Today is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, by the US, to separate itself from English rule.
*
Some overviews then.
Once again, there are always problems, but people typically don’t give credit where credit is due; they don’t appreciate what we have and what we’ve accomplished.
Washington Post, Editorial Board, today: 25 reasons to be optimistic about America’s future
The graphic is animated; it’s worth clicking through to watch it.
The United States has had a tumultuous history, and there have always been reasons to worry about the country’s future. The frosted glass of memory produces nostalgia for bygone eras.
Freedom and prosperity are never guaranteed, but it’s a mistake to bet against America. That’s as true now as when the country was founded 250 years ago.
Here are 25 reasons to believe the best days are still ahead for the United States.
I’ll summarize and paraphrase, then comment. By ‘we’ I mean the U.S.
- We’re a powerhouse in science
- We have the top universities in the world
- Life expectancy has reached a new high
- Cancer is becoming less deadly
- We’re reaping extraordinary medical breakthroughs
- mRNA technology
- The US dollar is the world’s undisputed currency
- More than half the world’s top 100 publicly traded corporations are American
- And 62% of Americans have a direct stake: they own stocks
- We lead the world in venture capital
- We’re getting wealthier
- The US median household has a higher income that 96% of the world’s population
- The US is a magnet for talent
- We’re the largest oil exporter
- We’re experiencing a boom in solar and wind
- We’re installing battery storage at a record pace
- We lead the world in AI
- We have the strongest military in the world
- We have an extensive system of global alliances
- We dominate the final frontier — space
- We’re more generous than any other country
- The US rules the world culturally
- Despite polarization, we’ve become more tolerant and accepting
- We have robust protections for free speech
- Our democracy remains rock solid.
Now, the exercise the reader is to count how many of these items are under assault by MAGA, the Trump administration, or both.
\\
Another take.
NY Times, Editorial Board, today: Five Questions That Will Determine America’s Next 50 Years
On this Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee. They pledged their lives, fortunes and honor precisely because the outcome was in doubt. Two and a half centuries later, the wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it. That is the truth worth celebrating this summer — America is still being made.
…
Americans can be tempted to treat the country’s founding as either a flawless act of genius or an irredeemable original sin. It was neither. It was a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it. “All men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved his fellow human beings; the promise and the betrayal arrived in the same sentence. Yet the promise, once written, could not be undone.
This foundational promise was followed by three others — for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation’s early fights were mostly over whom would be granted life and liberty. More recent arguments are often over the pursuit of happiness. They turn on the rules of the game: not who is admitted to the common life but what that life owes its members, and what all of us owe the people not yet born. It is the question of whether a free people, through self-government, can build a society in which everyone has a real chance to flourish.
So what are the five questions? Again, I’ll summarize and paraphrase.
- Whether self-governing people still share a common reality
- Whether we can still bear to lose
- Whether those who work can rise and that their children will rise further
- Whether the most pluralist nation in history can remain one people
- Whether we can pass tests that unfold slowly and ask for sacrifice now
It has not failed in previous traumas. As in the previous piece, MAGA and Trump are implicated in four of these, in my estimation. On the failing side.
\\
I love Connie Willis’ summaries of daily politics, but they are so long each day I don’t often look anymore. But someone on Facebook called this one out, for its optimistic take. Maybe things are changing.
CW Daily, today: A Happy and Hopeful Fourth of July
(Also here.) Note that she lives in Greeley, Colorado.
We went to the Greeley Stampede last night (our local fair and rodeo.) It can be kind of a rough crowd, but this year my husband and I both noticed something different about it–and not just that last year there was lots of MAGA stuff, and this year I saw hardly any red hats or in-your-face T-shirts. What we noticed was people’s attitudes–they were friendly and polite and smiling. Everyone talked to each other–the people at the table where we ate our corn dogs and cherry limeades were all talkative and cheerful, teenagers we were maneuvering around made way for us, and when I told a guy in the line waiting for tickets to get in that I liked his shirt, he gave us two free passes to the fair that he had. Everyone smiled. It was a sea change from last year’s tension and wariness, and it felt like the fever of divisiveness has broken, or at least is breaking.
