How To Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

What happens when a nation forgets what holds it together? In How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro argues that America’s current political divide isn’t about policy—it’s about meaning. He contends that we are not merely two parties arguing over taxes or borders; we are two nations living under one roof. One side still believes in the founding philosophy of liberty and human equality; the other wants to dismantle the very pillars that made America possible.

Shapiro calls these two worldviews Unionism and Disintegrationism. Unionism, he says, is the vision of the Founding Fathers—a nation tied together by a shared philosophy of natural rights, a culture of moral responsibility, and a history that celebrates progress toward greater freedom. Disintegrationism, by contrast, rejects those shared roots. It sees America not as a moral project of liberty but as an empire built on oppression, driven by power, and sustained by lies. The conflict between these visions, Shapiro argues, now threatens to tear apart the United States from the inside.

The Marriage of Union and Its Divorce

To explain America’s coming disintegration, Shapiro borrows the metaphor of a troubled marriage. America, he argues, was once a passionate partnership—a people bound by the Declaration of Independence’s belief that all humans have natural rights endowed by their Creator. But now each partner in this marriage sees the other as an enemy. The idea of shared meaning, mutual responsibility, and affection is evaporating. Just as jealous spouses use every argument to attack one another, political opponents reinterpret every symbol—the flag, the anthem, even the Constitution—as weapons in a cultural war.

This divide isn’t new. America fought one civil war in the 1860s when the Southern secessionists rejected universal equality. Yet Shapiro suggests that a new kind of secession is happening—not marked by battle lines, but by moral and cultural fragmentation. Cities and states retreat into political tribalism; universities reject shared truths; online mobs punish dissent. The result is a form of “national divorce” in which Americans no longer even speak the same moral language.

Three Pillars of Union—and Their Erosion

According to Shapiro, three foundations have always held the United States together: a shared philosophy, a common culture, and a unifying history. Together, these form the moral DNA of the American identity.

• American Philosophy is rooted in the natural rights tradition—from Locke to Jefferson. It asserts that human beings have inherent dignity, that all are equal before the law, and that government exists to protect rights, not grant them.
• American Culture balances freedom with moral duty. It prizes tolerance, family, religion, and the courage to defend liberty—even for those we disagree with.
• American History tells a story of imperfection redeemed. The nation’s progress—from slavery to civil rights—is proof of its foundational goodness, not evidence of irredeemable sin.

Disintegrationism attacks all three. Its proponents, from progressive academics to intersectional activists, reject natural rights in favor of government-bestowed entitlements, dismiss traditional moral institutions as tools of oppression, and recast history as an unbroken chain of exploitation. For Disintegrationists, 1619—not 1776—is the real founding date of America. This shift, Shapiro maintains, poisons the shared memory necessary for a free society.

Why This Battle Matters to You

For Shapiro, this isn’t an abstract clash of scholars—it’s a matter of civic survival. Once a society abandons the concept of universal truths, he warns, power becomes the only remaining currency. Those in control of government, media, or corporations impose their moral will on everyone else. Free speech becomes “hate speech”; religion becomes “bigotry”; economic freedom becomes “exploitation.” The more people depend on government to define their rights, the less they trust one another to live freely.

The book’s title—How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps—is a warning cloaked in irony. Step one is to deny America’s founding philosophy, replacing natural rights with government-controlled privileges. Step two is to erode its culture, trading freedom and duty for speech policing, dependency, and mob censorship. Step three is to rewrite its history, convincing new generations that America was founded not in liberty but in racism and inequality. Each step removes another piece of the glue that unites a diverse people.

The Stakes of Memory and Meaning

Shapiro argues that the fight for America’s soul is really a fight over memory. If citizens share no common understanding of justice, rights, and purpose, they can no longer govern themselves. As historian Alexis de Tocqueville warned, democracies collapse when they trade virtue for comfort or let government define morality. In Shapiro’s view, the growing distrust and rage of modern America come from losing that shared creed. Only a collective rediscovery of America’s first principles—reason, equality, self-restraint, and responsibility—can prevent dissolution.

