What a Ride? The United States after 250 years

Unlike most countries the United States have been founded on ideas, not on ethnicity, common language or heritage. When the Second Continental Congress declared its independence from Britain on July the 4th 1776 it referred to principles instead of historical legacies or territorial arguments. But what has happened since then to those “self-evident truths” over 2 ½ centuries, to the promises of the founders, the dreams of the nation and the myths evolving over time? How does the world’s oldest democracy fare after its revolution had turned into secession from the British Empire, after a deadly Civil War and two World Wars, after the Cold War, Vietnam, the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s - and after decades of global hegemony only dissipating in recent times? It has been quite a ride from Thomas Jefferson writing the “Declaration of Independence” over 17 thoughtful days to Donald Trump sputtering out dozens of not evident truths on his own social media platform during sleepless nights. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness”. Every American school child has learned this stirring sentence from the revered founding document addressed to the British King, the American colonists and the world. It was a statement of pride and promise to unify the 2.5 million scattered inhabitants of a vast and still unconquered continent. And it worked, leading to a constitution, a country and a global power. 

The United States’ journey through the centuries started with edits to the founding document and controversies about its interpretation that would shape its politics until today. Thomas Jefferson was already unhappy about the edits to his draft by the Second Continental Congress concerning the slave issue, despite being a holder of slaves himself. What would have happened if the southern delegates to the Congress would not have opposed the original paragraph that blamed George the III for the institution of “human bondage”, if it would have become the 28th grievance to the British ruler listed in the Declaration? What if the delegates had not evaded the issue of slavery in the document, but had ended the institution itself? 

For the historian Jill Lepore “(the paragraph’s) erasure marked the beginning of centuries of political attempts to pretend that slavery never happened”. And indeed, it is easy to draw the line from this omission to Frederick Douglas’ bitter question at the first centennial: “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” Or to the disappointment of black airmen who, returning home, had to sit again at the back of the bus after having fought for the United States in World War II. Or to James Baldwin’s plea to his fellow white Americans to confront the history of race. “It is the innocence that constitutes the crime”, he wrote in 1963. The line can be followed up to the recent cleansing of DEI programs by the Trump Administration and the firing of black generals by its openly racist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Or to the racialist weakening of the Voting Rights Act by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court in April of this year. The 250-year-long history of the “original sin” in American politics reads like a sequence of erasure, resistance, denial, progress and backlash. 

One can also look at the “expression of the American mind”, as Jefferson intended the Declaration of Independence to be, by recounting the circumstances of its historical celebrations. 50 years on, the anniversary was marked by a new confidence after having finally fought off the Brits militarily, but also by a strange tragedy when two founders and political adversaries, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both died on exactly the 4th of July 1826. 

The first centennial was celebrated in the wake of a civil war in which 700.000 Americans had died because the right to secession, which had fired the original document, had been claimed by the states of the Confederacy and turned against its very principles of liberty and equality. Later President Abraham Lincoln might have condensed the Declaration’s principles and the lessons from the Civil War in the famous phrase of his Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. But politically the centennial fell afoul of a new conflict between the former Confederate states and the Republicans which brought the rather conciliatory post-war period of “Reconstruction” to its end. Not much of “unity” to be seen after 100 years of the so-called United States. But still you could argue that after one century the Declaration of Independence had served its purpose when the revolt against British rule had succeeded, the civil war had been overcome and slavery had been abolished. And as the orations show over the years, there was enough to celebrate and enough to complain for the American “experiment” to be continued wholeheartedly by America’s citizens. 

It was still ten years to go to the Bicentennial when the fight for the political instrumentalization of the celebration and the interpretation of the American story began. President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted it to be a showcase for his “Great Society” including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other measures aimed at social equality. Yet when Richard Nixon succeeded him in the election of 1968 his idea was to show American greatness to the world, a Bicentennial of “boosterism and false patriotism” as his Democratic opponent George McGovern charged. 

