I can’t say that I’ve felt very much enthusiasm for the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, insofar as 1776 marks that date (and arguably, it doesn’t). It tells you all you need to know that I spent the Fourth of July under a tree in a nearby park, reading Machiavelli in hundred degree heat. But two of my friends wrote notable and interesting pieces commemorating the 250th, and did so in interestingly similar and dissimilar ways. Both are on Substack, and both are worth reading. My friend Bob Massie has a piece called “A New Birth of Freedom” on his Substack. And my friend Chris Sciabarra has one called “From America 200 to 250: A Personal Journey” on his. 

Both are semi-autobiographical essays that celebrate the founding ideals of the American Revolution, and do so by way of reflections on the 200th anniversary of the founding back in 1976. Both describe the 1976 celebrations from roughly the same place: the Fourth of July celebrations that took place in New York City. Bob describes them from the World Trade Center, Chris from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I was there, too: I watched the 1976 bicentennial celebrations as a seven-year-old from the cliffside backyard of a family friend in Weehawken, New Jersey. So I saw much the same spectacle as Bob and Chris did–at the same time, and essentially the same place.

The ideological story each of them tells is both similar to and different from the other. Bob is a liberal Democrat of 70s vintage; Chris is a “dialectical libertarian” of essentially 80s vintage. They both love America in different ways. You’ll have to read them both to see how they converge and diverge, but they end up doing both. 

A member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Montclair, Delaney Hall, Newark, New Jersey, June 29, 2026

Both pieces were nostalgic for me. Chris describes the New York City I remember from the 70s; Bob describes the ideological position I once took on the American founding. But nostalgic as they were, both take a celebratory position I can no longer adopt. America has a positive meaning for both of them that it no longer has for me. The alienation involved is nicely captured in Samuel Moyn’s “The Birthday Party No One Wants,” in The Yale Review. The “tradition of consecrating our origins is a spent force,” Moyn writes. It certainly is for me. The only part of the Revolution that really interests me is the part that most intellectuals ignore: the popular resistance to the British occupation of Boston. And the attractions there are more tactical than anything else. What interests me is how the Boston revolutionaries resisted, not why. I have my own why.

Though I agree with much that Moyn says, I would put things more acidly than he does. In saying this, I put present company–Bob, Chris, Moyn–aside. Present company aside, the people celebrating this thing don’t seem to have grasped that what they’re celebrating is a war: a group of middle class revolutionaries declared war against absolute monarchy, and fought that war to bloody victory. What seems farcical about twenty-first century invocations of the Revolutionary War is that while we face a threat at least on par with the British monarchy of 1776, talk of resistance is widely seen as crude, gauche, or embarrassing. Only “woke activists” do stuff like that. The “civilized” way of facing down the threat is to appeal to the courts, and invoke the legalistic glories of federalism. When that fails, I guess, the civilized thing to do is either to downplay the threat or surrender to it.

Outside Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

The idea of instigating a revolutionary war over Trump’s DHS would occur to almost no one. But precisely for that reason, the invocation of the Revolution is hard to take seriously. What are we rebelling against, again? And how? The Revolution wasn’t a piece of litigation. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t a declaration of abstract commitment to abstract ideals in abstract resistance to abstract tyranny. It was about picking up weapons, pointing them at the shock troops of Empire, and pulling the trigger. If this isn’t your idea of the “ideals” of the American Revolution, you’re thinking of the wrong event. The ideals didn’t exist in some notional ether. Some ideals entail their own physical enactment. This one entailed killing people–lots of people. 

But that’s not the lesson that contemporary American intellectuals have learned from the Revolutionary War: as far as they’re concerned, you can be a deskbound “revolutionary” by “explicating” revolutionary “ideals” without ever having to leave your seat. We live in a country whose intellectuals, particularly its academics, are embarrassed at the very idea of activism: even politically charged commencement speeches, and non-neutral presidential memos, are too much for them. They’re willing to “celebrate” the Revolution as long as it’s a party, and willing to enact it as long as it’s a podcast. Take the “ideals” any farther than that, in anything remotely resembling a practical direction, and they’re quick to demur.

If only it was possible to have a Revolution without war, resistance without blood, rebellion without incivility. Don’t get them wrong: wars against Russia, China, or Iran are one thing. Those are “threats,” even if no one has encountered a physical manifestation of the “threats” anywhere in or near the United States. When was the last time agents of Russia, China, or Iran abducted 10,000 people in five days off of the streets of this country? They haven’t. ICE has. But a war against ICE? Right here? At home? Where we’d actually have to see the corpses and bury them? Unacceptable. Horrific. Insane. I mean, so far, ICE has only killed people in dribs and drabs. Don’t we have to wait for a massacre before we consider physical resistance?

Across Doremus Avenue, June 29, 2026

I get it. I’m not eager for civil war, either. What I would say, however, is that if you’re not angry enough to kill an ICE agent, you’re not in a “revolutionary” mood. You’re daydreaming. That’s what the 250th anniversary of the Revolution looks like to me. It’s a gigantic, farcical, national daydream, a cartoon version of revolution, an infant’s version of revolutionary war. The threats we face here at home are bigger than the threats “the Founding Fathers” ever faced in 1776. But that’s not the impression we give, or the impression one gets. The impression one gets is that the dangers are contained, over there, happening to other people, basically legal and under control. Too bad none of that is true. Unfortunately, we are much bigger cowards than the Americans of the eighteenth century, much more easily intimidated by power, much more inured to obedience, much more wedded to our own subjugation, much more in the grips of word play, fantasy, and confabulation, much more addicted to creature comforts. There’s nothing to celebrate there, just a descent from self-respect into self-abnegation. 

Neither Bob nor Chris would put things that way, I realize, but that’s the lesson I took from their essays. We’ve devolved to a place from which there is neither redemption nor return. We deserve what happens next.