At 250, A Republic Examines Its Own Conscience

On the Fourth of July, 1826 — precisely fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence — two of its most distinguished authors died. John Adams in Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, each within hours of the other, as if Providence itself had drawn a curtain on the Founding generation. Neither lived long enough to know with certainty whether the experiment they had launched would endure.

Two centuries and a half later, we know that it has — though the question of whether it shall continue to do so is considerably less settled than the summer's anniversary fireworks might suggest.

President Trump opened the Great American State Fair on the National Mall this week, delivering remarks beneath military flyovers and celebrating what he called America's "250-year triumph." The spectacle was genuinely stirring. Flags flew over the capital. Citizens from across the country gathered to acknowledge what this republic has built and sustained — the longest-running constitutional democracy in human history, a continuous experiment in popular self-governance that has outlasted every empire and ideology of the modern age. One would have to possess a deeply impoverished historical imagination not to feel the weight of the occasion.

And yet. Within the same forty-eight hours, New York City voters sent three democratic socialists to Congress; a federal judge appointed by President Barack Obama permanently struck down an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections; and the nation's preferred inflation gauge rose to 4.1 percent, driven in part by the energy disruptions of an ongoing military conflict with Iran. Two of three Democrats, according to polling data reported this week, now hold a favorable view of socialism.

This is the republic at 250. Celebrate, yes. But without illusion.

Thucydides, in his account of the Peloponnesian War, observed that the greatest threat to democratic civilization does not typically arrive in the form of foreign conquerors — it arrives in the form of internal demagogues who exploit popular grievance to dismantle the very institutions that protect the popular will. The Athenian democracy that was the marvel of the ancient world did not fall to Sparta. It destroyed itself. Cleon and his successors persuaded the Assembly that the permanent emergency of war justified the suspension of the deliberative habits that had made Athens great, and the Assembly agreed, until there was nothing left to protect.

Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the young American republic in the 1830s, marveled at what he termed "self-interest rightly understood" — the capacity of American citizens to perceive that civic virtue and personal flourishing were not in tension but in fundamental alignment. The American, Tocqueville observed, was not naturally self-sacrificing in the classical republican sense; rather, he had learned through long practice to connect his own prosperity to the prosperity of his neighbors and his community. The township was the school of liberty.

But Tocqueville warned of a different danger — the soft despotism of administrative power, the gradual subordination of individual initiative and local governance to the paternal management of an ever-expanding central state. He did not imagine that despotism would arrive on horseback. He imagined it arriving with benefits, wrapped in the language of care and equality, administered by a new class of credentialed managers who would reduce citizens, over time, to something resembling contented sheep.

James Madison understood the peril from yet another angle. In Federalist No. 10, he argued that the central danger to republican government was faction — the organized pursuit of particular interests at the expense of the common good. His solution was not to eliminate faction, which he understood to be inseparable from human nature and from liberty itself, but to enlarge the republic so that no single faction could capture the whole of it. What Madison could not fully anticipate was the emergence of factions that would operate not primarily through electoral politics but through the institutions of knowledge production — the universities, the press, the civil service, the credentialing apparatus of professional life. When faction controls the formation of opinion rather than merely the casting of votes, the Madisonian remedy becomes more difficult to apply.

We are 250 years into the attempt. We have not yet resolved the question.

The socialist sweep of New York City's Democratic congressional primaries this week is not, as the establishment press is insisting, merely a local story about shifting demographics in particular urban districts. It is a data point in a larger civilizational argument — one that the American republic has been avoiding for decades and can avoid no longer.

When two of three members of a major political party express favorable views of socialism — an economic system that the twentieth century tested to catastrophic effect in every nation that seriously attempted it, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Chavez's Venezuela — something significant has shifted in the republic's self-understanding. The voters who cast ballots for Mamdani's endorsed candidates are not, for the most part, ignorant of history. They have been educated at length about that history. The problem is that their education has persuaded them that the historical failures of socialism were failures of execution rather than of premise. That the right people, with the right intentions and the right institutional authority, would produce different results.

This is the oldest error in politics. It animated the Jacobins. It animated the Bolsheviks. It animates every progressive utopian project that begins with the assumption that human nature is infinitely malleable — that the proper institutional arrangement can redeem what Augustine and Madison alike recognized as a permanent condition.

The Founders, for all their well-documented failures, were not naive about human nature. They were Christian men in the broad sense — steeped in a tradition that understood human fallibility not as a social construction to be engineered away, but as a permanent feature of the human condition that constitutional design must account for and channel rather than pretend to overcome. The separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, the Bill of Rights — these are not merely technical instruments. They are the political expression of a theological anthropology: a recognition that power corrupts, that ambition must be checked by ambition, that no class of human beings can be trusted with unchecked authority over another.

That understanding is not the inheritance of any single political party. It is the inheritance of the republic itself. And it is precisely what the socialist program — with its faith in state-owned grocery stores and administered wages and the redemptive power of redistributed authority — has always sought to supersede.

The 250th anniversary falls in a summer when the republic's civic faith is genuinely in question. An appointed federal judge this week permanently enjoined the democratically elected president's effort to ensure that only citizens vote in federal elections — an act of judicial supremacy that the Founders, who feared judicial overreach no less than executive tyranny, would have found alarming. Congress is deadlocked over fundamental questions of its own constitutional prerogative. Inflation, declared defeated, has returned on the back of a war the public did not fully choose.

None of this is fatal to the republic, if the republic's citizens choose otherwise. That is the lesson of July 4, 1826 — and of July 4, 2026. The republic survived Adams and Jefferson's departure because the generation that followed chose to sustain it. They did not merely celebrate the founding; they renewed its commitments under new conditions, against new pressures, with the full knowledge that republics are not self-perpetuating.

Benjamin Franklin, departing the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what form of government the delegates had produced. His answer — whether exactly as reported or not — captures the essential condition of self-governance: "A republic, if you can keep it."

We are 250 years into the attempt. The keeping is not guaranteed by the past. It is guaranteed only by the choices this generation makes — in primary election booths and federal courtrooms and university lecture halls and the ten thousand daily decisions of civic life that constitute, in aggregate, either a culture capable of self-governance or one that has forgotten how.

The anniversary is worth celebrating. The republic it commemorates demands something more than celebration.

It demands citizens who understand what they are keeping, and why it is worth the effort.