The grand narrative that has defined America for generations is collapsing. What once held power as a redemptive story of expanding freedom and democracy now reads as a selective fiction, one that conveniently omitted the foundational role of slavery, land theft, and imperial conquest in the nation's rise.
A century ago, the intellectual Randolph Bourne cut through the rhetoric of the American Revolution, calling it a squalid arrangement between capitalist and plantation owner. Freedom and democracy, he observed, had always been shackled to those who counted money and enslaved people. That diagnosis feels prescient today, as the country approaches its 250th anniversary of independence.
The power of America's founding narrative rested on a particular idea: that the nation embodied universal principles that benefited all mankind. Thomas Paine's rallying cry that the cause of America was the cause of all mankind became the template. This vision persisted into the modern era. When Barack Obama won the presidency, he invoked it directly, framing his election as proof that the gap between American ideals and reality had decisively narrowed. His rhetoric traced a line from women's suffrage through the civil rights movement to marriage equality, each step confirming the nation's arc toward justice.
That interpretive framework took root during World War II and solidified in the decades after. American elites, even conservatives, embraced claims to anti-fascism and anti-racism. The civil rights movement's victories seemed to vindicate the system itself. The United States was not just powerful but morally exemplary, a beacon of expanding opportunity and democratic possibility. This became the dominant consensus history taught in schools and invoked at official ceremonies.
But the consensus has fractured. The New York Times' 1619 Project offered a radically different founding narrative, arguing that the Revolutionary War was fought partly to preserve slavery and protect the southern planter class. Historians pushed back on specifics. Conservatives erupted. Yet what both critics and defenders largely glossed over was a second pillar of American expansionism: the hunger for land and westward conquest. Emancipation and expansion had always been twins in American thought, bound together in a justification for seizing territory and building wealth, regardless of who already lived there or who already labored on the soil.
This dual narrative has always contained a fundamental contradiction, and recent years have exposed it. Growing wealth inequality, the reversal of civil rights gains, repeated police violence, and costly wars waged on false pretenses have all hollowed out the idea that American democracy reliably delivers freedom and opportunity to ordinary people. The virtuous cycle of expansion and emancipation is broken.
The question Frederick Douglass posed in 1852 remains unanswered in any satisfying way. Standing as a free man in a free state, Douglass asked what independence meant to an enslaved people, what the Fourth of July meant when slavery still defined American law and life. The Dred Scott decision came five years later with a brutal answer: Black people could never be citizens. It took a civil war and another century of struggle for Black Americans to achieve even partial political and civil rights. Backsliding and violence persist to this day.
Fourth of July celebrations have historically served as occasions to either reaffirm or challenge the national narrative. The pattern has been evasion. The 1876 centennial barely mentioned slavery, focusing instead on industrial prowess and continental expansion. The 1893 Chicago World's Fair celebrated American power during an era of racial terror. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner framed westward movement as democracy's engine, rendering slavery a mere incident. Even Arthur Schlesinger's influential 1945 account of Andrew Jackson as a democratic hero omitted Jackson's role in the Indian removal and his vigorous defense of slavery.
The United States exported this narrative too. Ho Chi Minh invoked the Declaration of Independence when Vietnam sought independence from France in 1945, quoting its promise that all men are created equal with unalienable rights. He appealed directly to the Truman administration for support. The letters went unanswered.
By 1976, the bicentennial celebrations revealed how thoroughly the redemptive narrative had been replaced by kitsch and nostalgia. A freedom train sponsored by corporations paraded artifacts of Americana. Jimmy Carter, a southern progressive, celebrated in an antebellum-themed village designed to preserve Old South culture. In Philadelphia, a counter-celebration led by Black, Latino, and Native American organizers called instead for a bicentennial without colonies, demanding jobs and dignity.
The establishment story of America as an unfinished emancipatory project had already begun to fade. It was during those bicentennial years that Donald Trump was rising as a New York developer, even as he faced federal litigation over racial discrimination by his family's real estate company. Ronald Reagan soon rode back into power on frontier mythology and cowboy swagger. Trump learned the politics that would later define him: racist demagoguery about crime, warnings that foreigners were selling inferior goods, resentment cloaked as populism.
Now, as the 250th anniversary approaches, the template is clear. Andrew Jackson's plantation, the Hermitage, will display 1,776 flags. A restored Confederate memorial will frame official ceremonies in Washington. Jackson will be celebrated as the people's champion against elite corruption, not as the man who expanded slavery and ordered Indian removal. Trump, who has modeled himself after Jackson, will oversee celebrations that paint the founding as a perfect revolution, perhaps with a touch of plantation romance.
The meaning of American independence is no longer settled. The old synthesis of nationalist and progressive history is dead. What replaces it remains genuinely uncertain. The Fourth of July will be loud and expensive and mostly silent on the contradictions that built the nation.
Author James Rodriguez: "The country is finally staring at the gap between its mythology and its history, and that reckoning has only just begun."
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