Try as it has, the left has still not been able to kill one of America’s most timeless virtues, which is best known as rugged individualism. No other country has ever embraced this value the way America has. It represents a uniquely American cultural ideal that places the emphasis on self-reliance, independence, initiative, and resilience against all odds.
The American cowboy has become the iconic manifestation of this virtue, but it really isn’t that hard to find throughout American society. You see it in the entrepreneur or small business owner that risks it all to start a new venture. You see it in the dad who works two jobs to buy that house for his family, or put his kids through college. You see it in the single mother who puts herself through college to give her kids a better life.
Rugged individualism is about people who succeed or fail on their own, and get back up to try again. They employ hard work, innovation, persistence, and determination when all signs point to failure, yet they keep going without a safety net.
Stories of people like Steve Jobs, who founded Apple, reinforce the American ideal of rugged individualism. With no college degree, he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in his parents’ garage. To succeed, they had to be creative, adaptable, somewhat stoic when bad things happened, and in the end, they had to be comfortable with risk.
This harkens back to the frontier spirit that drove America to expand west from its earliest days. Explorers like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark charted territories that had been, to that point, unknown to civilization, using all of these traits. Traits that, 165 years later, would drive America to pull all of its resources to put a man on the moon. Yes, these were group efforts, but make no mistake, these were groups of rugged individuals, each of whom was doing everything in his or her power to shoulder the burden of the mission.
President Herbert Hoover popularized the term “rugged individualism” in a 1928 stump speech as he was campaigning for the White House. He said:
When the war closed, the most vital of issues both in our own country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a... choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization... [and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.
Almost 100 years ago, Hoover was even then drawing distinctions between this sense of American rugged individualism and European state socialism. Some things never change unless they get worse, right?
Hoover’s argument was that America’s success resulted from its embrace of personal liberty and free enterprise.
My colleague Robert Spencer covered New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Independence Day remarks on July 3, which, if you love this country in the least, were a disaster. In his piece, Robert captured something that speaks almost directly to rugged individualism, which goes hand in hand with American exceptionalism.
Mamdani goes on to mock and misrepresent the idea of American exceptionalism, and here he begins to claim that "we are told" a series of things that few people, if any, have ever been told. "We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else." On the contrary, in less fractious days, we were told that we were "richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else," because we were a uniquely just society in which anyone could make something of himself.
That’s right, Robert. Mamdani has it completely backward. America has become the force in the world that it’s become because, ultimately, it gave the people the freedom to realize their dreams. This means that the country’s success is due to the kind of people who actually want to make something of themselves, and in the process, they create things that are far bigger than themselves. Those are the rugged individuals of which we speak.
The left hates this. It can’t tolerate it because to do so would make the citizenry less dependent on government, and that would mitigate governmental power and control. In July 2012, when he was campaigning for reelection, President Barack Obama unveiled a new narrative coming from the left that was a direct assault on rugged individualism.
Obama to American business owners: "If you got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."pic.twitter.com/RooHcud4HF
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) January 18, 2026
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in her own campaign for president, dusted off Obama’s line in 2019 on the debate stage.
ICYMI: Elizabeth Warren echoed the "you didn't build that" line from President Obama during the #DemDebate. pic.twitter.com/x0k19DbyYk
— MRC Video (@mrcvideo) October 20, 2019
This is no accident. That line was drafted, honed, focus-grouped, and tested. It was a cornerstone line in the Democrat messaging machine, even though it never really stuck. There’s a reason for that. As much as the leftist base may have liked that line, Americans don’t connect with it at all.
While liberals of all stripes can sometimes cloud our vision and give us the impression they and their ideas are more popular than they are, this country still likes everything that that cowboy represents. We’re proud of the swagger that comes with preserving the rugged individual as part of the American identity.
There is an old country saying that goes like this: “You dance with the one who brung ya,” which means if someone got you this far, don't change. Rugged individualism has been very good to America, and it very likely is the key to its future.
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