I learned soon after leaving home for college, after leaving the conservative bubble in which I was raised, that it’s best not to admit you like the Fourth of July. Even after I was quick to quip, “My parents are immigrants, I’m allowed to be patriotic,” this admission was still taboo. Best not to admit you like America, let alone admire it.
I’m an educated, upper-class white woman. To like the United States — to vocalize this — is to be ignorant, tone deaf, and out of touch.
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I don’t celebrate the Fourth of July because this country gave my mother, who grew up in communist Romania, political and intellectual freedom. I don’t celebrate the Fourth of July because this country gave my father, who was raised by a mother who never made it past 5th grade, an education and economic opportunity.
I don’t celebrate the Fourth of July because America has been good to me and my family. I celebrate the Fourth of July because America can be good to everyone.
Iranian writer and professor Azar Nafisi, in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran writes that the difference between ancient and young countries is their gaze: “We in ancient countries have our past — we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”
It’s in fashion right now, especially among my generation, to fixate solely on America’s sordid past rather than on the promise of our future. Less than one-fifth of young people are proud to be American. Yet a decade ago, 85% of people ages 18-34 were “very” or “extremely” proud to be an American.
The reasons for this lack of pride aren’t insignificant: James Baldwin was right that loving this country demands that we criticize it too. The reasons for young people’s attitudes toward America, the motivations behind their apathy or disdain, are personal and varied.
Instead of focusing on the reasons for this decline, today I’d like to direct our gaze forward and make the case for pride in America — and more importantly, hope for America.
Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, a group of immigrants, preachers, slave owners, revolutionaries, and lawyers, gathered to sign a piece of paper that forever changed the course of history. They declared their country rooted in the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They envisioned a government that derives its powers from the consent of the people. They created a country founded on the radical and unprecedented notion of self-governance.
Most importantly, they created a country where the gap between ideal and reality couldn’t be left alone. The moment the Founders wrote that man’s equality was “self-evident,” every unjust and discriminatory law from that point on was in danger.
Many of our Founding Fathers lacked the bravery or conviction in their personal lives to uphold the values they articulated. But by affirming, at least in writing, what the ideals of our nation are, they set the standard that future laws would be tested against. The words they wrote allowed our nation to reconcile, slowly and imperfectly, the ideals we profess with the laws we pass.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that, “The great privilege of the United States is its ability to have repairable mistakes.”
In other words, we are a country that gets to self-correct. We are not doomed by one bad law or one bad president or one bad Congress. Today of all days, it’s worth marveling at this truth and viewing it as Tocqueville did — as a privilege.
Whenever politicians make statements such as “This is not what America stands for” or “We are better than this,” they tacitly affirm the standard of American conduct, a standard we often fall short of. The “shameless hypocrisy” of the antebellum United States that Frederick Douglass referenced 173 years ago was only so because of the standard of equality expressed in our founding documents.
This hypocrisy doesn’t apply universally. When China imprisons Uyghur Muslims, there is no hypocrisy because the founding documents of the Chinese Communist Party do not say all men are created equal. When the Taliban banned women from going to high school, it wasn’t hypocritical because the Taliban has never pretended to care about the pursuit of happiness. In many nations, there is no pretense of liberty.
But American democracy is different. The story of our democracy is reconciliatory. This is why Douglass still maintained hope and took encouragement “from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”
It is because of, and only because of, the Declaration and the institutions it inspired that America is able to reconcile who she is with who she should be.
Throughout American history, we gradually included more people in “We the people.” Of course, legally granting personhood did not immediately or fully translate into equal treatment under the law.
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It would be a mistake, however, to say that these exclusionary policies point to a deficiency in the ideals of our nation. Instead, these exclusionary policies reveal the glaring contradiction between ideal and practice, between what the law says and how it is applied. Thus our nation is forced to confront its ugliest parts — and invited to uphold its greatest ideals.
The brilliance, the beauty, of our democracy is its ability to self-correct without destroying itself. That is what we must celebrate today.
Lucia Orlandi is a writer in Washington, D.C. She writes at luciaorlandi.substack.com.