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By Newspot Nigeria Editorial Desk
🇺🇸 A clarion call for America’s renewal rang out from the halls of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters this week as Kevin Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation, boldly declared “America’s Golden Age” underway under President Donald Trump’s second administration. The speech—delivered June 5, 2025—ignited conservative circles and reshaped the narrative around America’s future.
Roberts, known for his combative vision of constitutional revival, cast the Trump-led moment not as a retreat from modernity, but as a return to enduring truths—what he called “the permanent things.” These include faith, family, tradition, and national sovereignty, which he claims were hollowed out by decades of liberal technocracy and globalist drift.
“We are standing at the sunrise of a golden age,” Roberts proclaimed, “guided once more by the permanent things.”
From “Dark Age” to Dawn
Roberts sharply criticized what he termed an “age of inversion”—a decades-long period where elites traded virtue for efficiency, community for convenience, and faith for moral relativism. In his view, the collapse of American manufacturing, male workforce decline, and surging suicide rates are symptoms of a broader spiritual and cultural vacuum.
He cited conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk, Michael Anton, and Charles Kesler, claiming they foresaw the collapse of liberalism into nihilism, and positioned the Trump resurgence as both a rejection and a rupture from failed globalist doctrines.
Main Street Over Wall Street
Roberts emphasized a redefined Republican Party, now centered on the working class: “steel towns, farming communities, border counties, and oil rigs.” He hailed what he called Main Street Conservatism—a new political ethos that places sovereignty, sacrifice, and production over Wall Street profits and cultural decadence.
He cited figures from the Reshoring Initiative noting 1.3 million manufacturing jobs returning to U.S. soil since 2017, a trend he says is accelerating again in Trump’s second term. Apprenticeships, skilled trades, and policies that favor “builders of the republic” were named as cornerstones of the new conservative economy.
“We’re not tweaking liberalism—we are burying it,” he said.
A Foreign Policy of Realism and Restraint
Perhaps most forcefully, Roberts praised Trump’s “strategic realism” in foreign affairs. Gone are the “liberal democracy at gunpoint” escapades of past decades. Instead, Roberts touted the Abraham Accords, a tariff-powered diplomacy, and renewed U.S. deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Europe as the backbone of what he called “The Trump Doctrine Redux.”
He invoked the late Claremont scholar Angelo Codevilla and Founding Father John Quincy Adams to underscore a nationalist realism: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Cultural Renewal on the Rise
Roberts closed with an impassioned vision of moral and spiritual revival, citing the rise in homeschooling, Christian conversions, and the restoration of “the dinner table” as America’s cultural epicenter post-COVID. He insists the revival will not succeed without strong families, churches, and communities and warned that politics alone is not enough without “forming souls.”
“We do not fight for power for its own sake. We fight for the freedom to live virtuously,” he said.
🇳🇬 A Message with Global Ripples
For observers in Nigeria and across the Global South, Roberts’ vision of nationalism rooted in moral order has implications. The rejection of elite globalist governance, emphasis on localism, and family-centered values echo debates already taking place in Nigeria over sovereignty, moral leadership, and economic independence.
His declaration may embolden conservative-nationalist figures across Africa seeking to push back against technocratic internationalism and reassert traditional values in governance.
Final Word
As Roberts thundered before an applauding audience:
“This golden age is not a miracle. It’s the result of a people remembering who they are.”
Whether this so-called golden age delivers long-term transformation or temporary revival remains to be seen—but it has certainly reignited a culture war in full daylight.
For continuous coverage of global political shifts and what they mean for Africa, stay with Newspot Nigeria.
