The year-long celebration of America250 is already underway in many parts of the country. Every state, every city, every community has made some kind of plan to join in what's promising to be a truly national experience for all of us.
What are we actually celebrating? Some might see this as our 250th birthday, seeing that we are acknowledging 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. Others might see it as an anniversary of our founding.
"An anniversary marks an event rather than merely time since a beginning, and so it addresses part of what the birthday metaphor misses," writes Yuval Levin in The Free Press.
"What we commemorate on the Fourth of July is a decision to start something together. It is the anniversary of a union," Levin adds.
But wasn't the Declaration a decision to separate ourselves from Great Britain? Note the beginning of the document, declaring when it becomes "necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” Jefferson made us into one people with those words.
Abraham Lincoln thought a lot about the Declaration of Independence both before and during the Civil War. In his 1858 speech rebutting Senator Stephen Douglas's remarks the previous evening in Chicago, Lincoln found a way to connect the founding generation of Americans with the current generation, including immigrants.
If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
Lincoln was already running hard for the Senate at the time of that speech (July 10, 1858). The Lincoln-Douglas Debates were a little more than one month away, beginning in Ottawa, Illinois, just 18 miles from where I'm sitting. As far as an exposition of what it meant to be an American, you will find no better example in history than those debates.
Yuval Levin was searching for what America250 really means.
We share a common home in which we have lived a common life over generations, and that common life has been oriented by a set of ideals—religious and philosophical, republican and liberal, including a belief in natural rights rooted in natural equality and pointing toward a politics of justice. There is no contradiction here.
Lincoln captured this balance in writing about his hero Henry Clay: Clay, he said, “loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” That is a model of patriotic love suited to America.
And it can move us beyond birthdays and anniversaries toward a more demanding analogy—to the intergenerational bonds by which a people is formed. We love our family because we belong to it. But we also love it because it has formed us toward flourishing—because parents and grandparents have passed down culture, faith, loyalty, community, and memory. They have offered us an understanding of what is beautiful and true. The nation does something similar.
America was an act of creation, a triumph of the will that has never been duplicated since. For most of the last 250 years, we have maintained this faith in our founding principles, keeping to a tradition of liberty despite so many trying to destroy it. Liberty is antithetical to some on the left because it allows for biases, prejudices, even racism and hate to exist. This runs directly counter to Karl Marx's vision of a utopia in which everyone would eventually enjoy full equality and live together in peace and harmony.
Thinking an entire nation into existence is a defining moment in human history. This moment still calls to us today, asking us to make the words of the Declaration and the Constitution become flesh and live in every patriot's heart.
I'm too much of a cynic to believe that thinking deeply about America250 will cure what ails us as a nation. The wounds are currently too deep, while trust is entirely lacking.
Perhaps, in some places, among some people, a small spark of recognition of our common bonds and shared history will lead to small victories on the road back to sanity. It's much harder to change one mind and one heart at a time than to expect sweeping conversions to a point of view. On the other hand, that way seems more lasting and permanent than some demagogue's mysticism.