Shapiro begins his analysis with the birth of what he calls America’s creed—the revolutionary idea that human beings possess inherent, inviolable rights. Drawing from philosophers like John Locke, Cicero, and Aquinas, he argues that the Founding Fathers synthesized two traditions: the Judeo-Christian belief in moral equality before God and the Greek conviction that reason defines human nature. Together, these gave rise to the concept of natural rights, which set the American experiment apart from every monarchy or empire that came before it.

Natural Rights: Freedom by Design

For Jefferson, Madison, and Adams, rights didn’t come from the will of kings or the vote of assemblies—they came from nature and nature’s God. Liberty wasn’t a gift but a condition of being human. This philosophical foundation explained why the colonists rebelled against Britain: when Parliament taxed without consent, it violated an order older than government itself. These rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—were not negotiable.

Government existed only to secure these rights. Once it began to replace them with privileges granted from above, tyranny followed. The Constitution therefore limited federal power through enumerated functions, checks and balances, and federalism. By treating humans as rational equals rather than wards of the state, the founders created what Shapiro calls a “moral contract” between citizen and republic.

Equality Before the Law, Not Equality of Life

For Shapiro, the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” has been widely misunderstood. The founders didn’t claim all people were identical in skills, wealth, or virtue; they meant equality under law. In a world built on hierarchies—of birth, race, or creed—this was radical. As Lincoln and Frederick Douglass later argued, the equality of rights, not outcomes, was the moral thread that tied emancipation and civil rights back to 1776.

The founding generation’s failure to immediately end slavery, Shapiro admits, was a tragic contradiction—but not a refutation of its ideals. Those ideals were the tools used to eventually abolish slavery. In his reading, America’s founding values were self-correcting because they contained the moral logic that made oppression unsustainable.

Government as Protector, Not Provider

The founders designed a system suspicious of power. Shapiro echoes historian Gordon Wood in describing how Madison and Hamilton feared both monarchs and majorities. Government’s central purpose was limited—defend rights, enforce contracts, and preserve peace. When government drifts into moral engineering or material redistribution, it betrays that mandate. From Shapiro’s perspective, each branch of government was meant to be a guardrail against human ambition: separation of powers to curb tyranny, federalism to preserve local diversity, and an independent judiciary to interpret, not invent, law.

The Enduring Meaning for You

This philosophy still matters, Shapiro insists, because it defines your relationship with the state. You are not a subject waiting for charity but a citizen endowed with unalienable rights. If liberty is replaced with state-provided comfort, you lose both autonomy and dignity. The American founding, in his view, remains an open invitation to be free—and to accept the moral responsibility that freedom demands.

If American freedom was born from belief in human nature and natural rights, Shapiro argues that modern progressivism has eroded that foundation. The new worldview—what he calls Disintegrationist philosophy—rejects the idea that human nature is fixed or that rights exist apart from government. Instead, it sees people as malleable and society as a plastic experiment that experts can reshape. Shapiro traces this thinking from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s utopianism to modern identity politics.

From Natural Rights to Social Engineering

According to Shapiro, figures like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey replaced the founders’ idea of God-given rights with the notion of positive rights—entitlements the government grants to ensure equality of outcome. In this new logic, liberty no longer means freedom from coercion; it means government empowerment. Thus health care, housing, and education became ‘rights’ that required heavy taxation and bureaucratic control. (Shapiro compares this shift to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights,” which sought to guarantee economic security through federal action.)

The Death of Equal Justice

Disintegrationists, Shapiro warns, also redefine equality. The founders’ “equality before the law” becomes “equality of results.” Under this reasoning, disparities in wealth, education, or culture must prove systemic injustice—and only coercive government can fix them. From racial quotas to the dogmas of intersectionality, the state’s mission morphs into social reengineering. As Shapiro writes, this unending attempt to “force fairness” violates the very rights it claims to serve. True equality, he insists, means equal freedom to act, not identical outcomes.

