Happy Fourth of July!

Suicide Girls, the early years.

Pardon the hate speech in the above headline, but our surveys show that 99 percent of our core audience enjoys the Fourth of July; it is for that small majority that this post is written.

Roger L. Simon, our beneficent Maximum Pajamahadeen Emeritus wonders, “Is America in a Pre-Revolutionary State this July 4th?”

As we approach July 4, 2013, is America in a pre-revolutionary state? Are we headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence.

Could it happen here?

We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game.

And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood.

It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read. What could be more totalitarian than that?

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal warns the costs of ObamaCare are close to tripling what were promised, and the number of doctors in our country is rapidly diminishing. No more “My son, the doctor!” It doesn’t pay.

And young people most of all will not be able to afford escalating health insurance costs and will end up paying the fine to the IRS, simultaneously bankrupting the health system and enhancing the brutal power of the IRS — all this while unemployment numbers remain near historical highs.

No one knows how many have given up looking for work while crony capitalist friends of the administration enrich themselves on mythological clean-energy projects.

In fact, everywhere we look on this July Fourth sees a great civilization in decline. And much of that decline can be laid at the foot of the incumbent. Especially his own people, African Americans, have suffered. Their unemployment numbers are catastrophic, their real needs ignored while hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, and, sadly, even the president fan the flames of non-existent racism.

Tahrir Square anyone?

Ironically, if our society enters a revolutionary phase, liberals will find themselves in the role of the Islamists, defending a shopworn and reactionary ideology on religious grounds, because it is only their faith that holds their ideas together at this point.

Hollywood actress and singer Bette Midler is so reactionary these days, she wishes she was a subject of the crown:

Many celebrities are celebrating the Fourth of July by wishing their country a very happy birthday. It’s a day where partisanship is pushed aside for good ol’ fashioned patriotism.

Bette Midler is taking a different approach.

The Parental Guidance star imagines a world in which the U.S. lost the war for its independence, but it’s not like that’s a bad thing. After all, she argues, that would mean we’d finally have socialized medicine.

Wow, who knew after making millions in Hollywood and as a recording artist, Bette Midler had no health insurance?

In contrast to those such as Bette who wish to go backwards; as Julia Shaw writes at NRO, “America’s birthday is also Calvin Coolidge’s. It’s a fitting coincidence, as the 30th president was one of the most eloquent defenders of America’s principles:”

Coolidge was for economic prosperity. His tax cuts and budgetary restraint enabled robust economic growth in America. “The chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge said in an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He understood, though, that material success wasn’t the most important goal for the American people. While we “make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth,” Coolidge explained, “there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization.”

Coolidge encouraged Americans to prioritize the spiritual over the material, to “cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which [our Founders] showed.” This meant a reverence for America’s principles.

Coolidge said yes to America’s principles, and the Declaration of Independence is the clearest articulation of them — it’s the mission statement of America. One of Coolidge’s greatest speeches was on the occasion of the Declaration’s 150th anniversary (his 54th birthday). Silent about himself, Coolidge praised the Declaration’s words on human equality, natural rights, and consent of the governed. America was the first nation founded on those principles. July 4, 1776, the day when they were formally expressed, “has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history” and “an incomparable event in the history of government.”

For Coolidge, these principles spelled security. They were final. “No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions,” he said. To deny the self-evident truths of the Declaration would take America “backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”

These principles provided the foundation for all Americans, whatever their policy preferences or partisan alignments. “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics,” Coolidge said, “every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

I wish that last sentence was still true today.

[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”65039″ width=”590″ height=”360″]

Related: For my interview with Amity Shlaes on her recent biography of the great Silent Cal, click here.

(Originally posted last year; photo atop post by Shutterstock.com.)