On July 4, celebrate not only independence, but also our nation's virtue and greatness

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Parade participants march near the National Mall along Constitution Avenue in Washington to commemorate Memorial Day, Monday, May 25, 2026, coinciding with the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

We’re just a few weeks away from July 4 — a day that marks 250 years of American independence. Think about that for a moment. Two hundred and fifty years. That’s a remarkable milestone for any nation, but especially for one that began as a risky experiment in self-government.

It should be a time for celebration. A time, no matter how brief, to set our differences aside and come together — not as Democrats or Republicans, not as liberals or conservatives, but simply as Americans.

So why do I think it won’t be that easy?

Because somewhere along the way, we stopped merely disagreeing with one another and started seeing one another as enemies.

For a long time in this country, baseball was our national pastime. Now it’s arguing over which side is worse, which side represents the greatest threat to our very existence. We don’t just debate anymore. We assume the worst motives of people who happen to vote differently than we do.

If you’re on the left, the existential threat has a name — Donald Trump. If you’re on the right, it’s more general — it’s woke Democrats who are supposedly determined to transform America into something unrecognizable.

The language itself tells the story. Every election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” Every political loss is treated as a catastrophe. Every victory by the other side is viewed as proof that the country is headed off a cliff.

That kind of thinking leaves very little room for national unity.

So where does that leave us? Not in a good place, I’m afraid.

Half the country will celebrate July 4 because it believes America really is great. The other half will complain that America under Donald Trump is anything but great. Some Americans will go even further and tell us America never was great — that this country was born in sin because of how Native Americans were treated and because hundreds of thousands of Black people were brought here in chains and denied their most basic human rights.

Their argument is that over all these years America never truly redeemed itself, that our history is little more than a long record of injustice and oppression. To hear some people tell it, there’s very little worth celebrating at all.

But there’s another way to look at America.

You can acknowledge our failures without defining the entire nation by them. You can recognize the stains on our history without ignoring the extraordinary achievements that followed. You can understand that America has often fallen short of its ideals while also recognizing that those ideals were noble enough to inspire generations of people to fight for a better country.

That distinction seems to get lost these days.

A Gallup poll tells us that while 92 percent of Republicans say they are extremely or very proud to be Americans, only 36 percent of Democrats say they are extremely or very proud to be American.

Whatever the reasons behind those numbers, they reveal something troubling. National pride, which once crossed party lines, has become another political dividing line.

I’m constantly surprised by how many Americans think that if the “wrong” party wins the White House, America won’t survive.

During the last presidential election, I talked to otherwise very smart people. Some were convinced that if Trump won, democracy would die. Others were equally convinced that if Kamala Harris won, America itself would cease to exist as they knew it.

How did we get to this place?

America survived two world wars. We survived a Great Depression. We survived political assassinations, a Civil War, economic crises, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Along the way, we endured countless other setbacks, large and small.

And we survived all of it.

None of this is to minimize today’s challenges. We have plenty of them. Political polarization is real. Trust in institutions is declining. Our public discourse often resembles a food fight in the high school cafeteria more than a serious national conversation.

But perspective matters.

It’s a safe bet that we’ll survive whichever party takes control of Congress in a few months and whichever party wins the White House in 2028.

Do we have faults here in America 250 years after we won our independence? Of course we do.

Every country has faults. Human beings are imperfect, which means the institutions they create will be imperfect too.

But America is more than its mistakes. It is also a story of freedom, opportunity, innovation, generosity, and self-correction. It is a nation that has repeatedly expanded liberty to people who were once excluded from it. It is a place millions around the world still hope to come to, not because it i…