Government Without Limits

Finally, if people have no fixed nature and rights are inventions of power, then government becomes boundless. Progressive intellectuals like Wilson viewed the Constitution as outdated—a machine built for a simpler age. They championed the “living Constitution,” meant to evolve with “the times.” In practice, Shapiro argues, this turned bureaucrats into unelected rulers. The result is an administrative state capable of dictating morality, economy, and family life, all in the name of progress. As the state grows, individual independence shrinks.

To Shapiro, these philosophical errors compose step one in America’s destruction: the belief that perfection requires control, and that liberty is too risky for ordinary people.

Moving beyond institutions, Shapiro argues that America’s endurance relied on a living culture of moral responsibility. Rights, he emphasizes, cannot survive on parchment—they must be practiced. Unionist culture once emphasized four habits of freedom: tolerance for others’ rights, social institutions that promote virtue, willingness to defend liberty, and an adventurous entrepreneurial spirit.

Tolerance and Free Speech

In a healthy society, you respect even the rights of those you dislike. The founders knew freedom of speech would be messy, but they preferred open debate to government censorship. Cases like Abrams v. United States (1919), Shapiro notes, reaffirmed that free thought is essential for truth-seeking. The true danger isn’t bad ideas—it’s authority deciding which ideas are allowed. When people treat offense as oppression, they give the state power to silence dissent, and freedom dies quietly.

Religion, Family, and Virtue

The founders realized that freedom without virtue becomes chaos. Civic virtue had to come from the church, the family, and voluntary associations. Thinkers from Washington to Tocqueville warned that morality—not bureaucracy—was the glue of democracy. Even today, Shapiro points out, religious Americans tend to give more to charity, marry more, and build stronger communities. In his view, you don’t need state coercion when conscience still governs behavior.

Defending Rights Through Courage

A moral culture also requires courage. The founders enshrined the right to bear arms not for hunting but to keep government fearful of its people. Shapiro links this tradition to the civil rights movement, noting that African Americans in the segregated South often protected their families with firearms when the law refused to. The spirit of liberty demands self-reliance—what he calls the “stubborn willingness to stand for yourself.”

The Spirit of Adventure

Finally, Shapiro highlights the entrepreneurial ethos that transformed thirteen colonies into a global powerhouse. Quoting Tocqueville, he describes early Americans as “boldly casting into the wilderness with their Bible, axe, and newspaper.” Risk-taking was a moral act—a declaration of independence repeated daily. Capitalism, properly understood, empowers individuals to innovate without permission from the state. For Shapiro, freedom isn’t guaranteed comfort but guaranteed opportunity to try, fail, and try again.

The collapse of shared philosophy, Shapiro claims, gave rise to a Disintegrationist culture that confuses compassion with control. Rights now mean safety from emotional harm rather than protection from coercion. Under the banner of tolerance, society censors dissenting voices, undermines religion and family, attacks gun rights, and shames ambition. Each of these trends, he warns, replaces moral responsibility with government enforcement.

From Freedom of Speech to Culture of Silence

One of Shapiro’s main concerns is the rise of “cancel culture.” He recounts how comedians like Sarah Silverman and companies like Mozilla faced mob outrage for past opinions, while social media platforms enforce vague bans on “hate speech.” The American Civil Liberties Union, once a defender of free expression, now prioritizes “equity” over liberty. The result is a chilling conformity resembling Tocqueville’s warning: the body is free, the soul enslaved by the mob. People police their thoughts not because the law commands it, but because shame does.

The Assault on Social Institutions

Disintegrationists, says Shapiro, view religion and family not as sources of virtue but as instruments of oppression. He traces this mindset to Marx and second-wave feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, who reinterpreted motherhood and marriage as slavery. Add to that the sexual theories of Alfred Kinsey and the radicalism of the 1960s, and you have a society that undermines its own foundations. Where families once taught self-control, schools now preach liberation from “repressive morality”—replacing parents and pastors with bureaucrats and experts.

