“What—to us—is the Fourth of July?”
It is a hard year to celebrate our country’s milestone anniversary. Every day brings news of yet new assaults on core American values and institutions. And these events only reinforce what we know from a critical re-examination of our history, that America has been built through force and the subjugation of others. Those forces are a throughline in our history, and they are on full display now.
What’s to celebrate?
Frederick Douglass’s famous speech about the meaning of this holiday celebrating American freedom to people who are not free resonates strongly in these times. In the face of this rise in white nationalism and authoritarian politics we must ask ourselves: what is the meaning of America? What purpose should we serve as Americans? What is the fourth of July celebrating?
In our time, as in Douglass’s, there are those who answer those questions in terms of American power, military and financial, and the assumption that having power justifies any use of that power. There are no moral principles guiding our role in the world other than our own self-interest. Such Americans celebrate this holiday as a display of our power and dominance, which sometimes become a display of raw power acted out on the White House lawn. The message couldn’t have been clearer: this is our way of governing.
But alongside that vision of America, there is another. It sees this American experiment as a noble one, notwithstanding the repeated, miserable failures of our country to live up to that ideal. That ideal is not flawed--the vision of a country in which all people, without regard to their origins, could have freedom and live in a society of “equal justice under law.”
The greatness of America is in that moral vision, not in our exercise of power.
If there is something to celebrate on the Fourth of July, it is this: that all the efforts of those who want only to glorify America and valorize the victory of the strong over the weak, have created an ongoing string of moral heroes who challenged Americans to be more inclusive and equal. That is the vision that inspired suffragettes, civil rights leaders, and others in every generation to push America to live up to its promise.
That spirit is surely worth celebrating. It is not to overlook or minimize our failings as a nation; it is to hold up and celebrate those who have articulated a moral vision of our country, despite those failings. It is also to recognize that this vision of America continues to draw people to this country each year. We should celebrate all the immigrants, then and now, who have chosen to believe in America’s promise, however they got here.
We can choose how to mark this anniversary, if at all. One choice is to focus on a vision of America that is uplifting, that is worthy of our dedication, and then to continue the efforts of so many before us who have worked to make that vision a reality.
Let us hold this day as a marker of how far we have come in realizing the ideal of a country with “liberty and justice for all.” The holiday gives us an opportunity for an honest appraisal of our long history of failures, and so also a way to move closer to that society.
It is also a time to reaffirm that we pledge “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” in the name of creating that kind of nation. Two and a half centuries ago, a group of Americans made that pledge. We can today, as well.