The Greatness and Uniqueness of the United States at 250

Programming Note: I will be live today from 12pm to 3pm ET on radio. You can listen live here. The whole show will be about how awesome America is.

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Two hundred and fifty years ago this weekend, a group of men in powdered hair and knee breeches did something the world had never seen done successfully. They took an empire — the most powerful empire on earth — and they broke away from it. No upstart colony had ever pulled that off. And yet they did. Well done. Remarkable.

I’ve spent this whole anniversary thinking about how to talk to you about it, because so many people are so divided right now, and I wanted to set the headlines aside and just talk to you about the greatness of this country. I can do that with some authority, because I grew up overseas and I’ve been to more nations than pretty much any of you, and I’m here to tell you: we are the best there is. I’ve seen the alternatives. The only people who don’t seem to want to be Americans anymore are progressives in the Ivy League madrasas and, increasingly, a slice of the online right that has convinced itself we’d all be better off apart. They’re both wrong, and history proves it.

Read the Declaration of Independence for yourself. What strikes you is that these were not bloodthirsty radicals. They didn’t want something new. They petitioned, and petitioned, and petitioned again to remain loyal subjects of the Crown. They believed they were entitled to the rights of Englishmen — trial by jury, the right to keep and bear arms, the protection of their property — the inheritance of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Bernard Bailyn figured this out by reading their letters — not just the founders, but the soldiers, the wives, the middle class. They all said the same thing. They thought they already had these rights, and Great Britain, in its arrogance, told them they were second-class colonists who didn’t deserve them. So they fought for what they believed was already theirs.

That’s why Bernard Bailyn called it conservative revolution and Gordon Wood described it as a radical one at the same time. Conservative, because they were preserving an inheritance, not inventing a utopia. Radical, because of what it unleashed. Compare us to the French. Theirs came a decade later and it was everything ours was not — new, violent, devouring its own. Robespierre lost his head to the very revolution he started. They wanted to remake man himself; they even tried to re-cut the calendar and the clock. The metric system is the last surviving scrap of that madness. We didn’t want to remake man. We wanted liberty. And when George Washington won, he walked away from power. King George said if he did that, he’d be the greatest man in the world. He did it. The whole world marveled, from Europe clear into Asia — a man who held all the power and gave it back.

Here’s what makes us truly unique. We are the only nation founded on an ideal. Not blood, not soil, not a king’s bloodline — an idea. That all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words reverberated around the whole world. The shot heard round the world really was heard round the world. Go read the monument at the entrance to the parliament of Trinidad and Tobago — it echoes our Declaration almost word for word. Nations you’ve never thought about built their own foundings on ours.

Now, are we a people or are we an idea? We’re both. That’s the honest answer. We are a people with a story, a language, a history — and we are a creed that anyone can join. That’s the miracle of it. A Taiwanese boy eats his first cheeseburger and decides he’s moving to the country that invented it, and twenty-five years later, he’s a citizen, married to an American, and an ordained minister standing before his church thanking God for 250 years of this nation. He loves this country more than the tenured cynics who were born here and can’t stand it. I’ll take a thousand of him. When you bind yourself to the ideal, you become one of the people. No other country on earth has ever really offered that. To this day, none does.

And what about our sins? Slavery was the original sin, and I won’t sand it down. The founders knew it. Jefferson knew it, and he owned slaves — the hypocrisy was staring right at them, and they kept kicking the can down the road. But here is what a poisoned telling of our history leaves out: the New England colonies began rejecting slavery before England itself did. And when the reckoning finally came, men died — hundreds of thousands of them — on battlefields to make other men free. “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” read the original lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That’s propitiation. One man suffers so others go free. A nation that will bleed that much to right its own wrong is not an evil nation. It is a great one, straining toward becoming a more perfect one. We had a black president. We had a black vice president. Our Secretary of State is the son of Cuban refugees. Anyone telling you the story that nothing here ever gets better is selling you something.

So on this 250th birthday, let me tell you what to do if you fret about this country. Stop being a victim. Reject the voices — foreign-funded, many of them — who want you angry, isolated, and at war with your neighbor. Get off the screen. Go outside. Go to church even if you don’t believe, because you need a community that isn’t a tribe of political partisans. Volunteer at the food pantry. Sit on your front porch and wave at the people walking by. Love your neighbor, whether or not he loves you back — you don’t get a carve-out on that one. Make your community better, and your town gets better, and your state, and then the whole country heals from the bottom up. That’s how it works. Not through revolution. Through you and me.

Don’t make an idol of the nation. It will end one day, as all things do, in God’s own time. But you can perpetuate it well past the obituaries the haters are already writing, simply by loving your neighbor and loving the blessings of liberty. We remain the last best hope of mankind. Happy 250th, America.