America at 250

The New York Times Editorial Board writes about America at 250. I think it's an important message for all Americans, especially for liberals tempted to give up on the American experiment as failed this Independence Day out of despair.

"On this Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee. They pledged their lives, fortunes and honor precisely because the outcome was in doubt. Two and a half centuries later, the wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it. That is the truth worth celebrating this summer — America is still being made.

…

Benjamin Franklin described the founding with a phrase so familiar that many Americans today can recite the line. Asked what kind of government the framers had produced, he is said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional part of that sentence — the if — comes fresh to every generation, and it is now the work in front of us.

In the decades ahead, the work will most likely come down to a handful of questions whose answers are genuinely uncertain.

…

America has answered questions this large before and some even larger, and we should not despair because we must again. The country did not fail even when it split in two and buried more than 750,000 of its people. It did not fail in the bread lines of the Depression, in the existential war against fascism that followed or in the smoke of burning cities in the 1960s. The country did not fail during the Cold War, when a rival nation vowed to bury us. Each time the Republic proved more durable than its mourners predicted, not because of any magic in the system, but because enough people decided the alternative was unacceptable and went to work. Democracy is not a sheltered structure we live inside. It is a habit we must practice — or lose.

So let the anniversary be more than fireworks and flags, though we should have those, too, gladly. Let it be a renewal of the work, a reminder that the right to govern ourselves is also the obligation to govern ourselves well: to show up, to listen, to tell the truth and to extend to one another the basic decency a shared citizenship demands.

The next 50 years are not a prophecy to be read. They are another wager to be placed. The founders handed us a promise they could not keep alone. We can’t, either. But we can answer their questions a little better than our forebears did, keep the Republic a little better than we found it and hand it on. That is the American project, and it is enough."