Watching the branded Freedom250 celebrations in DC, I was reminded of the quote attributed to C.S. Lewis: “When I sat with my anger long enough, she revealed her real name was grief.”
Initially, I was angry to see this solemn remembrance of the greatest-ever attempt to operationalize Enlightenment values taken over by a pay-per-view spectacle, with its conspicuous advertisements for beer and energy drinks. I was troubled by taxpayer-backed Rededicate250 prayer rallies that claimed American citizenship should require Christian identity. And I’m deeply worried about a domestic military apparatus increasingly treating civil liberties and due process as inconveniences rather than first principles. The celebration isn’t just tacky — it’s hollow. We seem to have forgotten what, exactly, the United States is supposed to be about.
Beyond my own misgivings, this summer is such a loss for my daughter. Her nuanced picture of the United States is not a people or a plot of land but a set of ideas, consecrated in a civil creed: that all men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights; that unchecked power is a threat to liberty and just powers are constitutionally constrained; that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, and govern best when they govern least. She is a little classical liberal, and largely shielded from the grim realities of our current political dysfunction.
An American Inheritance
Last July, on a family road trip, we prepared for this momentous anniversary together. A quarter millennium of human progress is hard to appreciate when your own age is in the single digits. We began in Jefferson’s study at Monticello, where he wrote the words that would transform the political vocabulary of the world. We talked about Jupiter Evans, the enslaved man who almost certainly was in Jefferson’s earshot at that moment and who, thanks to later edits made to Jefferson’s drafts, would not be included in “all men” for another ninety years. We walked the waterfront of Alexandria and stood in the assembly room of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in the stifling heat, just as the founders did while haggling over the future of political relations. We bowed our heads at battlefields and war memorials, and we read those words — “all men are created equal” — as they now appear beneath the dome of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.
I want her to believe in America, the idea. Not the empire, with its overseas meddling and wars of choice. Not the extraction machine, with its scalpel blade slicing off a share of every dollar she’ll ever earn, spend, invest, or save. Not the incarcerator, with its web of police and administrative lawyers, feeding citizens into prisons after failing them in the schoolhouse. But the American ideal. The one we celebrate.
And the project was always unfinished, imperfect. The Founders recognized that future generations would face new challenges and provided a path to amend the nation’s governing charter. Some of those amendments have strengthened, and some weakened, the principles the Constitution embodies, but each was adopted through channels built into the original. The system of laws and separated powers gave Americans a procedure to update the Constitution as practical need (Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments) and moral imperative (Thirteenth and Nineteenth) required.
The constitutional order, despite its noble intentions, began to break down almost immediately. Humans are capable of aspiring to significantly higher standards than we are generally capable of meeting, compounding our shortcomings with hypocrisy. George Washington used the military to put down a violent tax rebellion, whose motivating claims uncomfortably echoed those that galvanized the Sons of Liberty a generation before. John Adams betrayed free speech by backing the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious” speech against the government. Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the next election and pardoned those convicted, but then made the Louisiana Purchase, while privately acknowledging he lacked the authority. “An amendment of the Constitution seems necessary for this,” he wrote, but found it more expedient to use executive treaty power. And these champions of individual liberty, as is often noted, saw no pressing need to extend the same natural rights to the women, enslaved people, and indigenous individuals all around them. While many constitutional framers acknowledged that contradiction in private, few confronted it politically. They left that work to future generations.
The Long Work of Liberty
And future generations arrived to take up the American challenge. Frederick Douglass saw the Constitution as an anti-slavery doctrine and demanded inclusion in its liberties, asking, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” After fully two percent of the US population died in a Civil War to decide the point, Thaddeus Stevens embraced the amendment process to help abolish slavery. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and “The Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll each appealed to the Constitution to insist on the rights of Catholics, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, nonbelievers, and other religious minorities as full participants in the American project. Suffragists Alice Paul and Ernestine Hara Kettler lit fires outside the White House gate and went on hunger strike, enduring imprisonment and force-feedings to claim the promise of equal citizenship and representation for women. Martin Luther King Jr. famously described the Declaration and Constitution as a “promissory note” that had yet to be redeemed. Like suffragists before him, King wrote poignantly from behind bars, imploring the very nation that imprisoned him to fully embrace her own ideals: life, liberty, and equality before the law. These great American revolutionaries didn’t fight against her, but for her. They were constitutional radicals who insisted protections and promises apply to “all of us,” even as that understanding evolved.
The American miracle might be that its greatest reform movements demanded not the rejection of the nation’s founding ideals, but their fuller realization. The exceptionality of the American experiment was recognized, and often craved, by those who wanted to be a part of it.
“I love America more than any other country in the world,” wrote James Baldwin, “and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The idea of America is difficult. It requires struggle. Great victories in protecting and expanding the ideals of America have required great personal sacrifice. Citizens seeking to hold governments accountable to their stated purpose are often attacked by the very architecture that purports to protect them.
Safeguarding the legacy of liberty we have inherited from the framers and later liberators feels foreign to a generation that grew up enjoying its fruits without effort. But we cannot rest. The threats to the people are perpetual: power consolidates, it tears down its constraints, it seeks to extract resources from the docile and imprison the dissident. Even now, tyranny is executed in the name of “liberty.” Privacy and dignity are gutted for “security.” Free people are subjugated and their wills and consciences violated constantly.
More recent occupants of the White House may have more in common with Mad King George III than with the statesmen who crafted our constitutional order. But the American legacy isn’t perfection — it is self-correction.
Responsibility and Redemption
So that has become my lesson to my daughter in the coming days and years. The United States is remarkable not because it has emerged victorious, but because it has continually struggled to live up to its ideals.
The American story is not simply the story of enduring principles, but of generations struggling to live up to them. Our greatest figures did not expand liberty by abandoning the nation’s founding, but by demanding that we fully honor its promise. Our American identity is forged not just of Washington and Jefferson, but of Frederick Douglass, Robert Ingersoll, Alice Paul, and whomever comes next.
And that, I realized, is what I want her to inherit. The real work of the American anniversary is commitment: to refuse to surrender liberty for expediency, to insist on the Constitution’s protections, and to shape institutions that pass that inheritance intact, for the next generation to improve. The nation isn’t perfect. We haven’t always — or ever — fully lived up to the true meaning of our creed.
That commitment warrants neither hagiography nor cynicism. Every generation inherits an unfinished republic. By recognizing our responsibility to live up to the founding, we can rededicate ourselves to the principles that actually underpin the nation. Each of us has the chance — and the responsibility — to move us a little closer to the promise that all are created equal, that liberty belongs to everyone, and that government is the servant, not the master, of a free people.
