Every Fourth of July, Americans spend a long holiday weekend patting ourselves on the back. We remind ourselves that we’re the greatest country on earth, the indispensable nation, the World’s Oldest Democracy, the spark that ignites hope of freedom across the whole globe. It’s a feel-good festival of self-congratulation, with little introspection and lots of yay-for-us. But this year is different, and not just because it’s America’s 250th jubilee. This year, there are two separate semiquincentennials, for two increasingly-separate Americas.
What, exactly, is the thing that we’re celebrating? Most Americans, of all political and social views, are united in the belief that our country is something special. But we don’t agree on the question of why. Most years, this question is barely even raised: The unique bounty of American life is the natural result of…well, of a variety of things — hey, look at the fireworks! This year, the “why” is more pressing than at any time since the Civil War.
The best way of understanding American politics today is to see it as a continuation of a fundamental conflict that was ingrained in the nation 250 years ago, broke into open warfare between 1861-1865, and has been rumbling beneath our government and society ever since. That conflict is one of national identity: Is America a country defined by ideals, or by blood and soil?
The Declaration of Independence, the document signed on July 4, 1776, seems to indicate the former. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the delegates wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is not merely a throw-away line: It is the only sentence in the Declaration that most Americans are likely to know.
The bulk of the document, however, has a rather different tone: That of aggrieved gentry, indignant at being denied their full rights as British subjects. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” the Founders charge, and list the many ways that George III broke the implicit contract of governance. There is no universal principle here, just Englishmen rising up to defend traditional English privileges.
For most of our history, we have at least paid lip-service to the idea of America as a creedal nation. We’ve articulated a national identity based on universal ideals of equality and freedom. That, we’ve said, is what America is all about. Such a vision was always, at best, aspirational: The man who wrote that all men were created equal owned more than 610 other humans. Some 40 of the 56 signers were slave-holders.
This blatant contradiction between the words and the actions of the Founding Fathers was obvious (at least to Black Americans) from the very start, and highlighted decades later by the formerly-enslaved activist Frederick Douglass. “This Fourth July is yours, not mine,” he noted. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.” But, far from rejecting the Declaration as empty rhetoric, Douglass saw it as a vital pledge. He recognized that it gave him power not merely to criticise the status quo, but to demand that America simply live up to its own mission-statement. Martin Luther King Jr would use the same ideal in leading the fight for Civil Rights a century later, terming the nation’s founding document a “promissory note” which must one day be redeemed.
But many Americans have always rejected these ideals. The states of the Confederacy seceded to preserve the institution of slavery, and described this as a defense rather than a repudiation of America’s core identity: As they saw it, a nation of, by, and for White people predominantly of British ancestry. A large swathe of Americans still see the nation’s identity in such terms, and this conception underlies much of the MAGA world-view.
Donald Trump has made his views on non-White residents of his nation quite clear. The only class of refugees to whom he has permitted entry are White Afrikaners from South Africa longing for a return to apartheid. He objects to people legally emigrating from non-White nations he terms “sh*t-hole countries,” who he says “invade” America, commit rape and murder, eat neighbors’ pets, and “are poisoning the blood of our country.” He has tried to effectively revoke the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the post-Civil War measure guaranteeing citizenship to virtually all people born in America; such a drastic rewriting of American identity was averted by a single vote on the Supreme Court. Vice President J D Vance advocates for “heritage Americans” — that is, “people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War.” He pointedly does not specify on which side.
Trump, predictably, has taken over the 250th anniversary festivities, and tried to turn them into a celebration of his personal whims. Most Americans have rejected the effort. His American State Fair on the National Mall drew embarrassingly sparse crowds. For a big MAGA-flavored concert, he couldn’t even secure the participation of a lineup of one-hit-wonders from the 1990s. But his conception of national identity — a country largely for White people, with others tolerated so long as they don’t get too uppity — remains a bedrock idea for the one-third of Americans who constitute his base.
On July 4th, Americans will share hot-dogs, fireworks, and platitudes. But the schism over what America stands for is growing wider every day. In the 1850s, the same schism between two very different national identities led to the most brutal war in America’s history. It was inevitable, so long as blood-and-soil partisans are unwilling to accept a definition of America in which everyone is genuinely equal. Only when they do will the promissory note be redeemed. Only then, if that day ever comes, may we truly declare ourselves “free at last.”
The writer is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
On July 4th, Americans will share hot-dogs, fireworks, and platitudes. But the schism over what America stands for is growing wider every day. 
Share
