This weekend, the United States turns 250. Most nations answer the question “who are you” with a people: descent, soil, a shared past running back past anyone’s memory. The United States answered it with a claim about human beings — that they are created equal, and that they hold rights no government handed out and no government may take away.
I want to mark the anniversary with an argument about what this country actually is, because I am not sure the country is in a mood to make that argument for itself right now.
I read the founding the way I was trained to read contested texts. Where “created equal” comes from in Genesis and in the Mishnah’s reading of why the human story begins with a single person. What Frederick Douglass did with the Declaration in 1852 instead of throwing it on the fire. Why John Locke put rights before government. And George Washington’s August 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, where he refused the word “toleration,” called religious liberty an inherent natural right rather than a favor the majority grants, and reached for the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah — every man under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make him afraid — to tell a small Jewish community in a Protestant country that it was home.
The video does not pretend the country lived up to the idea. The promise of equality and the practice of slavery shared one country, and in many places the same signatures. I hold the promise against the performance, and I leave one question open instead of answering it: if a nation is an idea and not a bloodline, then anyone can carry it from anywhere — and anyone can also pick it up to hollow it out from the inside while speaking its language. Who decides when someone has stopped arguing in good faith, by what test, and what stops that test from being turned on whoever is out of power next?
The equality the founders wrote down did not describe the country they governed. It was an instruction to the country they were beginning. Two hundred and fifty years in, the instruction is not finished being carried out, and choosing to keep at it with the promise and the failures both in plain view is what I am celebrating.
