The week before Memorial Day, I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the first time. As a lifelong socialist, I had some misgivings about visiting our nation’s capitol on the eve of Trump’s garish and largely failed celebration of his own vanity for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Fortunately, my worries were overblown. I spent five days experiencing our country’s greatest historical treasures, including our nation’s Founding Documents, the Apollo 11 Command Module, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat (and the derringer that killed him), and countless other artifacts and historic sites. Seeing the Lincoln Memorial was extremely moving, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is a beautiful and underappreciated tribute to one of this country’s greatest presidents. Deliberately taking time to reflect on the intersection of my own values of internationalism, republicanism, democratic rights, and anti-militarism added another layer of meaning to the experience.
As I moved through D.C., I also reflected on what it means to be an American in an era of fascism. We live in a time in which the far- right insists that it has a monopoly on the truth of American history. Every misremembered detail and twisted political narrative hammers the argument that America is naturally and inevitably dominated by violent anti-leftist prejudices and uniquely amenable to right-wing authoritarianism. Many on the left are eager to assert the same, that America will need to be rebuilt brick-by-brick in order to accommodate socialism.
The American experiment has had a profound influence on world history, both for better and for worse. It has touched every aspect of our lives, and it will continue to influence our political reality for far longer than any of us will be alive. We cannot escape it. We must reckon with both the good and the bad.
This Fourth of July, on the 250th anniversary of the signing of Declaration of Independence, in the context of the pain and uncertainty of the current moment, I pose a simple question:
Is there anything left to salvage?
Founding Violence
Any holistic discussion of the legacy of the United States of America must begin with a full-throated condemnation of both Indigenous genocide and the African slave trade. The process of converting enormous territories in the Americas into plantation colonies employing intensive slave labor spanning two continents amounts to one of the most horrific crimes in human history. Millions of human beings were ruthlessly murdered in this process, and millions more were forced to live in brutal, inhuman conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of their cultures and their inherent dignity as human beings. Entire nations and people groups were wiped out in this centuries-long process, and the suffering it brought into the world is truly incalculable.
The genocide of native peoples in the territory of the United States continued into the early twentieth century, and countless waves of state-sanctioned violence only ended once there was essentially nothing left for the government to take. This process was aided and sustained by a popular zeal among violent white colonists to push into newly acquired territories, exterminating the people already living there as they went. After the American frontier was declared “closed” in the 1890s, the state then embarked on an explicit campaign of cultural erasure, forcing native children into assimilationist boarding schools that operated well into the 1960s. It is also worth noting that many Latinos have Indigenous and Black ancestors, and modern racism and colorism directed against Latinos can be viewed through the lens of anti-Indigenous racism.
Millions of human beings were brought from Africa to the United States to work as chattel slaves from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Chattel slaves were legally considered to be property in the way draft animals are considered property, and enslaved people under this system were afforded effectively zero legal rights. To prevent solidarity from developing between African slaves and poor white indentured servants in the early colonies, colonial elites aggressively developed racist propaganda to convince white workers that Black slaves were an inferior, subservient race incapable of achieving full personhood.
The Constitution of the United States was initially written to protect the rights of wealthy slaveholders to continue this intolerably vile system. It afforded Southern states disproportionate power in the Congress and the Electoral College, and the plantation-owning Southern elites used their position within the government to expand and defend slavery until the American Civil War. After the war, the failure of the radical project of Reconstruction allowed white elites to terrorize Black people through formal racial segregation and horrific violence for another century, effectively ignoring the sweeping protections passed in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Despite the progress of the Civil Rights Movement toward achieving full legal equality for Black Americans, this campaign of violence and discrimination continues to this day.
The Constitution
For many decades in the United States, the “wisdom of the Founders” was considered sacrosanct. American school systems are heavily influenced by both a bipartisan patriotism-industrial complex and, more recently, the reimagining of American history through a far-right lens. This combination has led many schools to explicitly teach that the U.S. Constitution is “the greatest in the world.” In the relatively stable postwar era of U.S. politics, this was easy enough for most people to believe. Now it is obvious to the entire world that our constitution is woefully out-of-date. The document is among the shortest and hardest to amend of any democratic constitution today. Common-sense amendments such as national proportional representation, the abolition of the Electoral College, and banning unlimited corporate donations to political candidates are effectively impossible under the current system.
To give a sense of how difficult the Constitution is to amend, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified in 1992, nearly thirty-five years ago. It was a minor procedural amendment requiring that changes to congressional salaries take effect only after the next congressional election. It was introduced by Congress in the 1790s and allowed to sit for two centuries. The last major substantive amendment (lowering the voting age to 18 nationally) was ratified in 1971. The Equal Rights Amendment proposed in the 1970s (explicitly banning discrimination on the basis of sex) was narrowly defeated after a right-wing anti-feminist pressure campaign prevented its ratification by enough state legislatures.
