I admit, heading into this year of well-meaning celebrations and community Liberty Bells, I was ready to be the skunk at the Semiquincentennial garden party. I love these historical occasions and was lucky enough to have been involved in a few over the years that provided for not only fireworks and flag-waving, but also serious discussion about small-d democratic values.
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Decades ago as a bored young lawyer in Philadelphia, I helped produce the two-day Liberty Conference on civil rights and freedom of expression as part of the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty in New York. The following year, while working for Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey Sr., I helped staff the state executive branch participation in the 1987 Constitutional Bicentennial in Philadelphia, which I also warmly remember as both a celebratory and substantive series of commemorative events like many this year.
In both cases, Ronald Reagan was President, and many of us could not have differed more strongly with most of his policies. But national politics didn’t intrude on those patriotic anniversaries — and the conservative President didn’t try to take them over to celebrate his own ego and authority.
By contrast, it had seemed utterly ludicrous to “celebrate” the birth — and birthplace — of our nation’s revolution in human freedom and “the consent of the governed” over the divine right of kings at the very moment when our collective Liberty Bell isn’t just cracked, but being systematically melted down for scrap by a gold-loving monarch and supine GOP Congress that hardly resembles the one in Philadelphia willing to risk “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for American democracy.
But heading into July Fourth, it’s clear that except for a dwindling group of MAGA faithful, the Trump administration’s efforts to hijack America 250 have become a farce, a concert without performers and a “State Fair” without many states. To be sure, the corporate branded MMA cage fight on hallowed White House ground owned by we the taxpayers happened as garishly planned — but notably without the support of the vast majority of Americans. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool debacle has provided a visual metaphor for the President’s failure to bend the biological reality with boastful rhetoric and no-bid contracts for incompetent cronies.
Trump may yet get his July Fourth political rally and later his Washington, D.C. NASCAR race, but it’s a hopeful sign that the effort to politicize this historic moment is already a failure. It has failed because Philadelphians — and many others — have shown how to embrace this hometown milestone by resisting facile flag-waving in favor of a deeper, kind of patriotism. It’s a patriotism that — in the tough, questioning spirit of Frederick Douglass’s searing 1852 “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” address — recognizes the complexity and profound contradictions of our past. It also recognizes the existential challenge now facing a democracy founded on the classically liberal ideas of liberty and rule of law while led by an illiberal, lawless President whose record literally reads like the Framers’ 1776 indictment of a cruel and unaccountable King.
Consider: The White House effort to literally “whitewash” the history of slavery and the lives of the enslaved came up against determined opposition. The latest Third Circuit ruling notwithstanding, Philadelphians have relentlessly fought back against the Trump administration’s removal of the powerful displays about the enslaved people in George Washington’s own house when he served as the nation’s first President. That opposition spread to national parks and historic sites around the country where factual narratives of indigenous tribes and climate change are also slated for removal.
Just in recent weeks we’ve had celebrations of Ona Judge who escaped from bondage in George Washington’s house. While at historic Stenton in Germantown, a WHYY community event examined how the fight for freedom of Dinah, a formerly enslaved woman, reveals the contradictions at the heart of America’s founding.
Visit Philadelphia organized a day-long TED Talk event on the future of democracy, appropriately held in what is now Marian Anderson Hall at the Kimmel Center, renamed last year for the courageous contralto who used the platform of the Lincoln Memorial in her iconic 1939 concert for a far higher purpose than a fractious weigh-in of preening MMA fighters.
There were substantive and celebratory events across the city for Juneteenth, an official federal holiday honoring the emancipation of the enslaved that the Trump administration refuses to recognize.
Further afield, parents in Central New Jersey and elsewhere furiously objected to the the plainly partisan visits by Education Secretary Linda McMahon to local public schools to promote the absurdly named “History Rocks” “patriotic” curriculum created by the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA right wing youth organization and evangelical Hillsdale College. At Harper’s Ferry, WV, some former park rangers are pushing back by teaching the removed Black history exhibits anyway.
Given this President and Vice President’s stated disdain for the first American Pope’s advocacy of peace on Earth, even the Constitution Center’s nonpartisan idea of awarding Villanova alum Pope Leo with the prestigious Liberty Medal turns out to be an unexpected act of resistance at this profoundly anti-constitutional moment in our history.
Still ahead is a Committee of 70 Summit grappling with the challenge of how to fulfill the promise of democracy after 250 years.
Indeed, merely going to see the onetime Tony Award-winning 1776, whether the production by talented Philadelphia performing arts high school students promoted by former Mayor and Governor Ed Rendell, or this past spring by professionals at the historic Walnut Street Theatre, is its own small act of resistance.
We have to vote on November 3 for candidates who will hold up the American system of checks and balances, and bring our democracy back from the brink. Not just that, we need to get others to vote
Example: Hungary
But if the effort to hijack the Semiquincentennial has failed, it’s critical to recognize the threats against another 250 years of U.S. democracy. So even as we enjoy the fireworks and really good concerts to celebrate July Fourth across our city, Commonwealth and country, I’d like to suggest that the date that matters most this year isn’t July 4, but November 3. That’s when we will have the statewide and congressional midterm elections that — despite the unprecedented and blatantly partisan mid-cycle gerrymandering demanded by President Trump in red states, aided by Supreme Court decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act — will determine whether we are to have the checks and balances against unaccountable executive authority that our Framers intended.
Already, we’ve seen the Department of Justice and FBI weaponized not only against the President’s political enemies, but against vote-counting in Georgia and California and voting rights groups in Ohio. They have demanded voter rolls in many other states for no legitimate reason and ordered the postal service not to deliver mail-in ballots in states that refuse to comply, though the courts have for the moment rejected this blatantly unconstitutional intrusion on state authority over elections.
We’ve seen the relentless repetition of the baseless and disproven claims about undocumented immigrants voting and “cheating” by Democrats, especially in big cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles. We even have President Trump preposterously claim that he won Minnesota three times and continuing to demand Congress enact his anti-voting SAVE Act.
That’s why the single most important and patriotic thing we can do to honor our nation’s 250th is to be like Hungary on the third of November. Let’s recall how Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian “illiberal democracy” became a revered model for the MAGA right in consolidating power by political cronies capturing independent media, attacking universities, taking over the judiciary and skewing election rules to damage opposition. Yet this spring Hungarians nonetheless rose up after 16 years and overcame every obstacle to deliver a landslide vote so large that even a well entrenched autocrat couldn’t spin away.
We have to vote on November 3 for candidates who will hold up the American system of checks and balances, and bring our democracy back from the brink. Not just that, we need to get others to vote. We can volunteer in campaigns, and not just here in Philadelphia where the outcome is so often determined in the Democratic primary, but out in one of the nationally pivotal battleground congressional seats in northeastern and south-central Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley and Bucks County, where the battle for control of the next Congress will be determined.
If you can’t see your way clear to voting for or working to elect a new Congress that will be a check on unconstitutional presidential power (which not long ago would have been thought a “conservative” value), then support nonpartisan voting rights groups that will go to court against legislation and lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising voters and disqualifying ballots around the nation: The Committee of 70. Common Cause Pennsylvania, the League of Women Voters, the LDF and Brennan Center for Justice. Sign up to drive someone to the polls, be a poll watcher in voter protection efforts, or a nonpartisan poll worker, who are in increasingly short supply.
After all, our 250th year is a moment when Franklin’s iconic response about whether we can actually keep our Republic hangs in the balance.
Communications strategist David M. Stone is a former Executive Vice President for Communications at Columbia University who previously served as communications director for U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and deputy chief of staff for Governor Bob Casey.
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