If you can keep it

Taking its title from Benjamin Franklin's famous warning that America is "a republic, if you can keep it," Eric Metaxas makes the case that the United States was founded on an unusually fragile premise: a shared commitment to liberty and self-government rather than blood-and-soil nationalism. He argues that this idea, unlike a fixed territory or ethnic identity, has to be actively understood and renewed by each generation or it can simply be lost.

The book combines founding-era history with a contemporary call to civic engagement, urging readers to see active citizenship as the price of keeping the American experiment alive.