The United States is six months away from celebrating its 250th birthday—making it the oldest democracy in the world. Its first few birthdays were kicked off by kicking out a British monarch who took far too many liberties with his American colonies without granting his subjects anything approaching actual liberty. There were stubborn edicts, stifling censorship, imperious tea and stamp taxes, Red Coats rifling through personal effects, incarcerations without being charged, juries never convened and trial dates that never materialized.
A nation born of trauma—a people traumatized by a king who held too tight a grip on a sovereign people from across an ocean. Colonialists under the British crown took full advantage of the geographic distance between the king’s tyranny and the possibility of a new beginning as Americans. The founding generation made a critical and gutsy decision to break with King George III and unite 13 different states committed to the principle of individual autonomy and the consent to be governed. The vastness of the United States provided a blank canvas that gave democracy first dibs on the virtues of self-rule.
The Declaration of Independence, the passage of which we celebrate annually on July 4, announced America’s break with the British monarchy; the Bill of Rights was a direct attack on the monarch himself and on all infringements on liberty, regardless of whom imposes them. Our founding documents were enacted as checks on governmental overreach—with the emphasis on “the government shall not … ,” rather than “citizens have the right to … .”
The Constitution is not only a recitation of entitlements; it is also a document concerned with limitations. A warning to government not to trample over fundamental freedoms. Power is to be separated and balances checked. Governmental leaders are in charge, yet not without oversight.
But it’s not a one-way street. The government is restricted in what it can do, and the people are not off the hook. They are obligated to perform reciprocal duties. Citizenship confers both rights and obligations.
For instance, the right to free speech and freedom of the press carries with it an implied duty that the body politic will benefit from the fruits of those freedoms. Citizens will read newspapers and remain informed on current events. Differences of opinion will not be avoided and surely not censored. They will congregate at town squares and listen to those standing on soapboxes engaged in robust debates.
Speech communicates the news of the day. It is how vital information about science and medicine is shared. Speech gives voice and shape to public opinion. The First Amendment prohibits the government from impinging on expressive activity. But of equal importance to the Founding Fathers is the received wisdom that derives from speech—the benefits that come from listening. Not all speech qualifies for protection. If it conveys ideas, adds to public discourse, contributes to the life of the mind and advances human progress, the First Amendment guarantees its safe passage.
That’s why the Supreme Court has long ruled that “fighting words,” “true threats,” defamation of entire groups and the “incitement of imminent lawlessness” are not safeguarded by constitutional guarantees. They are proscribed categories of unprotected speech—essentially, non-speech.
The heckler is to receive no veto power simply because he or she is loud. The drafters of the Constitution did not endow those with closed minds the power to shout down those who gravitate to the public square with minds fully open. Why fight a Revolutionary War to privilege censorship? Criticism, even offense, is welcome. Silencing speakers who have something meaningful to say is not.
An electorate that speaks freely and is fully aware of the issues of the day will make known to the government the will of the people. And a government attuned to the public pulse will make better decisions on its behalf.
Citizenship is shorthand for civic participation, the expectation that all Americans are fully engaged in the experience of a representative democracy.
The gift of the Founding Fathers was in setting a standard that rights come with responsibilities. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., reassuring them that “the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Everyone—but most especially those torching police precincts and cars, screaming “Death!” to a group of people, desecrating monuments, disrupting diners and public performances, scuffling with law enforcement—should ask themselves: “Am I a good citizen? Do I make America better by my presence? Am I uplifting my community or dragging it down?”
Raving about rights is pure narcissism and self-interest; citizenship is the more meaningful endeavor in honoring the legacy of the American founders. To be a good citizen is the very essence of democracy in action: freely exercising liberties without interfering with the rights of others to do the same.
In the span of human history, 250 years isn’t really that long a time period. Yet, in this era of highly caffeinated, hyperventilated, hyper-partisan politics, the founding principles that unite us as Americans can easily get lost. There are many obstacles to internalizing our shared values. Declining patriotism. The algorithmic anomie of social media. The cruel erasure of the cancellation culture.
