This Independence Day, Consider What It Means

July 5, 2026 4 min read

The American Project turned 250 years old yesterday. It’s worth spending some time thinking about what it means to you.

For me, I think first about how America is an idea in a way few – perhaps no – other countries are. In 1776, the founding fathers declared independence from the king of Great Britain¹.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.

From the founding of the country, America was about lofty ideals. Liberal democracy was an ambitious project that had never been executed successfully.

But the founders took great care to set up checks and balances against tyranny. Freedom of religion and of speech was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, setting the tone for a uniquely diverse, innovative, and prosperous society to grow over the next 250 years. Something like 100 million immigrants² came from all over the world to find the American Dream.

And America failed to live up to these ideals. Plenty of immigrants wanted to come, but Congress explicitly barred Chinese laborers in 1882. Catholics from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland faced substantial discrimination and provoked a political backlash in the 1800s³.

All of these immigrants were arriving in a country where the native people had been gradually displaced or killed. And after making freedom its founding principle, America allowed slavery for nearly another hundred years, importing almost 400,000 Africans to live a terrible life on the other side of the Atlantic.

But throughout every chapter of its history, America’s ideals didn’t die; if anything, they inspired its people, its leaders, and even its peers to do better.

Our representative democracy served as a model for the many others that came later. We fought a civil war over slavery as a direct consequence of persistent abolitionist efforts to outlaw it.

America intervened decisively in two world wars, branding itself the Arsenal of Democracy and putting an end to one (maybe two⁴) of the most brutal empires of the twentieth century. For all the religious prejudice against Catholics, we demonstrated tolerance when it mattered, accepting more Jews in the WWII era than any other country did willingly⁵.

After the world wars, America’s innovative culture (some mix of capitalism, individualism, and government investment) led to an incredible era of prosperity. Basically every important invention of this era came out of the USA: the polio vaccine, the transistor, the internet, and the Green Revolution. Our technology raised living standards for the whole world.

It took decades, but the African American civil rights movement ultimately triumphed. Not through force, but through peaceful protest and appeals to the public’s sense of justice. It was led by a man who spoke eloquently about the values of liberty and equality even when his country failed to ensure those rights for him.

Then in the late 1900s, European democracies disinvested in their militaries and stagnated economically, leaving the US to carry the Western Alliance in a much more extreme way than ever before. And it did. America’s intelligence-gathering and military-industrial complex were key in the defense of Ukraine from the first days of Russia’s invasion. American deterrence is likely the only thing keeping Taiwan a democracy.

We still have much work to do. Our president is testing the limits of checks and balances, discrediting the electoral process, and pardoning the very people who rioted against the peaceful transition of power.

But we have more to be proud of than any other nation in the world. Other countries are defined by their borders, but America is defined by ideas: democracy, freedom, excellence, and the pursuit of happiness.

My hope for the America of today is that we can simultaneously be proud of our history and strive harder to live up to our principles. Our freedom was hard to earn, and our democracy is difficult to protect, but that’s the essence of the American Project.

Perhaps your reflections on America’s big birthday will be different. And that’s what liberal democracy is all about.

In writing this essay, I learned the King George III was never “King of England”; his title was “King of Great Britain”. ↩︎
A very coarse estimate. About 90 million people have gotten a green card. Not all of those people stayed in the country, but that number doesn’t include immigration before 1820 or illegal immigration since then. ↩︎
However, there were no immigration quotas for Europeans until l921, so for most of this era the arrival of Catholics faced basically no legal restriction. ↩︎
Obviously Nazi Germany was one, but Imperial Japan also committed some horrifying military atrocities. ↩︎
The U.S. had more Jewish immigration than anywhere except British-governed Palestine (a territory that had no say in the matter) and the USSR, which did not exactly “accept” the immigrants, sending many of them into labor camps. ↩︎