Fireworks light up the night sky as thousands of people pack Kirby Park for the annual display on Tuesday night.
Times Leader file photo
It’s a quarter of a millennium. And while there are other countries boasting many more than 250 years, the U.S. alone can claim the title as the world’s oldest modern democracy. We set the model that others followed.
In fact, in his book “The End of History and the Last Man” (published in 1996 and updated in 2006), Francis Fukuyama argued our brand of “liberal democracy” would prove the pinnacle of governing systems. While the explanation was long and at times obtuse, the nutshell version seems simple: All previous forms left the majority of people as slaves, servants or subjects, either wanting more or burying ambition in the dreariness of a world they felt powerless to change. The consequence: stagnation or revolution, often both, followed by another round of similar failure.
Certainly, our origin story supports the notion: a scrappy, disjointed band of colonies — a relatively small number of the many peoples claimed by the British Empire — managed to pull together, raise an army, rebound from repeated defeats and secede from a country boasting the world’s greatest military power of the time.
Yes, we glossed over the abomination that was slavery in order to create a new country. Yes, we followed the mistaken tradition of denying women a say in their government (and even in their daily lives). Yes, we allowed racism, segregation, Jim Crow laws, xenophobia and white supremacy to fester and rebound for decades. But over all those years, we’ve always faced those problems and many others — haltingly at times, nearly tearing the nation asunder through a Civil War, lurching toward a truer democracy rather than marching boldly.
The economic and technical successes over the past 250 years seem countless. We invented the telephone, the airplane, the assembly line, transistors, flight to the moon, the internet and more. And if America didn’t invent the next big thing, we usually figured out how to use and improve it faster than others.
We grew from an agrarian upstart to the world’s largest economy, from that band of hungry and often unpaid Continental soldiers to a nation capable of producing more tanks, planes and ships during World War II than the combined members of the Axis could match. We became one of the “superpowers” after that conflict, and kept moving until we became the lone superpower.
We always stumble, take a step backward, and watch the political pendulum swing. We seem increasingly incapable of combating national debt. We succumb at times to irrational fears fed by those who see profit in such mongering. But we remain resilient.
We can come together as a nation when needed, but we also benefit from local communities, regional consensus, decentralized power and keeping and sharing our family, ancestral and ethnic traditions.
In more recent years, Fukuyama has doubted his prior conclusions, conceded that he may have judged the world’s shift to liberal democracy too soon, and fretted that we may be backsliding too much.
Only time will tell whether he was right in the original analysis or in the latter doubts. But time has shown that America remains as it started. Not just a new country, but a new idea, new aspirations. More than any nation before us, we habitually look forward more than holding on to the past. We exhibit, however uncertainly, a will to always grapple with demons big and small, until our better angels emerge.
Being a democracy is not the goal. Getting better at it was always the long arc of our history. That’s what we celebrate this weekend and this year.
Happy 250th Independence Day.
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