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Across the country today, Americans are celebrating a common article of faith: the belief that a free people can govern themselves under rights given to them not by the government but by their creator.
Two hundred fifty years ago, the Republic was founded as the first major Enlightenment Revolution. The Enlightenment had started roughly 100 years earlier. Many in Europe had long argued for a society based on the writings of figures like John Locke. But it would happen thousands of miles away, among a collection of colonies where a people came together and put those principles to the test. They believed that they were entitled to rights of free speech, free exercise, and property as human beings, not as subjects.
We became the fascination of Europe among writers and intellectuals who could not understand how the world’s first Enlightenment Revolution could be brought about by a people with little connection to each other or the land; with no calcified class structure or fixed institutions.
It led one Frenchman, who wrote under the name John Hector St. John, to ask, “What then is the American, this new man?”
In my book, Rage and the Republic, I ask whether we can answer that question today. Who were we then, and who are we now?
In 1776, two revolutions were developing in America and in France. One would become the world’s oldest and most successful republic The other, in France, would become “the Terror,” in which tens of thousands would die on guillotines and in the streets.
The true miracle of Philadelphia was the creation of a system that could harness the self-destructive powers of a democracy. The framers, and particularly James Madison, would create a constitutional system that forced moderation and compromise through checks and balances.
Many wanted a less restrained democratic system, but the Framers understood that such systems stretching back to ancient Athens had become little more than what Benjamin Rush called a “mobocracy.”
In France, such voices prevailed. They unleashed a blood-letting that would ultimately even devour the Jacobins themselves. They first turned on the wealth and aristocrats, then on the priests and then each other. It would lead French journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan to write that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Those voices are with us today. Many, including Democratic and socialist leaders, are denouncing the Declaration and the Constitution as tools of repression.
This week, various Democrats went public to call for radical revolutionary changes or criticize our founding. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used an occasion with newly admitted citizens to trash the country, oligarchs, ICE, and our “arena of supremacy.”
Socialist Mamdani described a virtual hellscape of a country run by “oligarchs who buy elections” as “children go to sleep hungry.” He added, “We see monopolies that dominate every industry, and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”
Mamdani mocked the narrative of the republic, telling the new citizens that “the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.”
Others joined the celebrations with their own condemnations. Pennsylvania socialist Chris Rabb, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, has joined the chorus of critics.
Speaking at Philadelphia’s “America at 250 — Trump Fascism, Historical Erasure, and the Battle Over Truth,” the unopposed Rabb lashed out at a country built on “stolen land and stolen labor.” He also mocked the “lofty” “screeds” that “were notoriously catering to a performative aspect of collective genius that purposely erased indigenous and black peoples.” He denounced this country as based on harmful “myths” supporting white supremacy and fascism: “Fascism is not new. These systems of harm are built into the very fabric of this nation.”
Others, such as former MSNBC host Joy Reid, declared that black Americans don’t celebrate the Fourth.
Reid dismissed celebrating what she called “MAGA America” which she described as “sad, pathetic, boring.” Others, like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), used the anniversary to praise Cuba as the true model of success.
Blue states — Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Pennsylvania—declined to participate in the 250th anniversary celebrations on the National Mall.
In Massachusetts, a historic church ended its longstanding celebration of the Fourth of July to focus on the “on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness.”
This is the home of John Adams and other patriots. Adams wrote his wife Abigail that this day would be “celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”
We are seeing not a constitutional crisis but a crisis of faith. Polls show that fewer than half of Democrats are now proud to be Americans.
For many of us, this day remains, as Adams described it, that day of deliverance. These are revolutionary times, but we remain a revolutionary people who believe that free speech and other rights belong to us as human beings. Our belief in individual rights and the free market built the greatest engine of prosperity and freedom in the history of the world.
Many of these critics cite our flaws, including slavery, in a country based on inalienable rights. But what the framers gave us was a system that allows an imperfect people to form a “more perfect union.”
It was here that citizens could pursue their own manifest destiny. It is here that a black minister could speak on our National Mall about his unrealized dream and galvanize a nation to fight for the civil rights of every American.
It is here that an African American, and the child of a Kenyan, could become president. It is here that the son of Vietnamese immigrants could rise this year to be Navy Secretary. It is here that a black child growing up in a home with a dirt floor and no plumbing — that is Clarence Thomas, of course — could become one of the longest-serving justices of the Supreme Court.
It is here that a people could survive economic meltdowns, global wars, and natural disasters, based on the simple belief that we share a common article of faith: “E pluribus unum” — “out of many, one.”
“What, then, is this American?” Look around you.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“
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