In the current political climate, it would take a colossal remaking of the country’s political order to amend the Constitution even once in our lifetimes. The closest we are likely to get to overhauling the Constitution through formal mechanisms is the calling of a Constitutional Convention. Under present political circumstances, this convention would be dominated by Republican state delegations, likely resulting in the formalizing of one-party rule under the far right.
Criticism of the structural problems with the U.S. Constitution has filled entire books. Under the Electoral College system, the individual presidential votes of voters anyone in a solidly red or blue state (representing a large majority of the U.S. population) might as well be thrown directly in the trash, and deciding presidential elections on a state-by-state basis dramatically increases the likelihood of a disputed result.
For example, if the Electoral College didn’t exist, the Supreme Court’s theft of the 2000 presidential election on behalf of George W. Bush would have been impossible. Democrat Al Gore would have won the election by over half a million votes under a popular vote system. The closest presidential race in modern history by popular vote was the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and even then the margin was more than 100,000 votes across all fifty states. The hurdles to physically manufacturing or legally disqualifying that many votes would be enormous, much greater than flipping the slate of electors sent by a handful of states, as Trump tried to do in the leadup to January 6.
The structure of the Senate gives disproportionate power to small, rural states. There are no bans on partisan gerrymandering, and corporations are allowed to spend ungodly amounts of money on elections. The Supreme Court has been captured by the far-right and has become a kind of “super-legislature” at a time when Congress is effectively unable to pass meaningful laws. The Court just put the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, rapidly making Jim Crow-era levels of racial gerrymandering the norm in Republican states across the country. The U.S. Constitution affords almost no freedoms reflecting “positive rights” to things like housing, healthcare, quality education, stable work, union representation, rights to indigenous and minority representation, and many others. And on and on and on it goes.
Institutional Decay
The Constitution has been in a sorry state for well over a century, and the American government has been dysfunctional at a very basic level for at least the past twenty years. That danger is now being compounded by the gamification of politics and the economy, attempts by the current President of the United States to establish an illiberal, personalistic dictatorship, and the complete inability of the Democratic Party to resist either trend.
The post-pandemic period has been one of the most obscene periods of wealth concentration in human history. Last month, Elon Musk briefly became the first person in history to have a net worth of over $1 trillion, a literally unimaginable amount of money that he plans to use to build an independent space empire under his control to evade all existing law.
Meanwhile, the traditional metrics of the U.S. economy are losing their relationship with reality. The government is engaging in massive deficit spending to prop up the economy in the context of a disastrous and wholly unnecessary war with Iran. Investments in the “transformative” technology of AI that are likely to generate no actual returns have pushed the stock market to new heights. The gamification of the economy and our political system through betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket has allowed consumers to “speculate” on almost literally anything, including war, death, and easily manipulated prop bets. Radically pro-business private equity firms have taken on a key role in this speculative economy, and these forces combined are likely leading America toward the next major economic crisis.
Meanwhile, Trump is in the process of consolidating his rule and doing as much damage to the American government as possible in service of his radically anti-government supporters and basest instincts. Eighteen months into his second term, ICE is still being used as an army of personal enforcers. The Supreme Court has endorsed Trump in his insatiable quest to enrich himself and his supporters on an unprecedented scale, and it has massively expanded his power through its selective interpretation of the Constitution.
The Democratic Party is woefully incapable of responding to this crisis. In Project 2029, the centrist think-tank wing of the party openly declares that its greatest ambitions to save U.S. democracy contain no substantive reforms to our broken system, instead focusing exclusively on failed slogans like “affordability” and “cutting red tape.” Gavin Newsom, the unpopular centrist California governor and an early 2028 frontrunner, has already seen fit to align himself with anti-trans bigots on his podcast in the hopes of scoring cheap political points. The party is overwhelmingly likely to engage in trickery and intra-party pressure tactics in 2028 to block a progressive nominee, similar to their undemocratic efforts in 2016 and 2020 to block the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. This process has already started in the context of the recent sweep of DSA-endorsed candidates in the Northeast, as centrist Democrats panic that the party will be captured by “far left” candidates who have the gall to run on a meaningful platform of reform.
The structural solutions centrist Democrats have proposed to this crisis are woefully inadequate, and they are all too likely to hand Republicans a third opportunity to destroy American democracy after a third GOP presidential victory in either 2028 or 2032. We’ve already watched it happen once. That’s assuming that Trump or his successor won’t abjectly refuse to leave office if they lose in 2028, as Trump infamously attempted in January 2021.
