I’ve been sailing through sharkish seas on the Pequod, so this newsletter has become a bit less frequent. But I thought I’d make a few comments about the Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July—the republic’s birthday. Birthdays are often cause for celebration. Just before you blow out the candles on your birthday cake, your friends and family usually don’t go around the table saying what’s wrong with you: “You’ve got horrible breath….I hate your taste in music….You spend way too much time online.” Instead, the birthday is an opportunity to recognize yourself as a person with value who has been fortunate enough to age another year.
Celebration plays an important role in a healthy political life, too. Part of preserving a regime means cultivating affection toward it. Redressing shortcomings can be part of that process of building affection, but that project also involves calling attention to what’s right and worthy in a regime.
That belief in the importance of a regime is especially valuable in times of crisis. When Abraham Lincoln spoke at Independence Hall in February 1861, he did not belabor claims that the United States was fundamentally a “flawed” country or that bigotry was somehow encoded in its founding documents. Instead, he praised the heroism and sacrifice of those who fought to create and preserve the American republic. He celebrated the “wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live.” As the Second Inaugural indicates, Lincoln was capable of a nuanced (perhaps even aporetic) account of American history. But he also recognized the importance of a statesman promoting affection for a regime.
A time of fractured media and polarized elites may offer many incentives to elevate factional conflict and division. Apocalypticism is particularly in fashion these days, as it offers an excuse for ideologues and the powerful to throw off the usual restraints of democratic life. The challenging of national symbols (in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere) has attracted considerable interest in some quarters.
In his essay “La Raison des Nations,” the French theorist Pierre Manent warned about the risks of dissolving the national. He warned that “in the absence of the sovereign, the political body necessarily tends toward one form or another of oligarchic domination.” From Manent’s perspective, the weakening of sovereignty (and part of that weakening is the delegitimization of the institutions of that sovereignty) could lead not to liberation but the arbitrary domination of the wealthy (and, perhaps, of managerial interests). This could also threaten the very basis of our enjoyment of modern liberty: “the sovereign state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed us to accommodate huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.”
The celebration of the Fourth of July can be an opportunity for gratitude—for the daring of the past, for hard-won liberties, for noble principles, for the intricate legacy of art and thought, for the unearned opportunities that we enjoy, and for the debts to the polity that has shaped us as persons. The Fourth of July reminds Americans of the glamour of their inheritance as well as the fact that they remain engaged in a continued national experiment. The fact that it is an experiment means that it offers ever-renewed opportunities for inclusion, for newcomers (whether immigrants or the next generation) to become participants in a greater project.
Every day might not need the glinting veneer of the Fourth of July. But a day of national jubilation—with fireworks and flags and readings of the Declaration of Independence—befits the calendar of the pageant that is American democracy.