To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beings. A truer account of American freedom runs through 1619 and Juneteenth, when Americans forced the country, at last, to begin making its promises answerable to reality.
So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone. The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.
In the final days before 4 July, the US supreme court gave the country a diagnosis of itself. It preserved one of the country’s greatest repairs – birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment – while loosening a guardrail against corruption and weakening another promise of equal protection.
Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts.