The 250th birthday of the American republic arrives wrapped in a dark irony: a nation born to reject tyranny has elected one of its own. The United States, once the world's wealthiest country with unmatched military alliances and scientific firepower, appears locked in a process of deliberate self-destruction.
Future historians, if they exist to study such things, will puzzle over how this happened. The question has occupied scholars of political collapse for years, though they cannot agree on when the rot began. Some point to 2008 and the financial crisis that gutted social mobility. Others trace it to 1980, when income inequality spiked and faith in institutions cratered. A few look back further still to 1876, Reconstruction's end, or even the Civil War itself.
But the crisis appears deeper and older than any single rupture. George Washington's Farewell Address predicted with eerie precision the hyperpartisanship now tearing the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln wrote: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." His prophecy has materialized.
The American experiment, in other words, may have contained the seeds of its own ending from the start.
The 250th anniversary has sparked a peculiar battle over the nation's own history. In 2020, protests toppled statues of founding fathers alongside Civil War generals. Florida and Texas responded by rewriting their school curricula on the revolution to emphasize conservative themes. Florida even renamed its alternative to AP history "Fact," a dose of unintentional humor in a deeply serious moment.
These agenda-driven histories on both left and right deserve little weight as serious reckoning. They are vibes, not substance. More serious scholarship has arrived to mark the occasion. Ken Burns' documentary on the American Revolution matches the quality of his earlier work on the Civil War and jazz, depicting the founders not as heroes or villains but as flawed men caught in history's current: idealistic and venal, brave and stupid, brilliant and brutal by turns.
Burns exposes what many already knew: the founding was shot through with contradiction. The revolutionaries who cried for liberty enslaved human beings. Jefferson penned the Declaration while his enslaved valet, fathered by Jefferson's father-in-law, poured his tea. Washington wrote of asserting rights "or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over." The revolution was civil war as much as liberation struggle. Benjamin Franklin's own son sided with the British.
What made America unique was not the violence or idealism itself, but the capacity to transform both into mythology. The founders created a nation convinced of its own exceptionalism, an idea so deeply embedded in the American psyche that even critics of the country affirm it.
That exceptionalism now works as a trap. A recent Pew poll found 59 percent of Americans believe their best years have passed. The nation has grown obsessed with its own origins, reaching backward in a doomed quest to reclaim its sense of destiny. The Trump years crystallized this through originalism, the legal philosophy that interprets the Constitution by reference to its historical meaning at the time of ratification. Since the Supreme Court's Bruen decision on gun rights, courts have been flooded with unanswerable arguments about firearm views from 250 years ago. Originalism has also revived racial gerrymandering, a practice literally invented by a founding father.
Donald Trump embodies this nostalgia perfectly. "Make America Great Again" is not a slogan but a literal program: return to the origin. Yet Trump's violation of political norms proves entirely consistent with a nation founded on violent overthrow. After January 6, when rioters attacked elected officials, some of those officials eventually sided with the attackers. Trump proposed a reward fund for them, symbolically set at $1.776 billion.
The irony runs deeper still. Burns' retelling strips away Enlightenment mythology to reveal the revolution's actual roots: greed and land speculation. The British crown had halted westward expansion and attempted to ban land trading in territories it considered indigenous lands. The colonies chafed under taxation. The revolution's harbinger was the glee of mobs tarring and feathering British officials. Violence was the spectacle that launched a nation.
That violent impulse never left. It is the poison at the American core. The founders felt entitled to something for nothing: labor without payment, domination without limit. They humiliated anyone who objected. Their revolution taught that mobs overthrowing political authority by force constitutes the ultimate political good. Americans have never been addicted to liberty itself, but to the feeling of liberation, the rush of throwing off restraint.
As the nation slouches back toward its origins, the distance narrows between the ideals of 1776 and the raw greed and spectacles of punishment that now define it. Originalism has rendered the Constitution nearly meaningless. The icons are desecrated. The Americans are drinking their own poison all the way down, and they are dying of it.
Author James Rodriguez: "The American exceptionalism that built the nation now blinds it to its own decay."
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