Nixon’s forced resignation after the Watergate Scandal put an end to all that in 1974. What followed was two years of congressional funding for various works of art, for civic education and historical sites some of which is now being cut by the Trump Administration. This took some pressure off the political polarization concerning the event. But despite all the garish but popular rituals and trashy gimmicks of a hyper-commercialist society displayed on the 4th of July 1976 the Bicentennial showed the scars and cracks in American society after the disasters of Vietnam and Watergate. The gap between promise and fulfilment of the Declaration’s words which had narrowed through the equalizing 60s seemed to have grown again. Commemorating the past, those anniversaries show, is not easy because the celebrations seem to be regularly upstaged by the contradictions between the founding principles and their betrayals. 

Since 1976 three views of American history have been competing for attention reflecting the political developments since then, as Yony Applebaum writes in “The Atlantic”. There was the old “consensus school” academically shaped by the children of Jewish immigrants during the Cold War, a very complimentary view of the country as a safe haven for many and a melting pot of different cultures. It was followed by a generation of women and minority academics who wanted to add their forgotten experiences to the analytical tableau and the story of the nation. They were more interested in the history of class, gender, race and identity than in the wider and sometimes imaginary America. But what started in the 60s and 70s as a needed and rightful addition to the nation’s history turned into a one-sided and at times illiberal exercise by demeaning the nation and condemning any form of patriotism. By stressing the country’s sins over its achievements, it created the backlash we have been observing over the last decade. 

America’s rough ride through the centuries had started with the exceptionalism of the Puritans and other religious fugitives from Europe. It continued with the founders’ preposterous dream that their Declaration could bring Liberty not only to the colonists but sooner or later to the whole world. It was a misreading of the historical context of the American Revolution - overestimating the United States’ role and destiny that became endemic to American foreign policy. 

But in the global realities of the 1770s, it was less the ideas hatched out by a group of learned landowners in Philadelphia but more the economic situation of the British Empire that shaped the conflict with the colonists.  The American Revolution was just a side-show to the empire-wide defiance between the Caribbean and India, not its main theatre, as Daniel Immerwahr describes it in the “New Yorker”. “In the global context, the Founders appear not as the wretched of the earth but as the fortunate sons of Britain who, at a certain point, found it more advantageous to become sons of liberty”. Indeed, compared to the attempted uprisings against the ruthless planters in Jamaica and the brutal exploitation of the East India Company the 27 “grievances” listed in the Declaration of Independence look like rather faint complaints. Or in the words of Hannah Arendt: France’s revolution “made world history” where America’s was “of little more than local importance”. One could even argue that it set Britain free to strengthen its Empire elsewhere. 

But exceptionalism, self-confidence and self-importance were there to stay, for good and bad wars to come. Today this self-centredness has morphed into Donald Trump’s “hyper-American approach”, as the historian Johann Neem calls it, of “Life” in a Darwinian system, “Liberty” of a chosen (and corrupt) few and “the pursuit of happiness” as a zero-sum game. It is a story that has the virtue of simplicity but the air of falsehoods - and maybe the support of a third of its current citizenry. 

The Trump years have shown that taking the state out of religion, as the founders intended, did not take religion out of politics; that the omission of the race question in the Declaration still has political reverberations; and that the promise of all men “created equal” can be easily ridiculed by Silicon Valley’s new prophets of inequality. It has been Trump’s genius to reinvigorate the dark strands in America’s past, its anti-intellectualism and anti-egalitarianism, its weakness for corruption and easy acceptance of violence, all based on a unique mix of well cultivated myths and real competitiveness. Over the last 250 years the principles of the Declaration have been betrayed many times and the rift between promise and reality has steadily accompanied the country’s trajectory. But at least in our lifetime its values have never been twisted to such an extent, nor has the gap between aspiration and practice widened to such a degree as it has over the last 17 months. 

Right from its beginnings the United States have been a fractitious and at times highly polarized country in search of a common story. Now, at the semiquincentennial, some observers are asking if its citizens have given up the search for a such a common story, or if it can be reconstructed again. With Donald Trump, the “No Kings” demonstrations, and after 250 years of a grandiose but bumptious ride the United States has again arrived at the question put to co-founder Benjamin Franklin in 1787: “Well, Doctor, what we have got”. The right answer then as today seems to be: “A Republic, if you can keep it”.