Why I STILL Believe in America after the Unhappiest Fourth of July

To do otherwise is to give up on humanity—Let America be AMERICA Again!

Though the Declaration of Independence was signed over a period of days, July 4, 1776, is taken as the birth date of the United States. In Lincoln language, twelve score and nine years later, Donald Trump and his pathetic, unpatriotic, cowering party members of Congress have killed it.

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The Unhappiest Fourth of July

Today is the unhappiest Fourth of July in the country’s history. On the fiftieth anniversary in 1826, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. Many people took it as an omen for where they nation they had been so instrumental in establishing was headed. Thirty-seven years later, on July 4, 1863, the Union was desperately trying to put down the Enslavers’ Rebellion, aka Civil War). The day before, Confederate forces had finally been turned back after three days of enormous bloodshed at Gettysburg and on the Fourth, Vicksburg surrendered to American troops after a prolonged siege. In retrospect, it is seen as the key turning point in the war, though the outcome remained in doubt for well over a year.The threat to the United States on July 4, 2025 is in some respects as grave as was that in 1863.

Looking at the horrors in this worst bill ever enacted in the United States (there have been many other terrible laws passed, but the sweep of evil in this one is unprecedented), it seems that the nation’s 249^th birthday is also the date of its demise.

“I believe in America,” undertaker Amerigo Bonasera says from a dark screen as The Godfather begins. The black screen, Bonasera’s profession, his name, which literally translates to “Good evening, America” but can be taken to mean “Good night, America,” and the failure of the justice system that has led him to come to Don Corleone—along with much else in the first two installment of The Godfather—all indicate that America has not lived up to its promise. One other among the many examples: In the famous “Leave the gun—take the cannolis [sic.]” scene, the Statue of Liberty is in the distance as Pauli is shot while Clemenza is urinating.

The premise that America had lost its way and was in decline was pervasive in popular culture in the 1970s, as the United States lost a war for the first time (the War of 1812 was hardly a victory, but who knew anything about that?), a president was insisting “I am not a crook” as ever more of his lies, illegal actions, and corruption kept surfacing (terrible though Nixon’s actions were, they seem quaint in comparison to Trump’s wrongdoing), environmental catastrophes, and more. Chinatown (1973) and Network (1976) are other examples. The former captured the hopeless outlook—“Forget it Jake; it’s Chinatown”—of its year better than any other film has another year, with the exception of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang did with 1932. Network becomes more stunningly prescient with each passing year, and that is for many reasons beyond Howard Beale’s rant in which he says he has no answers for all the problems, but everyone needs to open their windows and yell, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” being very similar to Trump’s spiel. There is so much more in Network that is extraordinarily predictive of what has happened subsequently in real (?) life that I plan to write a separate piece about it when I get a chance.

On the unhappiest Fourth of July in America's history, Donald Trump took the role of Bonasera’s profession, gleefully performing a funeral for the best in what America has stood for.

Yet, like the Italian American undertaker, I believe in America. Still. By America, I mean the wonderful principles on which this nation was founded. We have, all too obviously, fallen far short of them throughout the almost two-and-a-half centuries since they were enunciated, but they remain the last, best hope of humankind.USA = DEI

Unlike other nations, the United States was not founded based on the “blood and soil”—shared ethnicity and geography—that fascists favor. The United States was based on ideals that arose in the Enlightenment, some of which were truly American in origins, having reached French and English thinkers from indigenous people in eastern North America: the overthrowing of millennia of history based on hierarchy, inequality, rule from above, and proclaiming its negation: equality.

USA = DEI

Unlike other nations, the United States was not founded based on the “blood and soil”—shared ethnicity and geography—that fascists favor. The United States was based on ideals that arose in the Enlightenment, some of which were truly American in origins, having reached French and English thinkers from indigenous people in eastern North America: the overthrowing of millennia of history based on hierarchy, inequality, rule from above, and proclaiming its negation: equality.

DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—is the American ideal, though it has not generally been put into practice. UIE (Uniformity, Inequality, and Exclusion) is what “blood and soil” nations are about. It is what most of human history is about. It is what the Trump fascists seek to reimpose.

The Declaration of Independence was—and I’ll add, is—as Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Thursday:

an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

That declaration was written by an enslaver and signed by many other enslavers. Among the specifics in its list of the long train of abuses” it laid on King George III was:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

We have been, as historian Michael Kammen put it in the title of his 1972 book, a People of Paradox. The paradox that is the United States took bodily form in Thomas Jefferson. He articulated the radical vision, with its majestic ideals of freedom and equality, but failed miserably to live up to those ideals.

Yet the ideals remain the best the world has seen, and we absolutely must not give up on them. They were seriously challenged by the next generation of enslavers, led by John C. Calhoun, who mocked the idea of human equality. It was to escape the vision of the Founders that the enslavers rebelled and fought a terrible war.

It is more than mere coincidence that Confederate flags are often flown by MAGA people. Trump and his followers fundamentally reject the Idea of America. Like the rebels of the 1860s, the MAGA cult rejects the essence of the American ideal.

To Give Up on America Is to Give Up on Humanity

Giving up on America would be to follow Yuval Noah Harari’s hopeless view of human beings. His mega bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, is an extraordinarily pessimistic book. “There is no way out of the imagined order” that imprisons us, he writes. What he does not tell us is how that order was imagined in the first place. Figuring that out can provide us with the key to unlock the prison gates. I am currently at work on a book that rejects his hopeless, “that’s just the way it is,” outlook.

The imagined order that imprisons us is the belief that some humans are innately superior to others, that there are hierarchies built on vertical binaries of categories of humans that are seen as opposites, one being dominant and the other subordinate. The model for all these inequalities is the fiction ♂ > ♀. All other supposed “inferior” categories of humans are plugged into the =woman position on the bottom.

The Enlightenment and American Revolution began the work of tearing down this imagined order. Jefferson himself saw that slavery is incompatible with the ideal he was proclaiming, though he never got to the point of abandoning the practice himself. Some of Jefferson’s contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine and Abigail Adams, saw all the way down to the foundation of the worldview that the American Revolution was, in theory, rejecting: women are equal to men.

That is the ultimate fear that terrifies the men who support authoritarianism.

The Trump movement is not only anti-American, but also ante-American. It seeks to “take America back” to before 1776.

Most Americans Reject What Trump Fascism is Doing

What Trump and his toadies have done does not represent the American people. Here is a summary of polling on the bill:

A Fox News poll found that 38% of registered voters support the “One Big Beautiful Bill” based on what they know about it, while 59% oppose it.

The survey found that the legislation is unpopular across demographic, age and income groups. It is opposed 22%-73% by independents, and 43%-53% among white men without a college degree, the heart of Trump’s base.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 27% of registered voters support the bill, while 53% oppose it. Another 20% had no opinion. Among independents, 20% said they support it and 57% said they oppose it.

A KFF poll found that 35% of adults have a favorable view when asked about the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” while 64% have an unfavorable view. Just 27% of independents said they hold a favorable view of it.

A survey from Pew Research Center found that 29% of adults favor the bill, while 49% oppose it. (Another 21% said they weren’t sure.) Asked what impact it would have on the country, 54% said “a mostly negative effect,” 30% said “a mostly positive effect” and 12% said “not much of an effect.”

A poll by The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 23% of adults support “the budget bill changing tax, spending and Medicaid policies,” while 42% oppose it. Another 34% had no opinion.

…

The Quinnipiac poll found that just 10% of voters want to decrease Medicaid spending, while 40% want it to stay about the same and 47% want to increase it.

Let America Be America Again!

The words of Langston Hughes in his 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again” speak loudly to and for us today. Let us all heed them and act upon them:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where everyman is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

People who still believe in America are a large majority. Even many of those who voted for Trump do not want what he is doing to us.

We’re not going back!