Happy Fourth! Americans will be reading this on the way to a cookout or as they clean out inboxes after the holiday, so it’s best to be brief. But it’s still worth a moment to consider the extraordinary geopolitical rupture we celebrate even 248 years later.
The country’s current ills include grinding political dysfunction, entrenched economic inequality, declining life expectancy, accelerating climate change and mounting global tensions. Yet nothing amounts to the challenge that prompted the Declaration of Independence to include a sentence like this:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
This is a country that has survived hot wars, cold wars and civil war, pandemics, scandals and depressions. Leaders have included statesmen and demagogues, heroes and villains, geniuses and fools. But few challenges have ever risen to a level that required an appeal to “the Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God.” This great political endeavor won’t magically survive without a little luck and lot of work, but our current institutions still seem up to the task if we ensure they work as designed.
Equally striking is how important the framers considered earning the “decent respect” of world opinion for their monumental break and how little we care today about how others view us. In fact, while the U.S. role in the world is in decline in the eyes of Americans themselves in a fresh Ipsos-Kings College poll, the country’s standing has actually improved elsewhere over the last five years. The results are broadly in line with a similar Pew Research Center survey last year which showed a 23-nation median of 59% of those polled having a positive view of the United States.
We could do worse than recommitting ourselves to institutions that have mostly worked over two and a half centuries. We could do better at explaining why do what we do.