It is by no means already too late to save American democracy. At the same time, we will not have an unlimited number of chances to stop Trump’s successors from establishing a more durable authoritarianism that could last a generation or more.
The Patriotism Question
There is a lot of cynicism on the left when it comes to American patriotism, and for very good reason. Marx held that workers must reject loyalty to any single nation, prioritizing instead the interests of the international proletariat. This instinct has been proven right over the past 150 years: socialist parties and governments have historically devolved into extremism and brutal violence when they abandon internationalism.
In the early twentieth century, it was not uncommon for socialists to embrace what we would now consider “American patriotism” to varying degrees. Figures including socialist organizer Eugene Debs saw much to admire in the core values of the American Revolution and the radical struggle to end slavery that had taken place just a few generations earlier. Debs admired figures including Lincoln and Jefferson, and he famously quipped in a 1901 speech: “I like the Fourth of July. It breathes a spirit of revolution.” This sentiment wasn’t limited to Debs. In the 1940s, the Communist Party, just past the height of its influence in America during the Depression in the 1930s, even renamed its New York night school “The Jefferson School of Social Science.”
The turn away from the New Deal era, which communists and socialists had played a significant role in implementing, and the beginning of the Second Red Scare in the late 1940s marked a major shift in the prospects of the American left. Socialists moved from a relatively hopeful era in which a broadly left-populist president was remaking U.S. economic life and talking openly about wealth redistribution to an extraordinarily repressive period in which all of society was mobilized to scorn and attack “the Reds.”
The definition of “Red” during this period was dutifully expanded to anyone who wasn’t willing to uncritically endorse America’s aggressive and imperialist foreign policy of the era, and to those who were too eager to continue economic reforms that were considered by capitalist political interests to be “subversive.” Americans were allowed to express themselves within a narrow band of political opinions, and anyone who attempted to break out of that consensus was openly discriminated against and targeted for surveillance or worse. Even after the worst of McCarthyism subsided, the American left was driven underground and continued to be targeted and marginalized.
By the late 1960s, the grinding carnage of the Vietnam War had cemented the U.S. in the minds of the left as an unrepentant imperialist power that would spill any amount of blood and spend endless hordes of treasure to ensure people in the Global South lived only under autocratic, pro-American client states. High-profile assassinations of leftist leaders including Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the organized repression of communists and other leftists hardened the notion that America was “irredeemable” in a fundamental way.
The modern American left still carries the scars of these previous eras of repression as we enter a dangerous new era.
Why Celebrate?
In some ways, it isn’t surprising that we’ve seen a total divorce between American patriotism and the country’s socialist left. Almost all American socialists living today have spent their entire lives being told that socialism is antithetical to and fundamentally incompatible with American values. The modern right-wing vision of American patriotism not only excludes leftists, but openly declares them to be enemies of the state. In an era of right-wing ascendency and total Democratic incompetence, it’s hard to imagine there is much to salvage.
Meanwhile, many leftists have spent years rejecting displays of American patriotism, and for very good reason. It’s easy to revile the flag our government paints on bombs that are dropped indiscriminately on innocents around the world. This is especially true at a time when American democracy has never felt less representative, functional, fair, or amenable to real reform.
I don’t have a definitive answer to any of these questions, and I don’t pretend to. But almost all of our American readers will live in this country for the rest of their lives. The outcome of the struggle for democracy and justice in the United States will reverberate for a century or more. We have a unique opportunity to shape that struggle today.
To the most radical among us: anyone who hopes for a total collapse and reconstitution of the American system is realistically going to be waiting for a very long time. Even then, the possibilities in such a scenario will be constrained by the political and social conditions of our reality today. Any future government on this continent, no matter how revolutionary, will necessarily bear a distinctly American character. As leftists, it is up to us to decide for ourselves what that character should be.
This Fourth of July, I encourage everyone to reflect on what parts of the American experiment are worth salvaging, great or small. We should celebrate the accomplishments of the great reformers of American history and build toward our own major expansion of worker and civil rights, which will be the first in over fifty years. We should honor and stand alongside the radical traditions of indigenous peoples, Black Americans, and immigrants from every country around the world. Constitutionalists should reflect on how we can remake American democracy into an experiment in unapologetic egalitarianism. Radicals should prepare the ground for mass nonviolent resistance and build a clear, positive vision for a more just political system. And we should all build the kind of deep, community-based solidarity that can sustain a socialist movement.
Everyone will have a different answer to this question. The only wrong answer is to abdicate all imagination and declare that we can find nothing to value in the last two and a half centuries of our history. That history is not dictated to us from the outside. We have to make meaning of it for ourselves, and today is the perfect day to start.