A lot of people have been saying they’re despairing this Fourth of July, that they feel more like mourning than celebrating, but I find myself MUCH more hopeful than last year, when Trump and DOGE were running riot, colleges and businesses were caving, and watching 1776 on TV (which we do every Fourth of July, made me sick to my stomach. This year we’re in a much different place. The winds have shifted, and Trump is now struggling on multiple fronts, from his corruption (which was on the front page today) to the war he keeps losing over and over.
With many many details of current events, and people she loves who helped created America. I’ll resist quoting; it’s the bottom half of the post.
\\\
A couple more positive notes.
Vox, Bryan Walsh, today: Why Americans are living longer again, subtitled “The US death rate just hit a record low, and there’s reason to hope the trend will continue.”
America is a uniquely sick, unhealthy country — just ask Americans. We’re addicted to ultraprocessed food and succumb to deaths of despair. The current US health secretary, who insists we’ve been raising the “sickest generation” ever, has built an entire political movement around the idea that there is something uniquely unwell about America as a country.
Resist the negativity bias.
So it might surprise you to learn that the US actually just set a new record low in its death rate, the average American’s odds of dying in a given year. According to provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this week, the US registered 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025. That is the lowest level on record. Not the lowest level since the Covid pandemic. The lowest level since the US started keeping organized data more than 125 years ago, and given the obvious public health advances in the 20th century, it is almost certainly America’s lowest death rate through the entire 250 years of its existence.
More data, and graphs, follow.
\\
</p?
NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, today: What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness
“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”
Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.
Yes, there are many factors involved; Norway is relatively monocultural compared to the US, and so on. But the US never seems interested in learning lessons from other countries.
\\\
The US is hobbled by forces revealed in these articles.
The Atlantic, Jim Rasenberger, today: America’s Most Enduring Belief Is Also One of Its Most Dangerous, subtitled “How the simultaneous deaths of two Founding Fathers entrenched the idea that the United States was chosen by God”
Two hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Today, this is usually recalled, when it’s recalled at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were stunned that the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson its author, Adams its chief advocate—died on the same day, and that this day was the Fourth of July, and that this Fourth of July was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. “There is something so strange in it,” Hezekiah Niles of Niles’ Weekly Register wrote, “that we hardly know how to reconcile the fact by the common doctrine of chances.” An eminent mathematician calculated the odds at one in 1.2 billion.
The events of that day were so extraordinary that many Americans took them as a sign of God’s favor. “A coincidence of circumstances so wonderful,” Secretary of War James Barbour said, “furnishes a new seal to the hope, that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence.”
Humans are by nature superstitious, and don’t understand odds, or coincidences. They’re always reading in random events great meaning, where none exists.
This is, I’ve recently realized, an example of the sin of pride. One of the seven deadly sins, yes? It’s pride to think one is special, to think that God made the universe just for you.
\
Trump treats half the American population as enemies.
NY Times, yesterday: At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers From Patriotism to ‘Communism’, subtitled “On the eve of July 4, President Trump extolled the nation’s founders while branding his opponents as ‘communists’ in what seemed to be a warm-up for November.”
Of course, this is childish name-calling. And it’s unbecoming of a president who supposedly leads an entire nation. He is fear-mongering, to the ignorant, xenophobic MAGA base.
\
Washington Post, Letters to the Editor, yesterday: Keep church and state separate. Just as the founders wanted.
The June 28 news article “Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission aims at church-state separation” reported that Ben Carson, vice chair of the president’s Religious Liberty Commission, champions an “originalist understanding” of what the founders thought and what the Constitution says about church-state separation.
Carson is among those who apparently believe that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” It assuredly was not. In the 1780s, the founders wrote a Constitution that makes no reference to God, Jesus or the Bible. In 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli — negotiated by the first president and signed by the second — which flatly declared that “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” It is hard to imagine a more dispositive statement.
(from Dale Butland of Columbus OH)
Of course, the religious strive to reinterpret history in their favor.
What occurred to me today, or perhaps it was something I read that triggered the thought, is that the earliest settlers to North America, and Puritan and the Pilgrims, fled their home country precisely to flee religious persecution. The same kind of persecution MAGA would install in the modern government to oppress non-Christians.
Again, this is an aspect of human nature that is not easily escaped.
