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IDEAS FOR

The 250th anniversary of the American founding is not merely an occasion to celebrate. It is an invitation to ask what we owe the experiment, and what we are prepared to do about it.

The Founders Who Did the Work

Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence. He founded the first free medical clinic in America, pioneered the treatment of mental illness, and never stopped believing that a republic required citizens of moral formation and civic courage. He is also, as historian Joseph Loconte argues in his new documentary RUSH: The American Revolution’s Indispensable Doctor, precisely the kind of founder we have forgotten — and urgently need to recover.

Produced with Sagamore’s support and screened at the Tribeca Film Center in New York, the film is the inaugural project of the Rivendell Center — a new academic center dedicated to young professionals. Author and social critic Os Guinness joined Loconte in conversation at the premiere, exploring what Rush’s life and example offer a nation marking its 250th year.

Rush didn’t just theorize about a better republic. He built it one institution and one patient at a time. That, Loconte argues, is the model.

Benjamin Rush Documentary

Senior Fellow Joe Loconte was joined by Os Guinness at the Tribeca Film Center in New York City to launch his documentary featuring the life of America’s forgotten Founding Father—Dr. Benjamin Rush. The film was produced with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wonder Project signed a deal with Amazon to stream it worldwide.
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Putting Citizenship to Work

AEI Constitutional scholar and political scientist Dr. Yuval Levin's fireside chat with IBJ's Nathan Feltman at Sagamore's 2026 Indiana Conference on Citizenship
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What the Institutions Require of Us

At Sagamore’s 2026  Indiana Conference on Citizenship this February, constitutional scholar Dr. Yuval Levin offered Hoosiers a bracing assessment of American civic life at the quarter-millennium mark. Levin — director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and founder of National Affairs — has spent years arguing that America’s crisis is less a crisis of policy than a crisis of institutions: the slow hollowing out of the structures — Congress, civic associations, local government, family — through which a free people actually governs itself.

His challenge was not abstract. The institutions of self-government do not maintain themselves. They require citizens who take them seriously enough to participate, reform, and defend them — not as passive spectators of national politics, but as active builders of the communities closest to home. That is what citizenship looks like when it actually works.

Hope Has Hands

In a recent essay for the Ideas for America’s Next 250 series, Blair Milo reflects on what Senator Richard Lugar’s life in public service — and the remarkable moment of King Charles III addressing a joint session of Congress — offers this generation of citizens. Lugar didn’t just wish his city’s children would be educated together. He did the patient, unglamorous work of making it happen. He didn’t just pray nuclear weapons wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He flew to Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan with Senator Sam Nunn and watched the warheads come down.

His hope, Milo writes, had hands. It had neighbors. And that is the kind of hope this moment is asking from us — not optimism, which is a forecast, but hope, which assumes we have a part to play.

A Redemptive Friendship

Senior Fellow and Sagamore Network Director Blair Milo explores what Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar and the King's visit to Congress Offer for America’s Next 250.
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