On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared the thirteen colonies, then at war with Great Britain for over a year, a united entity fighting for its independence. The revolution that followed was the product of diverging views and interests working together and apart. Through the passing of time and the evolution of our civil religion, that revolution has been collapsed into one set of meanings about one set of people.
Despite the fact that our Declaration of Independence began with the proclamation that “all men are created equal,” the vast majority of Americans then and now had no say over the institutions that govern them. On this day, 250 years later, we have the opportunity to reflect on the story our country tells itself. Any socialist knows that story is filled with lies, and half-truths. But we must revisit the history of our old republic to search for a new national narrative.
One question confronts us today as we peer through the looking glass: How do we reconcile the forced patriotism of the 250th anniversary with the real facts of our history? What, to a socialist, is the Fourth of July?
The Early Republic
The political elites we later crowned Founding Fathers did not form a united bloc. Many merchants, especially in New York City, remained loyal to the crown and left for Canada at the war’s end. Of the American patriots, ideological diversity prevailed—from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic republicanism to independent monarchism. Over the next generation, the Founding Fathers and their successors crafted an American ideology which combined conservative, property-based republicanism in the North, slavocracy in the South, and aggressive settler expansion in the West; where the conquest of land from indigenous peoples and government non-interference built a national identity for smallholders and artisans, whose economic independence made them full citizens.
To the indigenous peoples, the Declaration of Independence and the victory of the United States marked the end of indirect rule by colonial empires and accelerated their conquest and colonization. At the war’s end, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan to pursue a genocidal scorched earth campaign against the British-aligned Haudenosaunee nations, methodically destroying villages and clearing upstate New York. The destruction and disempowerment of the indigenous peoples has continued since.
To the artisans and workers of the newly minted USA there were also a variety of reactions. The tariffs and lack of representation in government had radicalized them into volunteering to fight in a war of independence. After the war was won, pensions went underpaid and the taxes levied to pay war debts often fell hardest on poor whites. Revolts like Shay’s Rebellion were put down, and the constant risk of popular uprising pushed the political elites to move on from the Articles of Confederation. The new Constitution, ratified in 1789, was designed to ensure that the working class could never find a foothold in our political system.
Slavery and Freedom
In 1852, Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist leader and former slave, railed against July 4th as an essentially white holiday, one that did not address the reality of racialized political and economic domination in the American republic:
Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation, as embodied in the two great political parties, is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen
To the enslaved peoples of the USA, the Fourth of July was a cruel joke, a song of liberty sung by a tyrant. Millions of people who could otherwise have lived full and free lives were reduced to servants, purposefully uneducated, forced to suffer constant indignities, violation, and torture. The very same Constitution that declared the blessing of liberty counted these enslaved and disempowered people as 3/5ths of a person.
Throughout the speech, Douglass pointed to the comparative youth of the United States: “for were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier.” That nation was still young, and still able to resolve the glaring contradiction at the heart of its founding: that a nation of supposedly free-holding independent citizens kept millions of human beings in chains.
We now come 174 years after Douglass. The struggle of pre-war abolitionists for emancipation culminated in Reconstruction, our nation’s first attempt at a multi-racial democracy. Over the course of a generation, this experiment was dismantled and crushed; through terrorism, coups against black political power, and gerrymandering which allowed drafters of maps to limit black representation. Redemption re-entrenched reactionary white political power, and reinforced segregation between white and black society. The destruction of mixed society forced black people in the South to choose between accepting a degraded life, attempting to achieve some kind of self-rule, or leaving their homes for the North. Growing opposition to this system found its apex in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the mid 20th century.
The Great Lie
To someone raised at the end of the 20th century, the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement goes something like this: the oppression and disenfranchisement of black people was unquestionably wrong. They struggled virtuously against their oppression, but eventually went too far after some of their better leaders were, sadly, assassinated. After a period of riots in the late 60s and early 70s, we more or less managed to achieve a perfect multi-racial political system.
The 1999 cartoon My Friend Martin represents this mythology well. In it, a pair of young men travel back in time to befriend Martin Luther King Jr. In the climax, the young MLK chooses to go back in time and accept his assassination in order to create the flawless society of post-Rodney King America. This film was shown in schools to commemorate MLK Day. The Civil Rights Movement had become so subsumed into the American civil religion that its defeat was painted as a victory. This whiggish arc of history was fulfilled in the election of Barack Obama, and the seeming inauguration of a “post-racial America.”
This narrative of post-racialism was always a lie. Ideologically, Black Liberation was integrated into the narrative America told about itself; meanwhile the real struggle for economic and political equality was blunted and turned back. Redlining, racist hiring practices, over/under-policing and white flight have all contributed to a white-black wealth gap higher than it was in 1960. The long struggle for political representation ended in the victory of a generation of black and Latino mayors and members of Congress who have proven just as amenable to the colonizing effects of capital, just as willing to cover up murders by the police, and just as corrupt as their white colleagues.
As the mid-century wave of struggle crashed and abated, it left the core undemocratic aspects of our country intact. The scope of Presidential power only grew through Bush and Obama’s executive orders, and since 2010 the executive branch has de facto crafted more legislation than Congress. The threat of gerrymandering, an increasingly active Supreme Court, the victory of Citizens United; all were tolerated under the whiggish idea that they could be resolved by voting for Democrats. Then Trump won, and the rest is history.
Trump has used executive power to dismantle the civil service and launch unilateral wars of aggression. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, attacks the foundations of our civil society, and effectively annulled the Voting Rights Act earlier this Spring. Gerrymandering is now an accepted form of partisan warfare, and should it proceed, we can look forward to an even less representative government than the one we have now. All this as the USA turns 250.
Building a New Meaning
The Fourth of July is a whirlpool which pulls all events back to the origin. Every struggle since the Founding to bring us closer to a free society is morphed into a post-facto legitimization of the same constitutional order that produced those problems in the first place. The struggles of indigenous and enslaved people for freedom, and of women for the vote, the fight for equal civil rights through the ‘60s and ‘70s; all are presented to us as distorted reflections of the genius of our Founding slaveowners. The US civil religion imagines an already perfected government, gradually stripped of its more problematic aspects. But slavery and conquest has always been a part of Americanism.
All the facts listed above are known to you. To anyone proximate to activist spaces in the last decade, the knowledge that we are on stolen land, that the wealth of this country was born by oppressive systems designed to divide workers, that we live in a profoundly undemocratic state, are all somewhat common-sense. But without an alternative, without a positive vision for our society, acknowledging these facts comes to nothing. The colossal oppression we witness every day, the millions of corpses we walk upon, becomes a guilt-inspiring thing, not one that leads to action. We know that our society is cruel but we live with it, on a day to day basis. We let that knowledge turn into yet another consumer choice, another way for us to express our identity.
We are more than passive observers. Just as we live in what feels like the conclusion of this moment in American history defined by the collapse of the “Great Lie” of post-racial America, we live in the prelude of another great moment; one that is being actively shaped by the choices we make today.
There is another story we can tell of our people; a story of struggle by enslaved people and abolitionists, of liberationists and unionists, of communists and suffragettes. It will only fully cohere itself once we escape the whirlpool of American civil religion and start to understand all of these as part of a single force to transform our undemocratic society; from one rooted in the whims of a handful of slaveowners and merchants to one that will empower every human being that walks on the Earth.
As the Founding Fathers made an intentionally complex, conservative republic to disempower the working class, so will we make a democratic socialist republic which can tear down the edifice of colonialism, slavery, and all other forms of oppression. When we finally transcend the relevance of the Fourth of July, no one will ask why. They will instead ask why Americans accepted our suffering for so long, and so passively.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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