Happy Belated Birthday(s), America!

How celebrating the 4th can challenge populist nationalism and save democracy

Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash

As Americans, we celebrate our national birthday on the 4^th of July, recognizing the country’s founding as the adoption of our Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule. However, as millions of schoolchildren entering American History classes this fall will undoubtedly learn, it was on July 2^nd that the Lee Resolution was adopted formalizing American independency. The adoption of the Declaration on July 4^th was simply the approval for the notifying document meant to be sent to King George III. How American it is that we would lie about our age to make ourselves younger!

Along with this historical factoid, these children will learn that John Adams once wrote in a letter to his wife, Abigail, that July 2^nd would be considered the “most memorable” day in our history.¹ So, why do we Americans celebrate the 4^th instead of the 2^nd? The reason, for better and worse, is something essential to America – publication. The mass production and distribution of a given text intertwine two of the country’s seemingly foundational, though often problematic, characteristics – capitalism and nationalism.

Following the adoption of the Declaration, the document would be disseminated to the former colonies, now states, the Continental Army, and eventually to emissaries, dignitaries, and heads of state throughout Europe. This document would be an artifact, a more tangible item or marker of record than the actual closeted vote conducted by the Second Continental Congress. Atop the Declaration, and the latter facsimiles that would be produced, was the date: July 4, 1776.

The Declaration is an object that can be commercialized. To mark American independence, newspapers can publish the text or images of the Declaration, town criers or families can read it, copies can be produced and sold – or stolen by Nicolas Cage.

Like American flag hats and streamers, bikinis and underwear, the Declaration can be a commodified symbolic representation of American independence but only if we overlook the inconvenience of having to explain the discrepancy in the date. Much easier to just forget the 2^nd and adopt the 4^th.

But while it may seem belittling to describe the commodification of the document meant to define our understanding of rights, privileges, and the limitations and obligations of government as the source of our July 4^th celebration, there is something beautiful to it as well. The publication of the document is the process by which it is shared amongst the population, it is what makes it our definition of rights and privileges.

In the landmark text, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes the role of print-capitalism in the creation and spread of nationalism.² He especially identifies the role of newspapers and print-journalism in the development of American national consciousness.³

Publication creates a shared experience of local, national, and global events by its readers. Reading the same headlines, a person can travel far and wide while engaging in the same discussions across the country with every person they meet creating a sense of commonality. The scale of the press spreads that sense of community such that, with a national press, you can create a national community.

Compared to a pre-Enlightenment context, this national unity could be seen positively. Feudal states were divided with fragmented identities. In the American context, the clash between state and national identity was a major issue for half of our history.

However, with this enlargement of identity, came an enlargement of economic and military interests and power. Additionally, national identity does not simply unite but promotes a sense of superiority justifying enacting atrocities on lesser “others.” Power competition between states becomes grander and when diplomacy fails the wars become larger. Colonialism and the two World Wars were also the products and legacy of nationalism.

In our current context, nationalism is less a unifying force than it is a tool of populist division from supposedly nefarious global forces and technocratic elites. This is not just an American problem. Around the world, populist leaders are abandoning international alliances and frameworks sowing hatred, division, and fear.

This animosity is not simply externalized. As always, there is an internalization of that threat, a fear of a force acting within to betray our national interests in favor of an external foe. Whether it be immigrant populations, individual figures like George Soros, the entire Democratic Party, or, as Trump described in his speech at Mount Rushmore,⁴ communist infiltrators, the narrative of an enemy from within fractures the domestic population. In this way, nationalism always begets division.

American nationalism enabled its rapid growth and expansion allowing for it to claim the width of the North American continent within a century, while also adopting a massively diverse population from around the world. However, that same national identity was subverted by internalized “imagined communities” that divided and fractured the country. As Benedict Anderson notes:

Even in the USA, the affective bonds of nationalism were elastic enough, combined with the rapid expansion of the western frontier and the contradictions generated between the economies of North and South, to precipitate a war of secession almost a century after the Declaration of Independence…[sic]⁵

However, there is another way to analyze the 4^th of July besides the gloomy ramifications of the commodifying nationalism of print-capitalism.

July 2^nd may have been the official legal enactment of independence by the Second Continental Congress, but the publication of the Declaration of Independence was how the news was spread. We can, on the one hand, read this in the Andersonian sense of print-capitalism producing a national imagined community. However, we can also read the adoption of July 4^th as a democratic, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan symbol. One in which the birth of America was not when the political representatives legally formed the new country, but when the masses adopted it.

The 4^th is an inversion of traditional political power dynamics, in other words, democracy. Rather than power isolated in the hands of a cadre of political elites, democracy enables the governmental expression of the collective will. As the great defender of pluralism and democracy, John Dewey, stated:

In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organization; that in which the individual and society are organic to each other. For this reason democracy, so far as it is really democracy, is the most stable, not the most insecure, of governments. In every other form of government there are individuals who are not organs of the common will, who are outside of the political society in which they live, and are, in effect, aliens to that which should be their own commonwealth. Not participating in the formation or expression of the common will, they do not embody it in themselves. Having no share in society, society has none in them.⁶

We can see July 4^th through a different lens, an inclusive and cosmopolitan one that embraces the other with openness and an ethic of hospitality in which power is diffused throughout the population.

Democracy is the response, the challenge, to nationalist populism which seeks to divide, and inevitably destroy, the nation it professes to love. The nationalist will always construct a new threat, find a new foe to hate and fear, and the nation will inevitably shrink away into nothingness and despair. Democracy, however, can unite populations.

It should come as no surprise then that right-wing populists have begun to challenge the idea of America as a “democracy” (as if being a republic was somehow a mutually exclusive proposition). This is not just a manifestation of ignorance; it is an insidious proposition that seeks to dismantle what made American independence truly revolutionary. It undermines the egalitarian values professed in the Declaration, using the document instead as a prop.

In March 2025, Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence hung up in the Oval Office. His Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, spoke of the document as if it were the original, saying it would be, “carefully protected and preserved.”⁷ Meanwhile, the actual Declaration is kept in darkness to protect it after having nearly faded away in its entirety. What could be a more apt metaphor?

Trump uses the Declaration of Independence as a branding tool to sell the legitimacy of an administration which undermines the essence and spirit of the document itself, reducing it to a mere product.

For 250 years, the promise of the Declaration has been unrealized. But in recognizing the 4^th of July, perhaps we can see some hope of its democratic promise.

1. John Adams, “Letter From John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, July 3, 1776, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=102&pid=17.

2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983).

3. Ibid., 60-5.

4. Donald Trump, “Remarks: Donald Trump Speaks at Mount Rushmore for the Semiquincentennial - July 3, 2026,” Roll Call, July 3, 2026, https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-mount-rushmore-250th-birthday-semiquincentennial-july-3-2026/.

5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983), 64.

6. John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in John Dewey The Early Works, 1882-1898, Volume 1: 1882-1888: Early Essays and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, ed. George E. Axtelle, et. al. (Southern Illinois UP, 1969), 237-8.

7. Associated Press, “Trump Hangs a Copy of Declaration of Independence in Oval Office,” March 17, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-declaration-of-independence-oval-office-5b9b9a07ac61ab303d77bcb4f6f252e5.