a positive alternative vision that reflects our way of life.
Electoral and other formal political efforts remain valuable. These are insufficient on their own: even another Trump presidency will not change the current system’s underlying fragility or end the Left’s grip on most legacy institutions. But federal wins will help fend off threats to new institutions, and friendly states can become hubs for aligned networks and innovations.
Projects to revitalize existing institutions are likewise valuable. While structural impediments will limit short-term returns, growing energy in the broader movement will help animate internal reform efforts and enable external pressure. And while many legacy institutions should and will simply collapse, successful reform efforts will preserve institutional and cultural capital that provides a valuable complement to disruptive new entrants.
The opportunity and need are clear: major trends will transform the current order, and we need resources and organization to help lead this transformation. Legacy institutions are bogged down by inertia or captured by political enemies, making them unfavorable places to raise up leaders and acquire resources. Our project offers a powerful avenue both to develop the class of people who can ultimately challenge the incumbent regime and to acquire the resources, territory, and institutions that will enable this effort.
We must embrace this moment and the opportunities and demands it presents. It is our duty to preserve the cultural virtues we have inherited. It is our birthright to lead Western civilization into the digital age.
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