The Flag on the Moon

Why Democracy’s Greatest Triumph Is Also Its Greatest Warning

A free and democratic people reached out and touched the moon, and put its flag there. Yes, it did so out of competition with the Soviet Union, and that competition revealed something important: free people united in common purpose can reach the stars.

That flag still flies up there, untouched by wind or weather, a permanent reminder of what we're capable of when we choose to be who we actually are rather than surrendering to those who promise to be better versions of us.

But now we face a new kind of betrayal—one the original moon race never anticipated.

The flag on the moon is democracy's greatest monument—not carved in stone, but planted in the void itself. It stands as eternal testimony to a simple but profound truth: free people, freely choosing to work together, can achieve the impossible.

This wasn't just a technological triumph. It was democracy's answer to the fundamental question of human organization. It was proof that you don't need to choose between freedom and greatness, between individual liberty and collective achievement. You can have both. In fact, you can only have both together.

The Americans who reached the moon weren't just following orders from a central committee. They were free people choosing to unite around a common purpose—engineers and mathematicians and pilots and dreamers who could think freely, argue openly, innovate without permission. The mission succeeded not despite democracy but because of it.

The Soviets had their own brilliant engineers, their own rockets, their own dreams of the stars. But they couldn't sustain it. Because authoritarian systems, for all their claims of efficiency and long-term thinking, ultimately eat themselves. They consume the very creativity and initiative that makes great achievements possible.

We won that race. Democracy won that race. Free people won that race.

The Great Transfer

But today we face something the Cold War never presented: the systematic transfer of democratic innovation to authoritarian regimes by the very people who should be democracy's champions.

China may very well put men on the moon. But if they do, it will be on the backs of American innovation. The technology transfer from American companies to Chinese companies—with Apple among the largest contributors—will deserve much of the credit. The semiconductors, the software, the manufacturing processes, the accumulated knowledge of generations of American engineers and scientists—all of it gift-wrapped and delivered to Beijing in exchange for market access and quarterly profits.

This isn't Chinese innovation triumphing over American decline. This is American innovation being strip-mined by authoritarians while American executives count their money and pretend they're engaging in “global cooperation.”

Tim Cook and his fellow tech oligarchs are essentially handing Xi Jinping the keys to achievements that free people created. When Cook praises Chinese “innovation” while Uyghurs disappear into concentration camps, he's not demonstrating sophisticated global thinking—he's providing technological enablement for genocide while transferring the fruits of democratic creativity to those who would use them to suppress freedom.

If Chinese astronauts plant their flag on the moon using technology that originated in Cupertino and Seattle, it won't vindicate authoritarianism. It will indict the business leaders who sold out the democratic societies that made their success possible.

The Betrayal of Victory

This represents a new kind of historical betrayal—not military defeat or ideological conversion, but the voluntary liquidation of democratic advantages by those who benefited most from democratic innovation.

Tech oligarchs and their neoreactionary cheerleaders want us to believe that democracy is too messy, too inefficient, too chaotic to handle the challenges ahead. That we need to hand power over to the “competent” few who can make decisions without all that tedious deliberation and debate.

But they're advocating for the systems that lost the original space race—and they're simultaneously ensuring those same systems get a second chance by handing them the tools democracy created.

Curtis Yarvin and his Silicon Valley acolytes want us to believe that democratic governance is obsolete “legacy code” that can't keep up with modern complexity. Peter Thiel declares that freedom and democracy are incompatible. The DOGE operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions in favor of algorithmic efficiency.

They're all advocating for the systems that lost—while ensuring those systems get to win the rematch using weapons democracy forged.

Democracy put a flag on the moon. Authoritarianism put people in gulags. Now authoritarianism gets to reach for the moon using democracy's tools, sold to them by democracy's own oligarchs.

What Competition Revealed—And What Transfer Obscures

The space race revealed something crucial about the nature of human achievement that our current moment has forgotten: greatness emerges from freedom, not in spite of it.

The moon landing wasn't the product of technocratic efficiency or optimized decision-making. It was the result of millions of free people choosing to unite around a shared purpose while maintaining their freedom to think, argue, innovate, and even dissent. NASA succeeded because it harnessed democratic creativity, not because it suppressed it.

The engineers at Mission Control weren't yes-men following algorithmic instructions. They were free citizens using their judgment, making split-second decisions, improvising solutions to problems no one had anticipated. When Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded, they didn't consult an AI model or defer to a corporate hierarchy—they argued, debated, experimented, and figured it out together.

That's what democracy looks like when it works. Not the absence of conflict, but the transformation of conflict into creativity. Not the elimination of disagreement, but the channeling of disagreement into achievement.

But now that democratic creativity is being packaged and exported to regimes that actively suppress the very conditions that made it possible. Apple's innovation emerges from the freedom of democratic societies, then gets transferred to surveillance states that use it to eliminate freedom. The cycle consumes itself: democracy creates the tools of its own suppression, then hands them over to those who would use them most effectively.

