This week we will celebrate July 4th, a holiday that—at least in our memories—cuts across partisan lines. We like to think that a broad cross section of Americans can put aside our differences and come together for parades, picnics, and fireworks that celebrate our independence from a tyrannical autocracy.

As we approach the 249th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, many are wondering what the future holds. The divides are real and deep. So we ask ourselves, will the country we have loved and ideals we have professed last much longer?

Past Independence Day celebrations have taken place amidst strong partisan rancor and great strife, including when the country was torn apart by a civil war. Today it takes place as one of our political parties continues a 90-year effort to destroy modern government.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson takes us back to 1933, the year before the New Deal brought us a government that cared about more than the wealthiest Americans.

“[A]fter years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.”

I do not know how the current attacks on democracy will play out, but I do know we have seen them before. It is easy to forget, notes the writer S.C. Gwynne, that the United States “has always been a messy, wildly partisan, and deeply violent experiment. It never wasn’t.” 

As others have written (but probably not Thomas Jefferson), “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” The Constitution, which is the basis for our rule of law and not of kings, has to be saved if our democracy is to function. Yet by any objective measure, much of what the current regime supports through executive order is unconstitutional and cruel. The administration’s signature legislative initiative is, as many have written, epically regressive. Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian has noted not only how awful the bill is for our future, but how deeply unpopular it is with the country at large.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) said, “I’ve been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

“This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”

The New York Times has listed each provision of the Senate version of the budget reconciliation bill as of Monday afternoon, and noted the projected costs or savings.

The costs and savings are important, but historians have been most helpful in setting the context for this massive transfer of wealth and power. Richardson set that context again late on Monday night after updating the ongoing discussions on Sunday evening. She noted that the bill makes the biggest cut ever to programs for low-income Americans. Also, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office “said the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republican senators are trying to pass will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years despite the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other programs over the same period.”

Guillaume A.W. Attia who studies intellectual history at the University of British Columbia posted a helpful essay to also put the MAGA effort in context. “The history of America is a long struggle between the drive for domination and the dream of freedom,” he writes at the Liberal Currents newsletter. Oftentimes it seems that domination is winning.

“This ‘dream yet unfulfilled,’ as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, of ‘a land where men of all races, colors, and creeds live together as brothers’ would not seem real until the new millennium, when almost 70 million Americans would elect a visibly ‘colored’ politician as president of the United States. Much of this history can—and often does—leave a person with a cynical outlook on the nation’s history and character, but that is only if one chooses to ignore the myriads of ways in which Americans of all stripes struggled throughout the country’s difficult history to make this a ‘more perfect union.'” (emphasis added)

Historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has suggested that we too often have a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.

“We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyranny, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.”

As Attia notes, “For all his faults (and there were many), Thomas Jefferson’s fateful decision to include the words ‘all men are created equal’ [in the Declaration of Independence] helped transform the U.S. into a nation committed in theory, but seldom in practice, to the equal treatment of others.”

“Thanks to his intervention, the nation’s greatest men, among them Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and even the brilliant heretic, John C. Calhoun, were all forced to contend with those egalitarian words, and found them impossible to ignore.”

It is clear that the current regime doesn’t believe that all persons are equal. In addition to immigrants it has targeted LGBTQ+ individuals and DEI programs. Yes, there is bad news, as in the forced resignation of the University of Virginia president because of his DEI work. But millions turned out for Pride events last month and still support equality for all Americans.

In a recent post entitled Virginia Candidates Show You Can Try to Kill DEI, But You’ll Fail, journalist Jill Lawrence demonstrates the truth of Solnit’s assertion.

“In a state whose first two governors were Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, two women will face off for the top job: former congresswoman and CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, a white Democrat, and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a black Republican, Jamaican immigrant, and Marine Corps veteran.

A gay conservative talk-radio host is running for lieutenant governor on the Republican side against an Indian immigrant. And for attorney general, a black former state legislator on the Democratic ticket is challenging the Hispanic Republican incumbent.

Who would have conceived of such a thing here in 2025?

Well, actually, many of us. Historian Kevin Kruse continues to remind his readers that the exact same “replacement theory” claims we see today by the anti-DEI crowd were being made a century ago, about the exact same city (New York), with only the identities of the “immigrant horde” changing. Ditto for the century before that.

Yes, the racist panic has been a constant, but the elasticity of what makes an American is also present, continuing to expand, as more and more Americans see the value of diversity. Many of those who are leading the anti-DEI charge (e.g., Stephen Miller) had immigrant ancestors whose very arrival was decried as a sign of America’s imminent collapse. The present level of hatred and bigotry comes and goes. It is not, however, inevitable.

During this 249th celebration of Independence Day there is still much work to do. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Thankfully, good trouble lives on. Thankfully, there are millions who still dream for a better, more just, more equitable future and they are willing to expend the effort—as their ancestors did—to help us move towards that ideal.

More to come . . .

DJB

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UPDATES: A couple of quick notes after the passage of the epically regressive budget reconciliation bill. First, Jennifer Rubin’s column on the similarities between the list of grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and today’s authoritarianism makes for a timely read on July 4th. It is important to remember that for many years Rubin was a reliable voice for conservative Republican policies. Second, Paul Waldman provides his take on the reasoning for what appears to be a politically damaging vote.

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Photograph of fireworks on the National Mall from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Other images from Wikimedia.