This Saturday will mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The easy-to-say semiquincentennial should have been an opportunity for us to come together as a nation and celebrate the high Enlightenment ideals that are the foundational bedrock of our country. The centerpiece of the celebration was to be a grand World’s Fair-type exposition planned with food and music from around the nation on the National Mall. But then, for the second time, we elected to the presidency a malignant narcissist who is incapable of celebrating anything except himself. Donald Trump shut down the bipartisan America 250 commission, took the money, started his own Freedom 250 commission and proceeded to make everything about him. The result is a scarcely attended fair that has cheap booths instead of pavilions and features prominent right-wing advocacy groups throughout the fair. To make sure that we knew that this celebration wasn’t for everybody, Secretary of Transportation, and former Wisconsin 7th District Congressman, Sean Duffy called Democrats “libtards” at the opening ceremony of the fair.
What a missed opportunity this is for our nation. Literally any other president could have pulled this celebration off by simply getting out of the way. It’s not like our society wasn’t divided in 1976 for the bicentennial. By the mid-70s, our nation had been rocked by Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, high inflation that we tried to “whip,” and multiple energy crises. Americans found themselves on opposite sides of big ideas and issues then too, but found a way to come together, put those things aside and celebrate the nation. Gerald Ford, the only American president never elected in a national election, was able to oversee a grand celebration despite the fact that he was in a contentious race for re-election.
Now, it’s too late to fix this fiasco, but I have a solution. We get a chance at a do-over in 11 years. That’s because the nation created by the Declaration of Independence no longer exists. Now before you start writing angry letters to the paper, I’m not making some dramatic point about how far we’ve strayed from the Founders’ vision, that can be another column at a later date. I’m talking about the fact that the nation that you and I live in wasn’t born on July 4, 1776, it was born on September 17, 1787, when the Constitution was signed in the very same room as the Declaration of Independence. You see the nation created by the Declaration and governed by the Articles of Confederation failed spectacularly. By the time the Framers convened in Philadelphia in May 1787, America was surrounded by enemies on all sides and the nation was facing an existential crisis. We needed a stronger federal government to help guide our fledgling country into what it would become and to realize our full potential as a people. A lot of the defining features of American democracy can't be found in the Articles of Confederation. There were no checks and balances because there was only one branch of government (the legislative), no balance of powers because the states could ignore the federal government outright, no economic prosperity because the Commerce Clause hadn’t yet been written to turn us into a national free trade zone, and there was no Bill of Rights to ensure and safeguard our liberties.
That’s why I’m proposing that on the week of September 17, 2037, we hold a semiquincentennial for the country that we live in today, the one created by the Constitution of the United States. Don’t get me wrong, the original Constitution has its limits too. Slavery is written into the text and is a key component of how representation was decided in our early government. But through the Constitution, the Framers gave us a mechanism, an amendment process, to live up to those words that we will celebrate on Saturday: All men (today we would say all people) are created equal.
Which brings me back to Saturday. I have good news about that celebration too. This administration completely botched the Declaration’s 250th celebration in the capital. But Washington, D.C., didn’t exist 250 years ago, it was just a swamp when the Declaration was signed. The spirit of America has never been confined to one place; it lies within each of us. We celebrate America every day when we help our neighbor even if they pray, think, look, or vote differently than us. Perhaps the silver lining of the failed 250 celebration in D.C. is that we’ve decentralized the celebration. This weekend America, and the quite literally revolutionary idea that we are all created equal and endowed with natural unalienable rights, will be celebrated in town squares across our nation and I think that’s far more fitting of the Founders vision for our country than some grand gala in a faraway capital. You see, and this may surprise some of you, even we liberals love America. So, I hope you’ll find a way to make it out to the local celebrations and remember that it is the people that make America great, not our leaders.
Happy birthday, America, here’s to 250 more, and may we never lose in our hearts the ideas upon which you were founded.