America at 250

 “I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.” – Thomas Jefferson. Died July 4, 1826.

250 years ago, a group of optimists put their names to a remarkable document, stating that the King, God’s representative on Earth, had lost the right to govern by his own corruption, tyranny, inattentiveness and incompetence. The Declaration of Independence claimed that human rights came not from the grace of monarchs and emperors but were instead inherent and God-given. The only reason the King, or any government, existed, was to secure those rights, with the consent of the people. And if a government did not secure those fundamental rights, the people had the right, indeed the obligation, to rebel and to institute a new government. The Declaration of Independence then set out, in detail, what the King had done wrong, from levying taxes without consent, to withholding his assent to laws that would help the Colonies, to restricting immigration to the Colonies. It was truly radical stuff, and those who signed it did so knowing full well that it could mean ruin or death.  

The Declaration of Independence is the founding document for a new nation, not just a new country. This new nation, from its very beginning, brought together people of disparate backgrounds. It is a myth that the United States was ethnically or culturally homogenous in 1776. Religiously, the country was religiously divided between High-Church Anglican, Low-Church Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Puritan, Quaker, Catholic, and Jewish faiths. Within living memory of the Revolution, people were killing each other over those distinctions. Boston would not see its first public Catholic mass until 1788. Since the Act of Supremacy in 1534, Great Britain had been torn apart by religious conflict, most spectacularly in the English Civil Wars (yes, wars. Three of them). Great Britain wouldn’t stop fighting about religion until 1746, only 30 years before the Declaration of Independence.

It is also a myth that the colonies were ethnically homogenous. Other than the Africans who were kidnapped and brought here against their will, there were French, French-Huguenot, and a considerable population of Dutch and Germans, the latter of whom Benjamin Franklin though were a bunch of shiftless layabouts. Even talking about “English” settlers ignores the considerable numbers of people who identified as Welsh, Cornish, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Irish. William Shakespeare, in Henry V, tried to get these disparate peoples to see themselves as part of one British nation. He didn’t succeed, and considering the current state of Northern Ireland, and the electoral success of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party, nobody else has managed to do so in the intervening 400 years. Amazingly, the United States was able to cohere as a nation in a way that the United Kingdom never will. The genius of the United States was to make a nation of nations, not with appeals to ancient history, or appeals to a common language or religion or set of customs, but with a small set of ideas that anybody could choose to believe.  

While we currently fret about the instability of the American experiment, it’s amazing that it has lasted a quarter of a millennium. Since the Declaration of Independence, France has had either two or three monarchies (depending on how you count them), two Empires, five Republics, and one fascist dictatorship. Each of these forms of government began and ended violently. Over the same time-frame, Germany had a period where it was a bunch of independent states under one loose empire, a period where those states were French puppet states, a period of fewer, larger independent states, an empire pulled together by and ruled by the most humorless of those independent states, two Republics, a twelve year period that they’d prefer not to have to talk about, and this 45-year period where everybody was half-expecting the country to be destroyed by World War III. In Russia, the 250 years since 1776 have largely been characterized by lots of people trying to stop being seen as Russian and instead seen as Polish, Finnish, Latvian, Ukrainian, etc. Italy spent about 500 years as a vague idea before finally uniting. Spain had a civil war that makes Gone with the Wind look like You’ve Got Mail. Argentina in some ways had a similar starting position to the United States, and yet it had a century of tragedy and misfortune that it will take a long time to recover from.  

The durability of the American experiment is because these United States are bigger than the ego, desires, or vision of one man. The Founding Fathers did not agree on what the country should look like, but they left behind a form of government where people of wildly differing opinions could find a way to govern themselves. We still talk about Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, not because they agreed with each other, but because we’ve found a way of synthesizing the thoughts and beliefs of each of them, in a way that they were never able to manage.

Of course, that does not mean that our country didn’t make mistakes, or that it always lived up to its potential. Slavery and Jim Crow were evil, and hypocritical. Genocide of Native Americans was evil. Our imperial adventures were evil. But what sets this country apart is our willingness to discuss that evil. It is the official position of the Turkish government that the Armenian Genocide never occurred, and you can be sentenced to up to two years in prison for saying that it did. Japan still isn’t fully honest about its crimes in China during World War II. Poland hasn’t quite reckoned with antisemitism, past and present. Russians have racist terms for Ukrainians, especially amazing considering that some of the same people who use those slurs also claim that Ukrainians are Russian. I point this out not to excuse the evils that America has committed over the years, but to note that we are constantly airing our dirty laundry in a way that other countries don’t.

I hope I live to see the tricentennial, 50 years from now. In those next 50 years we need to keep a few things in mind. First, America has been in some tight spots before, and in our own blundering, uneven, and often non-ideal way, we have found a way forward and emerged the better for it. Second, America is not great because it is rich and powerful, but because it is a set of ideas that are so radical, that much of our national struggles are in fact struggles to understand what they mean. Third, America does not belong to you, or to me, but to all of us. We will succeed, or fail, together. It’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. Let’s try to improve it.  Fourth, get the hell off social media, turn off the TV, and go out and talk to people. Media is there to encourage, exploit, and magnify the grotesque and outrageous, rather than magnifying real life.

We are going to make it. God Bless America.