Surrendering to Government Overreach

In Shapiro’s view, every erosion of virtue leads to bigger government. When people no longer discipline themselves through faith or family, they invite the state to do it for them. Gun control debates illustrate this inversion: the founders armed citizens to deter tyranny, yet modern activists want government to be the sole guardian of safety. Quoting figures like Beto O’Rourke—“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15”—Shapiro warns that safety without freedom becomes servitude.

The War on Economic Freedom

Finally, Shapiro argues that the entrepreneurial spirit that built America is being vilified. Disintegrationists portray billionaires and innovators as “exploiters” rather than creators, turning ambition into sin and redistribution into virtue. Citing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, he notes how calls for socialism arise not from love of the poor but envy of the successful. History, however, shows the opposite: free markets have lifted more people from poverty than any other system. Destroying capitalism, Shapiro concludes, means destroying the engine of America’s hope.

History, for Shapiro, is the third pillar of American unity—and the most contested. He contrasts two competing narratives: what he calls Unionist history and Disintegrationist history. The first sees America as a story of ideals striving to overcome flaws; the second sees it as a lie built on oppression. Our choice of narrative, he warns, determines whether future generations feel gratitude or guilt for their country.

The Unionist Narrative

Shapiro’s Unionist history celebrates the founding principles as self-correcting. From the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement, reformers like Lincoln, Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the founding—never against it. They wielded the Declaration’s promise of equality as a weapon to expand liberty. America’s victories in two world wars, its defeat of communism, and its record of innovation testify, in his account, to a moral force rooted in freedom.

The Disintegrationist Rewrite

By contrast, Disintegrationists reinterpret history through a permanent victim-vs.-oppressor lens. Shapiro cites the influence of historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframe America’s birth as a conspiracy of power rather than liberation. He critiques how these narratives link every modern problem—poverty, crime, capitalism itself—to slavery or colonization. For Shapiro, such thinking denies moral agency, convincing citizens that progress is impossible without tearing down the system.

Why Shared Memory Matters

A people cannot survive, Shapiro reminds readers, without shared memory. Forgetting common heroes and victories transforms neighbors into strangers. When students are taught only America’s sins, patriotism becomes shame. He warns that a country convinced it was “born in evil” will seek to erase itself. The antidote is honest gratitude—acknowledging wrongs while still affirming the good that overcomes them. Hope, not hatred, is the lesson he wants you to pass forward.

In his closing chapters, Shapiro offers a path back from the abyss. He admits that the divides are real—religion, class, and identity—but contends that America can rebuild its unity by remembering what made it great. This means rediscovering faith in shared moral law, rebuilding families and communities, and limiting government to its rightful role. True renewal, he says, begins not in Washington but in you.

Recover Philosophy Through Education

Civic ignorance, Shapiro argues, is at the heart of division. Schools must teach the philosophy of natural rights and the context of American greatness instead of ideological grievance. Learning that slavery was overcome through the power of American ideals reminds students that progress comes from applying truth, not abandoning it. Reforming education, therefore, is less about curriculum battles and more about restoring shared purpose.

Rebuild Culture from the Ground Up

Shapiro urges Americans to invest in the small institutions that shape virtue: families, churches, and civic groups. These gather the trust that politics has lost. Quoting Edmund Burke, he reminds readers that “to love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle of public affections.” Cultural unity survives, he believes, when people find shared moral language in local life rather than on Twitter.

Rely on Duty, Not Dependence

Finally, Shapiro returns to the founders’ vision of citizenship as both right and duty. Freedom demands self-government—raising families, working hard, defending faith, and helping neighbors. Dependence on state or mob weakens civic muscle. The path forward, then, isn’t revolution but restoration: a recommitment to American ideals in daily life. Only a virtuous people, he concludes, can keep a free country free.