Roots Before Branches: How America Formed and Lost the Citizens' Self-Government Requires

Roots Before Branches provides the analytical framework behind the Civic Formation Trilogy's central thesis: the ceiling of government competence is set by the floor of citizen capacity. Moving through fourteen historical eras, from colonial salutary neglect through the digital age, this volume examines how the American founding generation was formed for constitutional self-government, and traces how that formation has drifted across two hundred and fifty years. Each era is examined through a consistent lens: the world citizens inhabited, what was forming them, what they feared, what they believed, and where the pressure broke. The book argues that modern citizens risk something different from the tyranny the founders resisted: a voluntary and gradual surrender of self-government through comfort, distraction, and institutional dependency. Roots Before Branches ends with urgent questions and no easy answers, setting up the diagnostic instrument of Book III.