Watching the branded Freedom250 celebrations in DC, I was reminded of the quote attributed to C.S. Lewis: "When I sat with my anger long enough, she revealed her real name was grief."

Initially, I was angry to see this solemn remembrance of the greatest-ever attempt to operationalize Enlightenment values taken over by a pay-per-view spectacle, with its conspicuous advertisements for beer and energy drinks. I was troubled by taxpayer-backed Rededicate250 prayer rallies that claimed American citizenship should require Christian identity. And I'm deeply worried about a domestic military apparatus increasingly treating civil liberties and due process as inconveniences rather than first principles. The celebration isn't just tacky — it's hollow. We seem to have forgotten what, exactly, the United States is supposed to be about. 

Beyond my own misgivings, this summer is such a loss for my daughter. Her nuanced picture of the United States is not a people or a plot of land but a set of ideas, consecrated in a civil creed: that all men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights; that unchecked power is a threat to liberty and just powers are constitutionally constrained; that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, and govern best when they govern least. She is a little classical liberal, and largely shielded from the grim realities of our current political dysfunction.

An American Inheritance

Last July, on a family road trip, we prepared for this momentous anniversary together. A quarter millennium of human progress is hard to appreciate when your own age is in the single digits. We began in Jefferson's study at Monticello, where he wrote the words that would transform the political vocabulary of the world. We talked about Jupiter Evans, the enslaved man who almost certainly was in Jefferson's earshot at that moment and who, thanks to later edits made to Jefferson's drafts, would not be included in "all men" for another ninety years. We walked the waterfront of Alexandria and stood in the assembly room of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in the stifling heat, just as the founders did while haggling over the future of political relations. We bowed our heads at battlefields and war memorials, and we read those words — "all men are created equal" — as they now appear beneath the dome of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. 

I want her to believe in America, the idea. Not the empire, with its overseas meddling and wars of choice. Not the extraction machine, with its scalpel blade slicing off a share of every dollar she'll ever earn, spend, invest, or save. Not the incarcerator, with its web of police and administrative lawyers, feeding citizens into prisons after failing them in the schoolhouse. But the American ideal. The one we celebrate. 

And the project was always unfinished, imperfect. The Founders recognized that future generations would face new challenges and provided a path to amend the nation's governing charter. Some of those amendments have strengthened, and some weakened, the principles the Constitution embodies, but each was adopted through channels built into the original. The system of laws and separated powers gave Americans a procedure to update the Constitution as practical need (Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments) and moral imperative (Thirteenth and Nineteenth) required.