The Myth of the Single Savior
This essay is the first in a four-part series on the changing nature of freedom in American life. The project looks at how fear, dependency, and national identity have shaped our sense of autonomy, and how a clearer path forward can begin with local responsibility and personal agency.
There is a difference between believing in a leader and handing them our agency.
The two can look similar from a distance. Support can turn into dependence. Admiration can turn into surrender. And somewhere along the way, the idea of a single person carrying the weight of a nation begins to feel natural, even necessary. It becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about how things get fixed.
But that story is new. It is not rooted in the older conservative ideals many people still claim to defend. Those traditions were built on something very different. They rested on the belief that strength rises from the bottom up, that character matters more than charisma, and that the purpose of a leader is to serve a free people rather than become the center of their hopes. The strength was always meant to sit with the individual, the family, the neighborhood, and the town. Not at the podium. Not behind a seal. Not in the hands of a single personality whose presence is supposed to tip the scale of history.
Somewhere in recent years, that understanding shifted. People felt overwhelmed. Economic insecurity, cultural change, and a constant stream of fear-based messaging created the sense that life was slipping out of their control. In moments like that, it becomes easy to believe that only one person can pull the nation back from the edge. Strongmen rise when people stop trusting their own institutions, their own communities, and their own ability to shape the places they live. The ground becomes fertile for the belief that problems are too large for ordinary people. It becomes tempting to imagine that one figure can restore what feels lost.
But the truth is less dramatic and far more grounded. A free society does not thrive when people place their future in a single pair of hands. It thrives when power is distributed. It thrives when individuals make decisions locally, when communities know how to solve their own problems, and when leadership is understood as stewardship rather than salvation. Concentrated power has always been a risk to freedom, no matter who holds it. Once people begin to believe that their well-being depends on the success of a single person, they lose something important. They lose the sense that they are part of the work.
The older conservative instinct understood this. It was skeptical of central authority. It valued local control. It saw national leaders as tools, not idols. The point of a republic was never to elevate one person to mythic status. The point was to prevent any leader from becoming unavoidable. Freedom was defended through dispersion, through checks, through an active citizenry that did not wait to be rescued.
When a movement begins to orbit around one individual, the ground beneath it shifts. People stop looking to their towns, their counties, their civic groups. They stop believing that local problems can be solved by local hands. They look upward instead of around. And once that happens, the structure of freedom weakens. A country that outsources its power loses the very autonomy it claims to protect.
If conservative ideals still matter, then the path forward is not found in blind loyalty to any personality, no matter how compelling. It is found in remembering what made those ideals strong in the first place. Responsibility spread across many people. Governance that begins close to home. Communities that rely on themselves instead of distant authorities. The kind of steady confidence that keeps power small and rooted.
A free society does not require a savior. It requires participation. It requires people who know their own strength and trust their neighbors enough to build something together. National figures come and go. Communities endure. The real work of freedom happens between citizens who believe they can shape their own lives without waiting for someone else to speak for them.
If we can return to that understanding, the myth of the single savior loses its pull. What rises in its place is a different kind of hope. One that does not depend on a hero. One that grows from shared responsibility and local resilience. One that asks us to claim our own agency rather than give it away.
Freedom expands when people stop waiting to be saved. It expands when they remember that they were never supposed to hand over their power in the first place.