The names and intentions of our Founding Fathers have been sullied. Their intentions have been blurred, dismissed as the bad faith of terribly flawed white men. Schools dedicated to their memory are whitewashed with graffiti; statues toppled and doused in paint. They have become discarded historical figures, hardly ever mentioned favorably in schools. American exceptionalism has become a joke.
Citizenship confers both rights and obligations.
Protest movements—Black Lives Matter, pro-Hamas, anti-ICE—have become more vocal and violent since the COVID pandemic. American values have been condemned to the trash heap along with all of Western civilization, mocked by intersectional grievances, and denounced as racist and colonialist. An entire canon of ideas has been detonated by the claptrap of identity politics—designed not to unite Americans in Americana but to shame them into renouncing their patriotism, to shirk their obligations as citizens and to deny their peoplehood.
Both the left and right seem to have lost their way. Pulled off course by malicious gate-crashers, those with marching orders to undermine the United States. Extreme elements within each of the political parties have seized an outsized role in gauging public opinion, speaking falsely and making mischief.
For these reasons, as we approach this anniversary milestone, most Americans have forgotten how we got here (if they had ever known). We are in desperate need of a national civics lesson. There is an utter absence of curiosity about what the Founding Fathers imagined for this American experiment, what they were thinking when the American journey began.
July 4 hasn’t always been hot dogs and mattress sales. The founding generation had ideals, and they had ideas on how to live up to those ideals. Yet they didn’t leave behind much of a guidebook aside from legislative history and the Federalist Papers. Our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution—taken together are a relatively slim volume. We were tasked to figure it out. Apply dusty constitutional amendments to modern settings. Infer original intent. Embrace the future by revisiting lessons from our past.
How is America doing after reaching a quarter of a millennium? Would our Founding Fathers approve if they were to see our progress? Once an outlier nation at the farthest reaches of an ocean. Emerging as a superpower, only to be told that we must atone for our many sins.
That alone would have shocked our founding generation. Sins? The 1619 Project of The New York Times, which received the Pulitzer Prize, couldn’t find a single virtue in the United States.
The United States welcomed immigrants who were hungry for more than just food.
From the moment that white people planted their feet in the new world of North America, every breath has been expended in the service of racism and slavery. And little if any racial progress has been made—not the Emancipation Proclamation and the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution; not the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; not Head Start and Affirmative Action; not civil-rights laws designed to achieve equality in housing and public accommodations; not a twice-elected American black president, a once elected vice president and two consecutive black secretaries of state.
Nothing can redeem the United States from its white super-racist fortress. Abraham Lincoln, especially, would be quite surprised by this discovery.
The cornerstone of progressive thought these days, which has hijacked the Democratic Party, projects this bitter, illiberal, intolerant vision of the United States. Speech is no longer free but dependent on safe spaces. Open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas have closed shop.
Democrats have memorized a pre-approved narrative of American failure, and they are sticking to it. Everyone is entitled to their own truth, regardless of whether the premises are false.
Progressives can’t even agree on basic biology. Our science has never been more advanced, and yet male and female chromosomes and reproductive organs are somehow indeterminate of gender. The Founding Fathers were men of the Enlightenment. They believed in science and were certain that as the calendar flipped from 1976 to 2026, scientific discoveries along the way would remain immutable.
Imagine how dumbfounded they would be by how dumb we have become.
A bigger shock would be the alliance between progressives and Islamists. Thomas Jefferson fought off the Barbary pirates. He never imagined that Muslims would not only migrate to the United States, but that they would have such a hold on the American body politic. New York City, Dearborn, Mich., where most of the population is Muslim; Patterson, Prospect Park and Montgomery, N.J.; and Bell, Calif., all have Muslim mayors and nearly all-Muslim city councils.
Calls to prayer in the middle of the street in Philadelphia. A female Islamic professor from Minnesota calling for the dismantling of the United States.
