On July 4, 2026, America will be 250 years old. Our friends abroad should join patriots at home in celebrating the miracle that is the United States of America.
The idea that there is something unique about America can be traced back to the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, that prescient observer of our infant republic, who explored the idea in his seminal work Democracy in America. He concluded that the success of representative government on these shores was based on the balance between liberty and order and the genius of Americans at forming voluntary associations.
De Tocqueville’s classic was published in 1835, a little more than 50 years after our nation’s founding. The intervening time has shown the wisdom of his insights.
In the course of history, 250 years may seem like the blink of an eye. In its Eastern and Western empires, Rome lasted 1,400 years. Egyptian civilization spanned three millennia.
By contrast, our history may seem like a ripple in the ocean of time. But think of all we’ve accomplished.
We fought and defeated what was then the greatest empire on earth to win our independence. We could hardly have been more outmatched militarily. At the outset, a highly trained, disciplined, and battle-tested army faced yeoman farmers with muskets. Our victory seemed to be divinely ordained.
We started with a vision set forth in the Mayflower Compact, later referred to as a shining city on a hill. We began forming a national identity before the Pilgrims set foot in New England.
As historian Gordon Wood pointed out, America is a “creedal nation.” Our ties aren’t of race or ethnicity but shared values: “One nation under God with liberty and justice for all” – ten words from the Pledge of Allegiance which define us as a people.
God is an integral part of the American identity. To ask what England or France mean is absurd. They are countries whose people share a common language, history, and religion, though those distinctions are blurring.
But America means something. It always has. Our nation was originally settled by religious dissidents: Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Catholics in Maryland.
You’ll find the meaning of America in our patriotic music – “Then conquer we must when our cause it is just, and this be our motto, in God is our trust.” “Our fathers’ God to thee, author of liberty.” “God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above.”
This gave us a yardstick with which to measure our conduct as a people.
We adopted a constitution that was a model of self-government, a compact that protects individual rights by limiting the power of the state. In so doing, it gave citizens the greatest range for human expression and enterprise.
In his Farewell Address, Ronald Reagan described the uniqueness of our constitutional republic: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the People’ are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do.”
We fought Mexico in 1846 and gained half a million square miles of land. This followed the acquisition of the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase. By the middle of the 19th century, what started as 13 colonies clinging precariously to the Eastern seaboard stretched from sea to sea.
We fought a civil war to abolish slavery and save the Union. More than 700,000 died in that conflict. Never has a people paid a higher price to rectify a tragic mistake.
In the next century, we launched a civil rights movement to ensure equality before the law.
By joining the Allies in the First World War, we tipped the scales toward the democracies and helped to end the awful carnage of trench warfare.
In World War II, we saved humanity from the twin horrors of Nazism and Japanese imperialism. Besides striking decisive blows for freedom in Europe and the Pacific, we became – in the words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the Arsenal of Democracy.
After liberating Europe, we took not a square inch of its territory, other than what we needed to bury our dead. Instead of exploiting a continent lying in ruins, we rebuilt it through the Marshall Plan. Our generosity extended even to our former enemies, Germany and Japan.
In the post-war era, we sacrificed to stop the spread of communism in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. We may have lost the Vietnam War, but the “reeducation camps” and Killing Fields proved that our cause was just.
Today, America is standing forthrightly against Russian aggression and Chinese imperialism. Imagine where the world would be without our strength of arms and willingness to use them.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve fought rogue regimes and terrorist movements in the Middle East and elsewhere to the benefit of humanity. Now we’re fighting a narco-terrorist state in our own backyard.
In 2025, we saved the world from nuclear annihilation by bombing Iran’s reactor. You’re welcome, world.
We survived bank failures, the Great Depression, numerous recessions, fires, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and the Biden presidency.
We set an example for emerging nations in limited government and the protection of human rights.
We did not see our mission as spreading our form of government, but rather setting an example for others to follow, if they chose. In the words of President John Quincy Adams: “America … goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
From modest beginnings early in the 19th century, we led the world into the industrial age.
Inventions flowed from our workshops and laboratories, including the electric motor, incandescent light bulb, airplane, telegraph, telephone, television, microchip, personal computer, and Internet, not to mention life-saving drugs and medical procedures, including the polio vaccine, open heart surgery, and the cardiac pacemaker. You might say we ushered humanity into the modern age.
More than 70 percent of all Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans, a nation that has 4.2 percent of the world’s population.
America accounts for 32 percent of global liquid assets, which totaled $67 trillion as of early 2024. We are also the leader in global trade – $7 trillion in 2022.
We are home to 32 percent of the world’s millionaires – 5.7 million – and the largest number of billionaires on the planet. Most of this wealth wasn’t inherited but earned through investments or in the marketplace, lifting all boats.
