Most conservatives are likely familiar with John Adams’ insightful observation, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

For years, we have accepted the obvious implication of that statement: If the system isn’t working as intended, the problem is with the people. It’s the “if you can keep it” part of Ben Franklin’s description of the republic the Founders gave us.

Until recently, even those frustrated by our national decline generally accepted that understanding.

They diagnosed the disease—cultural rot, moral confusion, the collapse of institutional trust—and argued, rightly, that renewal must begin there.

But something has shifted. Increasingly, some post-liberal voices on the right suggest the solution is not to reform the people, but to revise—or replace—our system of government itself.

The American experiment has not failed. It was hijacked by the progressive movement more than a century ago.

Over the past 100 years, the federal government has usurped roles never intended for it: family formation, moral instruction, income distribution, education, overregulation, even meaning itself, aided and abetted by the........

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