The New Frontier Thesis

A MODERN FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND OUR SHARED AMERICAN STORY,
SHAPE OUR CULTURE, AND UNIFY OUR NATION

Debuting in 2020, the NFT identifies two versions of the “American Story” competing for the minds of Americans:

THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY APPROACH

Appeals to Americans’ desire for settled and safe choices, with a focus on:

• Acceptance

• Yearning for Hope

• Meaning

THE PIONEERING APPROACH

Appeals to concerns for:

• Felt Freedom

• Community Based in Shared Purpose

• Individual Empowerment

We continually refine the New Frontier Thesis with new data in real time. Every new audience studied and topic explored expands the power of our pathways. We are building a new American story that will unite our nation.

BACKGROUND

Since 2011, the Frontier Lab’s body of work has been identifying the values that explain political decision-making when it comes to policy, brand, and leaders. Those values form the foundation for six themes that will define a new American Spirit.

In over 75 studies we’ve conducted in the past 8 years, a surprising overall finding was that the persuadable voters who swing between parties or remain on the sidelines respond to these identified values, and nearly all Americans related to the strength and courage of a frontier American spirit in one way or another. Most messaging and policy formation relies on conventional issues that have been defined by the media and those in power. Rejecting these and choosing a new prism — one that is uncovered by listening to the American people in innovative ways — will magnify and create a resurgence of the unique American character. 

AMERICAN SPIRIT AND AMERICAN FREEDOM

Americans today are faced with two competitive views of the fate of the American character: the prevailing view says that unity is not achievable, America is not exceptional, and the individual everyman has less of a voice than the elite or the academic. For many, the American Dream has been rebirthed through a prism of materialistic equality. 

One alternative view, the uniting frontier of America’s past and potentially its future, holds that material gain should not be the measure of America’s greatness; we have a better mission and measure. That is, the American spirit – formed at the frontier, where American Freedom also found its definition not in safety and comfort but in adventure, strength, and destiny.

SIX INSIGHTS TO DEFINE AMERICAN GREATNESS AS ITS SPIRIT

Over the past 8 years, the Frontier Lab has conducted over 75 studies. They’ve ranged from in-depth laddering interviews of protesters, to longitudinal panel analyses, to behavioral event modeling of party switchers in the 2016 election. Throughout many of these studies, a common set of six surprising themes emerge that cut across traditional party lines, and that blur or even obscure the traditional demographic lines and segments that have been divisive in our past. These six themes all embody a basic set of Frontier Values. They appear to be a new way to relate to citizens and a new way to talk about and resolve important questions and issues that now seem unsolvable.

1)      Revive the American Spirit

Over the past decades the American spirit has been eroding with the promise of the material gain, repackaged as the American Dream, as the definition of Americanism. 

Americans on both the left and the right, and in particular the persuadables hovering between parties, desire a modern definition of American exceptionalism that requires their courage and tenacity to achieve. This is not prosperity handed out by the political class, but territory conquered through inquisitiveness and strength. 

 “They became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of democracy.”

2)     Restore American Freedom

Restoring American Freedom starts by defining what we’ve lost – beyond our greatness, these are the conditions necessary to reacquire the American spirit. Individualism based on antipathy to control acknowledges that conditions of authority that are restraining the American spirit. Current events cry out for ending a tyranny of the bureaucracy and the articulation of a loss to Americans that precedes a renewal of vigor to reacquire freedom. 

“The frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.”

3)     Relish the Responsibility to Lead

When Americans had the change to obtain a measure of freedom through their own labor or courage, the visceral reward from an interaction with freedom was far more powerful than an intellectual defense of its merits. Americans seek a way to experience the Exuberance of Freedom by participating in their own responsibility to achieve it. From Criminal Justice Reform to Immigration Security, the buoyancy of doing it themselves fuels the American Spirit. 

“That dominant individualism working for good and for evil and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom these are traits of the frontier traits railed out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. He was finder as well as fighter, the trailmaker for civilization, the inventor of new ways.”

4)     Reach Potential not Utopia

What is attainable, now – in the immediate and not the unreachable hope of Obama. There’s no hope for a better tomorrow if you don’t fix today, through strength and focused goals. 

“That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical inventive turn of mind quick to find expedients that masterful grasp of material things lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends …fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness the pioneer fought his way across the continent masterful and wasteful preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing rejoicing in rude strength and wilful achievement.”

5)     Respect all Americans -- Reject class and division

Reject the progressive narrative that we are inexorably divided against each other and act on the respect all Americans have for their neighbor by seeking Total Justice for the American Community. In immigration, economic freedom, and criminal justice, the precursor to cohesion is respect for the fellow American.

6)     Resist  Elite Tyranny

Anti-Elitism and a desire for equality was a pervasive driver of political choices, from swing voters seeking to destigmatize trade jobs to Black Americans bristling at the imposition of other religious values onto their beliefs about traditional marriage. 

“The materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank and to rise to a higher plane of existence The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities.”

HOW THE FRONTIER THESIS IS REFLECTED IN KEY ISSUES