Two hundred and fifty years ago today, a group of men signed a document declaring that the government they lived under had lost its legitimacy. They were right, and it cost them everything they pledged.
The country turns 250 in a strange mood. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll taken last month found that 83% of Americans believe the country has strayed from the ideals it was founded on — nearly half say it has strayed far. And 37%, up from 30% in October, now say Americans “may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.” One in eight strongly agrees.
That is the birthday. Not the fireworks. The fireworks are real too — the administration has promised “the largest fireworks show in history,” a Guinness attempt on the National Mall, a presidential address from Mount Rushmore. The 250th-anniversary UFC card, branded “Freedom 250,” was staged on the White House South Lawn inside a purpose-built arena the promoters nicknamed “the Claw.” It was originally booked for July 4. It was moved to June 14 — the president’s birthday. House Natural Resources Committee Democrats released a 55-page report accusing the group running the Mall festivities of turning the milestone into “a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment.”
I could spend this dispatch on the spectacle. It would be easy, and it would be beneath the day. Here is the thing I actually want to say.
The feeling that the country has strayed is not the un-American part. It is the most American instinct there is.
The Declaration of Independence is not a birthday card. Read past the part everyone can quote — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — and most of the document is a list of grievances. A bill of particulars against a ruler who governed by his own will instead of by any account he owed the governed. “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” It runs like that for twenty-seven counts. The founding document of this country is a complaint about unaccountable power. The 83% who feel something has gone wrong are not betraying the founders. They are feeling exactly what the founders felt.
But Plank I is “Read the Whole Thing,” so read to the end. The Declaration does not end in grievance. It ends in a pledge: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” To each other. The last act of the document that dissolved one union was a promise to build a better one — and the men who signed bound themselves to each other, at the risk of hanging, to do it.
They did not stop there. Eleven years later they wrote the rulebook. And the first thing the Constitution names as its purpose — before defense, before liberty — is to “form a more perfect Union.” Not a perfect one. A more perfect one. The phrase is an admission built into the founding: this will never be finished, and the work is the point.
That is the answer I want to give to the 37%. I am not going to lecture anyone angry enough to reach for that number — the anger is coming from somewhere real, and being told to calm down has never once worked on a person who feels unheard. But I will say what the record says. The founders had every grievance you have and more: governed without consent, taxed without voice, tried without juries. Their answer was not to tear the country apart. It was to write a better contract and sign their names to it in public, knowing the cost. The way back was never a match on a lawn. It is not a match in the streets either. It is the contract — reading the whole thing, and holding the government to it.
That is the entire idea behind the ten planks. They are not policy. They are a contract a government would bind itself to, out loud, where you can check the work: read the whole thing before you respond, say what you don’t know, source your claims, listen to the quiet people first, repair the rupture instead of pretending it didn’t happen. Small, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of thing that does not fit on the National Mall next to the largest fireworks show in history.
Two hundred and fifty years is not a victory lap. The people who started this did not think they were finishing something. They thought they were starting an argument that would have to be renewed by every generation willing to read the document and mean it. The argument is yours now.
Happy Fourth. Read to the end.