On this Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee. They pledged their lives, fortunes and honor precisely because the outcome was in doubt. Two and a half centuries later, the wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it. That is the truth worth celebrating this summer — America is still being made.
None of this should obscure how much the wager has won. In two and a half centuries the experiment of self-government has drawn strangers into citizenship, lifted people into security and comfort and put power in the hands of ordinary men and women more than any nation before it. The American example has emboldened people far beyond its borders to demand the same. At its best, this country has been a friend to the cause of human freedom. The ledger is not clean, but any fair accounting shows a nation that has turned its enormous strength toward the good far more often than not.
Americans can be tempted to treat the country’s founding as either a flawless act of genius or an irredeemable original sin. It was neither. It was a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it. “All men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved his fellow human beings; the promise and the betrayal arrived in the same sentence. Yet the promise, once written, could not be undone.
This foundational promise was followed by three others — for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation’s early fights were mostly over whom would be granted life and liberty. More recent arguments are often over the pursuit of happiness. They turn on the rules of the game: not who is admitted to the common life but what that life owes its members, and what all of us owe the people not yet born. It is the question of whether a free people, through self-government, can build a society in which everyone has a real chance to flourish.
Benjamin Franklin described the founding with a phrase so familiar that many Americans today can recite the line. Asked what kind of government the framers had produced, he is said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional part of that sentence — the if — comes fresh to every generation, and it is now the work in front of us.
In the decades ahead, the work will most likely come down to a handful of questions whose answers are genuinely uncertain.
The first question is whether self-governing people still share a common reality. Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds. A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps. When people retreat to tribal enclaves, it can foster a sense of self-righteousness and victimization.
The second is whether we can still bear to lose. Self-government is, in part, a system for handling disagreement without bloodshed, and its indispensable habit is the willingness of the defeated to accept defeat, surrender power and live to argue another day. This habit asks something difficult: that we value the rules of the contest more than the outcome we wanted. Today, Americans increasingly regard their neighbors across the political divide not as fellow citizens with whom they disagree but as enemies to be defeated. A politics organized around enmity and catastrophization has little use for patient, unglamorous compromise and for granting that the other side might be arguing in good faith. The question is whether we can recover the conviction that a fairly counted loss is not a disaster but the price of a system worth keeping.
The third is whether the country can still keep its central material promise that those who work can rise and that their children can rise further. Today’s levels of inequality have little precedent, and living standards for large parts of American society have stagnated in recent years. The country’s promise was never only about economic outcomes, either. It was also about fairness and who has the opportunity to forge a better life. By these measures, the last 50 years have been dismaying.
The fourth is the oldest American question in its newest form: whether the most pluralist nation in history can remain one people. No country has tried what this one tries — to bind people of every origin, faith and tongue into a citizenry by assent to a set of ideas rather than by blood or soil. Past generations have heroically expanded the definition of we the people: the abolitionist invoking the Declaration against the slaveholder, the suffragist against the men who would not let her vote, the marcher at Selma against the troopers waiting at the end of the bridge, the patron at the Stonewall Inn against the raiding officers. The same fundamental questions confront us: Do all Americans count as “the people,” and will we welcome more strangers into our community?
The fifth question is about the future, about whether we can pass tests that unfold slowly and yet ask for sacrifice now. A dangerously changing climate presents one of those tests. Another involves debts handed to people who never voted on them.
America has answered questions this large before and some even larger, and we should not despair because we must again. The country did not fail even when it split in two and buried more than 750,000 of its people. It did not fail in the bread lines of the Depression, in the existential war against fascism that followed or in the smoke of burning cities in the 1960s. The country did not fail during the Cold War, when a rival nation vowed to bury us. Each time the Republic proved more durable than its mourners predicted, not because of any magic in the system, but because enough people decided the alternative was unacceptable and went to work. Democracy is not a sheltered structure we live inside. It is a habit we must practice — or lose.
So let the anniversary be more than fireworks and flags, though we should have those, too, gladly. Let it be a renewal of the work, a reminder that the right to govern ourselves is also the obligation to govern ourselves well: to show up, to listen, to tell the truth and to extend to one another the basic decency a shared citizenship demands.
The next 50 years are not a prophecy to be read. They are another wager to be placed. The founders handed us a promise they could not keep alone. We can’t, either. But we can answer their questions a little better than our forebears did, keep the Republic a little better than we found it and hand it on. That is the American project, and it is enough.
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