Roughly 14 percent of those who emigrate worldwide each year come to the United States, more than the next four top immigration nations combined. Some countries build walls to keep their people in. We build walls to keep out those who are trying to enter illegally. Legal immigrants are welcomed, witness the fact that we issue more than a million green cards each year.
We showed humanity that free markets and free minds are the keys to prosperity and liberty.
We pioneered entertainment, perfecting the art of motion pictures. By the 1930s, Hollywood came to symbolize cinema that was, at its best, both joyful and uplifting. In the past few decades, we’ve fallen from that height. But we still dominate the industry, with 87 percent of major studio releases produced in America.
The United States produces 16 percent of the world’s total energy supply. Our oil, coal, and natural gas keep the world running.
With the second Trump presidency, we have taken back control of our borders, rejected cultural Marxism, turned our backs on the anti-industrial green agenda, and fielded a military capable of miracles like last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer, destroying much of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
We are not the world’s policemen, though, from time to time, we are called on to be its fire brigade. When there’s conflict anywhere in the world that threatens international stability, the cry does not go up to “Send in the Swedes!”
Despite our remarkable success, America’s enemies — foreign and domestic – are legion.
Internationally, they include totalitarians, authoritarians, and theocrats who hate the idea of popular sovereignty and civil liberties, ideologues who want to force their toxic isms on humanity, environmental Luddites who seek to repeal the Industrial Revolution, and internationalists – including the racists and warmongers who control the United Nations – who think they can undermine our sovereignty.
On the home front, a war against America has raged for more than half a century.
Marxism gained a foothold in academia in the 1930s. Today, its control is almost absolute, witness the antisemitic mobs rampaging on college campuses. Major corporations that have succeeded in the marketplace finance schools that push Marxism.
Revolution hit the streets of our cities with race riots in the 1960s and anti-Vietnam protests later in the decade. Now, Antifa and its political supporters are rioting to protect illegal immigration by fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation efforts.
The Democrat Party’s energized base has transformed it from the party of big government and welfarism increasingly into an anti-American coalition of Marxists, woke elitists, and terrorist sympathizers at war with everything that makes us great. They want to put boys in girls’ locker rooms, pornography in children’s libraries, and diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] in every aspect of American life.
Academia, public education, the legacy media, and liberal churches are inveterately anti-American and use their forums for tax-exempt indoctrination and agitation.
The flags of Mexico, “Palestine” and Iran fly in our streets, while the American flag is burned.
At every level, law enforcement is besieged. Judges think they can make the law. Congressmen and governors think they’re the president. Cities and states think they can have their own immigration policy. And activists think they can overturn laws they oppose with an anarchist veto.
The national debt is a seemingly intractable problem. In early November, the debt stood at $38.1 trillion or $111,683 for every man, woman, and child in America.
The national debt is now more than our annual GDP of $30.3 trillion. We haven’t had a balanced budget since 2001. Interest on the debt is currently 17 percent of the entire federal budget, several points higher than defense spending. Politicians lack the will to tackle the debt head-on and instead kick the can down the road.
Despite decades of the manifest failure of socialism everywhere in the world, voters just elected avowed socialists as mayors of New York (America’s largest city and financial hub of the nation) and Seattle.
These are unique challenges. Still, the patient is robust, and the prognosis is excellent.
The Democrat Party – the party that hates America – has never been more unpopular. Its once solid constituencies are melting away, including blue-collar workers and young black and Hispanic men. There has been a recent upsurge in patriotism among the young, reflected in increased military recruitment.
The forces of darkness may rule the streets of some cities, but the flame of patriotism burns bright in the hearts of most Americans, especially those who use their heads and hands to build, rather than carry protest signs and assault police and federal agents.
America has always been a project in the making, with challenges and obstacles on the road forward. But today’s difficulties pale compared to those we confronted in the aftermath of the Civil War, during the Great Depression, and at the outset of World War II.
With all of our mistakes, try to imagine where the world would be without America. There would have been no shores of refuge for the oppressed masses of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Without the United States, Nazism and communism might have triumphed. There would have been no one to liberate the death camps. The steady march of Islamic fundamentalism would have been unimpeded. The natural resources we developed would have stayed in the ground.
It’s unlikely that another nation would have stepped forward to make up the trillions in foreign aid we have contributed to assist development and improve living conditions in emerging nations.
Considering where we are and how far we’ve come in 250 years, our nation’s birthday should fill us with hope for the future and a resolve to advance the great work of heroes like Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, and the generations that built this blessed land.
Never in the course of history has humanity owed so much to one nation. Take a bow, America.
Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times. A version of this article appeared in The Washington Times.
