Independence Day 2025 marks America’s 249th year, one short of a quarter millennium. Some people calling it a “semi-quincentennial,” but saying “millennium” evokes grand-historical images ranging from Armageddon to Deliverance. This sense of consequence is worth re-conjuring. The world has come to a point where a billion people live in air conditioning, fly across oceans, and buy their food in supermarkets,. Whereas life had always been a matter of scratching the ground and praying for rain, now the whole species can actually see that more can be had. Furthermore, discoveries and inventions – from quantum physics to DNA to artificial intelligence – mean that any thing we knew can be cast into doubt, any rule can be challenged, any limit might be surmountable. All order, social, political, economic, legal and psychic, is now conditional. What humanity does next, amid all today’s disruptions, could reach beyond biblical proportions.
Americans are nervous. People who “oppose Donald Trump” see disaster already in place. Nor do “MAGA” fans feel secure: populist movements arise because people feel deeply alienated, and their discontent has hardly been sated. Our politics play in a doom loop, a prescient commentator notes:
The more blinded by battle left and right become, the more they resemble one another, meeting, as history shows, in many varieties of destruction. Despite claiming allegiance to the Constitution, modern progressives reject it as an outdated impediment to efficient government. Reeling with the intoxication of ephemeral victory, the populist right has now joined the left, just as it has in protectionism and the left’s long tradition of appeasing Russia … Although it seems that progressives always have a plan and populists are incapable of anything but improvisation, both are to constitutionalism as drunkenness is to sobriety. They feed on their own momentum and enchantments until there is little difference between them and what once was dear to both is destroyed.
It is time to review the creation and purpose of this quarter-millennial invention, our nation.
America conceived itself in the Declaration of Independence. A “People” announced itself, where only British provinces had existed, and this new People named itself only as “we,” who hold certain Truths. A holding of truths is a creed, and this civic creed defines this People. Nowhere else have we, as a nation, named other terms for our existence.
The Truths of this founding creed are that all persons are equally endowed with unalienable rights and that governments exist to secure those rights, legitimate only in consent of the governed. This founding was radically new in the world. No nation had been conceived in a concept, and none had put the rights of the governed above and before the power of rulers. Rulers had ruled by divine dispensation, rights were privileges they bestowed at their discretion, and identity followed received traits of race, tongue, church, kin, or soil. Now “we” were a People and “power of the earth,” self-defined by principle, under which all humans are arbiters of their own lives, by their own chosen lights, whom governments exist to serve.
Such ideas had been debated before, but the Declaration put what had been a mental exercise into living effect. Its radical tenets would now face all the foibles of human nature and a savage world. Could it hold? The question, and the process of finding an answer, precisely define an experiment. The Declaration posed just such an experiment, and history tests its theory. The results will tell if a People can take identity from an idea, and whether a nation so conceived can survive.
What exactly is the theory that is tested – and will be in perpetuity? First, that a social vessel defined by such beliefs, this nation, can “long endure,” as Lincoln put it. “Endurance” has two conditions: one in the conventional sense of survival in a Realpolitik world; but also in our keeping faith with our tenets – rights equally and inherently endowed in all, and government that must secure those rights. Will “we” run our governments to ensure effective survival, in profane life and in our founding purpose? Second, we are tested for the use we make of those rights for which the nation exists. Will we use freedom well?
Creeds voice aspirations, which only transcend ugly realities with time and effort. Our experiment cannot be assessed in a snapshot, but in this nation’s development. As Amartya Sen defines it, freedom and development are, both together, the increase in people’s capacity to live as they choose. When Independence was declared, many of the signers owned slaves. The creed changed slavery from fact of life to a practice of sin, and the nation developed to erase it, at least officially. However fitfully, rights and capacities to choose our lives have grown. However often in the breach, we have kept our tenets. Much still needs to be realized, but it is in the nation’s endurance that realizations will grow.
Americans have lived by this creed, often implicitly but in long term effect, for this past quarter of a millennium. No other nation has existed so long in its current form. Still, in the sweep of history, we are young, where other identities, notably ethnicity, trace back to the Flood. Will we last? What caused the fall of Rome, the rise of Athens, or the collapse of the Ming Dynasty? We may well ponder. And yet, for America, the parallels don’t really matter. Our identity doesn’t bind us to past norms and received identities. It unfolds into the future, in what our free pursuits may bring into being. New music? New images of the cosmos? New inventions? New forms of community? We exist for the possibilities; old traditions and “realistic” limits may help us steer, but do not carry our purpose. In this sense, we are, again, an experiment, of a new idea, not only of government but social and personal exploration too. The potential future dwarfs the past, and even our imagination today – so long as we keep passing the tests. How that will happen is up to us, each and all together. Proof of the American experiment will come as we show the Declaration’s creed viable.
America’s essence, our significance in the universe, and our power in this world of guns and goods and laws – and of people trying to make sense of it all – all start from our nation’s self-conception in the Declaration’s creed.
The dysfunctions of public affairs, and the disorientations of the post-modern age, shake norms and conventions and faiths constantly, and drive many to despair. But we can take heart – we have purpose – a theory to prove, a nation to build, and a destiny to explore.
This may seem a terrible burden for a mass population, of a People more ethnically diverse than any in history, most just trying to make life work. But, whoever “I” am as an individual, proof of our experiment always, ultimately, comes back to “me.” Even if I am one of those struggling to get by, I vote, I buy or save, I click or swipe, I can learn others’ views or fight or ignore them, I can try new ways to live or keep to tried and true. If I feel empowered to build things or ideas, I can constrain myself to carry our creed, not just citing its words to validate my claims – America cannot afford to reduce creed and theory to dogma, especially to gain personal interests. America passes or fails history’s test as everyone’s billions of choices add up to validate the Declaration’s creed – or don’t. At bottom, as with generations before, the nation is me, it depends on me, and it supports me. Our one-third of a billion of “me” are “the People.”
What more could free people ask for, but to have the fate of our freedom in our own hands? We Americans, like our forebears and our descendants, carry this burden and this blessing, conferred by our founding. And it leaves us to make history, day by day.
Common Conviction 