The Founding Fathers believed in a strict separation of church and state. Islam, however, is a religion and a political movement. The founding generation only contemplated Christian denominations and Jews, with neither to become dominant in secular society.
Islam, however, recognizes no separation between the government, Shariah law and the word of Allah. There is nothing clandestine in the Quran’s resolve to see Islam conquer other nations and world religions. Islam has demonstrated little tolerance for religious pluralism. There’s but one truth, and infidels and apostates don’t possess it.
What has happened throughout Western Europe, Canada and Australia with no-go zones, Sharia courts, the takeover of once secular city streets for calls to prayer, the ramming of vehicles into Christmas markets and torching Christmas trees may very soon be coming to a city near you unless we hold fast to our constitutional priorities separating church from state. The First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause does not protect such an expansive and intrusive expression of Islamic religious observance.
The Founding Fathers were very fearful of the mob-mentality of majoritarian rule. Local governments in European capitals have capitulated to their large Muslim populations with their known ties to Islamic extremism and terrorism.
In Dearborn, we have seen the burning of American flags coinciding with chants, “Death to America!” American Jews have been openly harassed and threatened by Muslims—relying on misapplied protections from the First Amendment—since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023. Pro-Hamas rallies, both on college campuses and on public streets, involved rallying cries for dead Jews.
We don’t hear much nowadays about the virtues of assimilation.
Not unlike in Europe, American university officials and local governments refuse, or are simply too terrified, to enforce the law and crack down on such despicably hateful spectacles. The Founding Fathers would have regarded such behavior as simply un-American. And what about the recent actions of MAGA’s America First movement? How might the Founding Fathers have viewed them?
Put simply, the Founding Fathers, several of whom were born in Europe, felt warmly and opportunistically when it came to foreigners. They believed in American patriotism, not nationalism. What they valued most was good citizenship and global relevance. They did not envision immigration that provided asylum without a return on investment. Nor did they desire to see America withdraw from the world.
Immigrants were welcome so long as they pursued a path leading to naturalization—a commitment to assimilate into the American mainstream. Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Some reasonable term [before applying for citizenship] ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.”
The United States welcomed immigrants who were hungry for more than just food. They wanted a slice of the American dream and wanted no part of America’s decline.
Hamilton further wrote: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.”
Given what we have seen recently, does that describe the guiding ethos of Somali Minnesotans and Venezuelan gang members? The Father of our nation, George Washington, wanted immigrants quickly absorbed into American life, but not without “get[ting] assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon [to] become one people.”
Because the miraculous social mobility engine of the melting pot has been abandoned—replaced by the rigidly stagnant politics of identity—we don’t hear much nowadays about the virtues of assimilation and how it unifies the population in a shared national enterprise.
What the progressive left and the isolationist ultra-right have most in common is a mutual hatred of Israel and a receptivity to violence. Without Israel, a Zohran Mamdani and Nick Fuentes would not likely agree on anything else. And this animus has not only polluted their political affiliations, but it is also likely to lead to their self-destruction. The history of the United States—and what happens when such tensions are present—is not in their favor.
The pursuit of happiness is an equal opportunity virtue. America’s vastness was never meant to be wasted on those disinclined to get on the starting line to avail themselves of the opportunities offered in this New World. The primary author of the Constitution, James Madison, believed it “desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours.”
The Founding Fathers would have been appalled to learn that our immigration system gave birth to sleeper cells. They envisioned immigrants wildly waving American flags on July 4. Their faces flush with patriotic pride. Backpacks loaded with explosives and ball bearings and Allahu Akbar! on their lips was inconceivable. So, too, would be the chants from the American First ultra-right, “Jews will not replace us!”
America First is, ultimately, an anti-American concept—because of its inherent coldness and perpetual isolation. The hatred of foreigners and allies like Israel does not further the American experiment.
The progressive left, with its improbable Islamist bedfellows, coupled with a MAGA movement that wants nothing more than for America to go it alone, is unbecoming of the democratic nation our founding generation bequeathed to us 250 years ago.
Reprinted with permission by White Rose Magazine.
