The country is fractured. Can we really celebrate its birthday?<\/b>
\nCeremonies honoring next Fourth of July\u2019s Semiquincentennial are already gearing up. Earlier this month, a traveling Stars and Stripes banner \u2014 the U.S. \u201cFlag Sojourn 250\u201d \u2014 was raised over Mississippi, having already covered 40,000 miles of its ongoing international tour of cemeteries, landmarks, governor\u2019s mansions and courthouses. \u201cFor nearly 250 years,\u201d Mississippi\u2019s First Lady Elee Reeves announced, \u201cthe American flag has been a source of comfort in times of grief, unity in times of uncertainty, and pride during moments of great national joy.\u201d
Wronger things have been uttered with less self-awareness. In fact, the American flag was not taken all that seriously as a national symbol until 1814. Congress didn\u2019t even bother settling on its modern template until four years later. Until then, all kinds of designs were patched together from silk, linen, wool or \u201canything at hand.\u201d During and after the Civil War, of course, the ensign was as much a symbol of tyranny to many Southerners as it was a source of unity. Sympathizers from Mississippi to Kentucky burned the flag, tore it down, ripped it and spit on it.
America\u2019s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country\u2019s mood.
Conceits aren\u2019t facts: \u201cHeritage is not history,\u201d to borrow the scholar David Lowenthal\u2019s distinction, but instead \u201cwhat people make of their history to make themselves feel good.\u201d America\u2019s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country\u2019s mood.
Republican and Democratic patriotism are worlds apart. The sense of pride that once bound the right and left is so threadbare that pundits have openly despaired of America\u2019s \u201cidentity crisis\u201d and called for a fresh national story to \u201crally people to a new trajectory.\u201d
Jamie Holmes\u2019 \u201cThe Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America\u2019s Forgotten War\u201d will be published on Feb. 3, 2026.
The pleas argue, in effect, for negotiating a new heritage. We shouldn\u2019t.
There is no \u201csingle unifying narrative linking past and present in America\u201d that can serve an inclusive, patriotic identity. The country\u2019s fragile birth in 1776 was as contested as its 100th birthday. The conciliatory narrative that emerged from 1876 painted veterans, North and South, as noble, valorous brothers. The \u201cemancipationist vision of Civil War memory\u201d faded, as Yale University historian David Blight detailed in \u201cRace and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,\u201d and \u201cromance triumphed over reality.\u201d Reconstruction ended, the Lost Cause myth thrived and Americans curbed civil rights for Black Americans, people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups for some 90 years.
The 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, which followed \u201ca decade of racial tensions, assassinations, scandal, rising inflation, embattled campuses and eroding public trust,\u201d also privileged heritage over history. Federal event planners were clueless enough to ask Native Americans to commemorate what was for many a day of mourning. \u201cJustice, justice, justice,\u201d a tribal chairman replied. \u201cWe\u2019ve never had any of that justice \u2013 and now you people want us to celebrate!\u201d America was a \u201cbeacon of liberty,\u201d while at the same time, to \u201clesser\u201d citizens, it was exactly the opposite.
The flag itself has been a symbol of starkly irreconcilable ideals. The red, white and blue banner graced courthouses where Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazism swore allegiance to the United States. In the 1930s, it was also raised by the German American Bund next to swastikas, and by the Ku Klux Klan beside Blood Drop Crosses. When Old Glory was planted on the moon in 1969, it had already draped the caskets of tens of thousands of soldiers who died in Vietnam. The flag was repressive to Chinese immigrants separated from their children on Angel Island in the 1920s, an inspiration to Cuban refugees fleeing in 1980 and a betrayal to Miami residents denied justice that year for the vile police killing of Arthur McDuffie.
Traditionally, countries founded by an ethnic majority have forged identities on ethnic, rather than civic, grounds. Despite the principled rhetoric, the American founding was in effect an achievement for white men. Many Republicans appear satisfied by that heritage; some liberals, adding apologetic footnotes to old textbooks, so to speak, have found it increasingly awkward.
Reaching for a new half-truth is no solution, and it doesn\u2019t have to be. Germany is proof that countries don\u2019t instantly dissolve when deprived of the crutch of triumphalist heritage. New Zealand is making admirable progress in emphasizing civic norms over settler-founding myths. Canada provides an instructional model for democratic multiculturalism beyond mythologized heritage. Singapore has forged ahead with a politics of \u201cpragmatic values as national values,\u201d norms, progress and duty.
History, by this model, offers motley warnings, reality-checks and sober inspirations for the work ahead in place of a master narrative. Not one story, but many. There are no simple solutions, to be sure \u2014 certainly not within today\u2019s political climate. But climates shift, and while \u201cinvented heritage\u201d can act as a powerful anchor, it can also be a millstone, an obstacle to necessary, large-scale changes. History\u2019s crises have often led to bright renewals.
Without question, deep structural inequalities threaten the fabric of American democracy. But at the same time, they also open the door to ambitious reforms, including overturning Citizens United, progressive wealth taxation, labor empowerment, universal social guarantees and massive public investment in job creation: a new \u201cEconomic Bill of Rights.\u201d
The grand narrative that feels missing \u2014 of America as a \u201cshining city on a hill,\u201d in the words of President Ronald Reagan, who was repurposing John Winthrop \u2014 has lost its use. It\u2019s time to take the broken participation trophy of American exceptionalism off the mantle. Unlike their elders, most millennial and Gen Z Americans reject that exceptionalism.
There is more than enough curiosity in this country to recognize all American histories, in all their differences, and more than enough common sense to support a ruling coalition that acknowledges what the American flag has meant while fighting for what it should.<\/p>\n