Think More: America at 250

On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the country’s official celebrations will fill the Mall with spectacle. But the more lasting commemoration is happening in print: in essays, reviews, symposia, and arguments over what the Declaration says, what kind of nation it made, and whether a republic founded on a proposition can endure another quarter-millennium. What follows is a reader, not a roundup: five movements through some of the best writing of the season.

Begin where the founders began, with the words themselves. In the Claremont Review of Books, Charles R. Kesler reads Justice Clarence Thomas’s spring address at Austin as one of the season’s truest birthday gifts: a reminder that the Constitution supplies the means of American government while the Declaration supplies its ends. That order matters, and two new books press it at length. City Journal weighs both, with Edward Short on Michael Auslin’s National Treasure, which treats Jefferson’s preamble as the country’s best rallying cry, and a companion review of Walter Isaacson’s study of the Declaration’s second sentence.

What that sentence accomplished is the question Harvey Mansfield takes up in The New Criterion, arguing that the Declaration shows what philosophy can do once it stops being decorative and starts founding nations. The late Gordon Wood fixed on five words, “all men are created equal,” and judged nothing in the modern political vocabulary more radical, as National Review recalled after his death this month. For the long view, Christopher Flannery opens the semiquincentennial issue of Imprimis by insisting that what deserves celebrating is the idea of independence itself, prior to the war that secured it. Daniel Dreisbach notes in Law & Liberty that Virginia reached the same truths a few weeks early.

---

If the Declaration is a creed, then America is the rare country one can join by conviction. James Piereson presses the point in The New Criterion, asking whether a republic founded on universal principles can survive as a nation-state at all, while Richard Reinsch argues in Law & Liberty that the progressive left and the populist right have both mislaid the creedal inheritance that made the country cohere. Leonidas Zelmanovitz supplies the human proof in the same journal: an immigrant who became an American by assent to the founding rather than by birth.

The creed holds only if it is taught. Larry Arnn writes in The American Mind that the Declaration remains the surest instrument for uniting a divided people, and Carson Holloway answers the charge that its universalism dissolves the nation by showing that misuse is no argument against a principle. David Bobb and Tony Williams ask what should bind Americans across the next 250 years. The season also brought a loss: Colleen Sheehan’s Law & Liberty elegy for Gordon Wood, who died in June, and Wilfred McClay’s argument in City Journal that remembrance, done in full, is itself an act of citizenship.

---

The Declaration grounds its rights in “Nature’s God” rather than in the state or the social consensus, and a cluster of writers has spent the year taking that clause seriously. Owen Anderson examines the Declaration’s God in The American Mind; Timon Cline argues that Providence was the cornerstone of the founding rather than its ornament; and Paul Seaton reviews a providential rereading of the document in Law & Liberty. Daniel McCarthy, editing Modern Age, asks the sharpest version of the question: did 1776 launch not only a new nation but a new political religion?

Whether the truths are self-evident at all is the subject of a bracing Public Discourse exchange with the French philosopher Remi Brague, who observes that the ancients would have found human equality anything but obvious, which is precisely why the founders anchored it in the divine. George Weigel, writing in First Things, recommends a gentler preparation for the anniversary: an evening with the John Adams miniseries, and a Catholic’s gratitude for what was once declared self-evident.

---

Not everyone means to celebrate. John Fonte warns in The American Mind that the slavery-history wars are intensifying as the anniversary nears, and James Piereson revisits, in The New Criterion, the long campaign by the newspaper of record to date the founding to 1619 rather than 1776. The historians are themselves ambivalent: in City Journal, Edward Short surveys a new scholarly collection in which the profession can no longer agree on whether the Revolution is theirs to claim.

The cameras have entered the fight. In Compact, Adam Rowe dissects Ken Burns’s 12-hour documentary as a film that wants the founders’ legacy both ways, while Bradley Birzer praises Hillsdale’s rival series in The American Mind. Brenda Hafera, in Modern Age, reclaims the founding’s true authors as the American people themselves. Dominic Green reads the Declaration against Burke, showing how the Anglo-American and French revolutions can be found in tension on a single page. The season’s most combative entry comes from Public Discourse, which casts the contest as a matter of apostasy: read it for the argument, and gauge the temperature for yourself.

---

Is the American era closing or just beginning? Spencer Klavan opens the symposium in The American Mind with the question, declining the fashionable pessimism and observing that forward has always been the country’s preferred direction. Daniel Mahoney answers that renewal lies in remembering America as an heir of the West rather than a rupture from it; Jay Cost calls for a return to foundations; and Glenn Ellmers insists the moral task remains even when the odds look long.

The mood is soberer than 1976, as City Journal notes in surveying a semiquincentennial with no tall-ship euphoria and no presidential election to anchor it. Larry Arnn reads the quieter anniversary as a firestorm over the Declaration’s meaning, and argues in Imprimis that the document which founded the country can still save it. Daniel McCarthy closes the ledger in Modern Age by warning that a republic which mistakes prosperity for purpose forgets why it declared independence in the first place. The reckoning these writers share is a Roman one: 250 years is half a republic by Rome’s measure, with everything still to play for.

---

The fireworks will fade by the fifth of July. The argument over the Declaration should not. This reader is built to keep it going.

By the Editors of Lyceum