This is the supreme irony of our moment. The authoritarian systems we're now supposed to admire have never produced anything comparable to the moon landing through their own creativity. They excel at control, surveillance, and the suppression of dissent. But when they reach for the moon, they'll do it using innovations that could only have emerged from the democratic societies they're working to undermine.

The Center That Holds

This is the center that can and must be held.

Not some mushy compromise between democracy and authoritarianism. Not a pragmatic accommodation with oligarchic efficiency. But the principled commitment to what actually works: free people, united in common purpose, capable of extraordinary achievement precisely because they're free—and wise enough to preserve the advantages their freedom creates.

The flag on the moon isn't just American—it's democratic. It belongs to everyone who believes that free people can reach the stars. It stands as permanent proof that the democratic way of organizing human society isn't just morally superior to its alternatives—it's more capable of greatness.

But that greatness means nothing if we voluntarily transfer its fruits to those who would use them against us. The center that holds must include the wisdom to distinguish between sharing the benefits of democratic innovation and arming those who would destroy the conditions that make such innovation possible.

This is what we're fighting for. Not the preservation of a failed system, but the restoration of a winning one that's smart enough to protect its own advantages. Not the defense of inefficient bureaucracy, but the protection of the most successful form of human organization ever created—and the insistence that its fruits serve freedom rather than enabling tyranny.

The Moral Emergency

When we stand in the rows at Arlington National Cemetery, when we see those graves and feel the weight of what they represent, we're not just honoring individual sacrifice. We're honoring the principle that those lives preserved: that free people can govern themselves, can unite for common purposes, can achieve impossible things without surrendering their freedom to those who promise to achieve them more efficiently.

But we're also confronting a moral emergency: those who died to preserve democratic societies are watching their sacrifice being liquidated by business leaders who value market access over the principles that created their wealth.

The debt we owe the dead isn't just about preserving democracy—it's about preserving the advantages democracy creates and ensuring they serve democratic ends rather than authoritarian ones. When Tim Cook hands Chinese surveillance states the tools to perfect their oppression, when tech oligarchs transfer democratic innovations to regimes that use them to suppress democracy, they're not just betraying American interests—they're desecrating the graves of those who died to preserve the freedom that made such innovations possible.

The Recommitment

We should recommit ourselves to this great endeavor. Not turn away from it. Not embrace the systems of control and oppression of the losers of that race. And certainly not arm those systems with the weapons our freedom created.

The challenges ahead—climate change, artificial intelligence, space exploration, the next pandemic, the colonization of Mars—these aren't reasons to abandon democracy or to hand democracy's tools to its enemies. They're reasons to demonstrate what democracy can do when free people unite around common purposes while preserving the advantages their unity creates.

The America that can meet these challenges isn't the America that retreats into nationalist isolation or surrenders to oligarchic efficiency. It's the America that looks at vast problems and says: “We'll figure this out together. All of us. Through argument and debate and compromise and shared commitment to the common good. And we'll keep the solutions we create.”

The America that plants flags on the moon because that's what free people do when they remember who they are—and that protects the achievements of democratic innovation from those who would use them to eliminate democracy.

The Next Flag

That flag on the moon has been waiting for us for over fifty years. Waiting for us to return. Waiting for us to plant the next one. Waiting for us to remember what we're capable of—and to ensure that our capabilities serve our values rather than our enemies.

The authoritarians can build their surveillance states and optimize their control systems. They can promise efficiency and order and the end of democratic messiness. But they should have to do it with their own innovations, created through their own systems, using their own creativity.

If they reach the moon, let them do it the way we did—by unleashing the creative potential of their own people, by allowing freedom and debate and dissent, by proving that their way of organizing human society can inspire the impossible rather than merely controlling the possible.

The next great achievements in human history—the settlement of Mars, the development of artificial intelligence that serves human flourishing, the solutions to climate change that preserve both prosperity and planet—these should come from free people freely choosing to unite around common purposes. And the fruits of these achievements should serve the expansion of freedom, not its elimination.

This is the America I want. This is the America worth fighting for. This is the America that honors the debt we owe to the dead by living up to what they died for—and by ensuring that what they died for doesn't get sold to the highest bidder.

Not the America that surrenders its birthright to oligarchs who promise efficiency. Not the America that trades democratic governance for algorithmic optimization. Not the America that hands the weapons of freedom to the enemies of freedom.

But the America that remembers: we won the race to the moon, we won the Cold War, we proved that free people can do impossible things. We can do it again. We will do it again. And this time, we'll be wise enough to keep what we create.

The powerful play goes on, and our verse isn't finished yet. The flag on the moon is waiting for company. The stars are waiting for free people to claim them.

But let them be claimed by free people, using the tools of freedom, for the purposes of freedom.

Democracy today, democracy tomorrow, democracy everywhere, democracy forever.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And free people united in common purpose can reach the stars—without arming tyrants along the way.

The center holds. The flag flies. The next impossible thing is waiting.

Let's go plant it together. And let's make sure it stays planted.

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”I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

— John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961 Speech before a Joint Session of Congress