This July 4, Let’s Resolve to Win an Actual Democracy
The US government is already preparing massive celebrations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for next July 4, the country’s semiquincentennial. It’s high time to scrap the antidemocratic system the framers bequeathed to us.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence began early for many Americans. On a chilly December morning in 1973, a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, sponsored by the City of Boston, transformed into protests over contemporary concerns. Barrels labeled “Gulf Oil,” “Exxon,” and “Shell” were tossed into the harbor to denounce environmental destruction. Marchers carried signs condemning the war in Vietnam and the then recent coup in Chile. Chants of “Down with King George” mingled with “Down with King Richard,” ensuring that President Richard Nixon, then facing the Watergate scandal and the resignation of his vice president Spiro Agnew, would not be forgotten.
The cheekily named “Boston Oil Party” was organized by the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an offshoot of the New Left and the antiwar movement that sought to deploy American cultural and political symbols for progressive ends. The commission emphasized the promises in the Declaration of Independence, arguing that its “message of equality and inalienable rights” was still relevant. Its demands included economic democracy and changes to the school curriculum to teach the “real history of the [American] people.”
The official bicentennial festivities began in 1975 and included the American Freedom Train — a museum on wheels that brought historic documents and artifacts, including George Washington’s draft of the Constitution, moon rocks, and the first American Bible — to every state during its staggering twenty-one-month tour. The Freedom Train was heralded by the aptly named Preamble Express, which was “dispatched to scout the route and court host city officials.”
Fireworks displays in major cities were broadcast nationally, and a large international fleet sailed through waterways in New York City and Boston. Johnny Cash, Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Philip visited the capital, Disney World presented America on Parade every day for a year, and the Super Bowl halftime show featured “200 Years and Just a Baby: A Tribute to America’s Bicentennial.” Meanwhile, Schoolhouse Rock! released several related educational shorts, including “I’m Just a Bill.”
Yet the bicentennial’s glare was dimmed by American defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, militant indigenous activism, and multiple anti-colonial struggles. In response, the administration used spectacle, nostalgia, and a “grand reading of American history” to shore up the country’s damaged reputation. Reflecting on the fall of Saigon, Henry Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, reasoned, “We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future.”
By most accounts, the Ford administration succeeded in shaping the bicentennial’s narrative. The Left had its moments, including a series of multi-coalition events in Philadelphia that the Times described as “echoes of the protest days of the 1960s.” But the official celebrations went off without a hitch and drew far larger audiences.
John Bodnar argues that, for most Americans, the celebrations “marked an end to a period of social unrest and dissent and a renewal of American consensus and patriotism.” Jason Tebbe concludes, “The corporate ‘buy-centennial’ that the People’s Bicentennial Commission and many less radical Americans wanted to avoid, won out. The red, white and blue beer cans you can still find at antique stores today tell the tale.” Commenting on the period, Aziz Rana observes a “widespread public desire to close the book on the recent past” and an “emerging cross-party climate of constitutional rededication” that continued for decades. Only a few years earlier, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan had spoken for many when, during the Watergate hearings, she declared her indisputable faith in the Constitution. Meanwhile, the People’s Bicentennial Commission was accused of “Communist activity” and attempting to “steal the Bicentennial.”
Just over a decade later, the Constitution celebrated its own two-hundredth birthday in 1987 with much fanfare. Chief Justice Warren Berger retired from the Supreme Court to chair the events, concluding that it was “more important that we have an adequate celebration” than for him to remain on the bench.
Against the Constitution, for Democracy
In the year 2000, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the National Constitution Center, which continues to uphold its namesake as “the greatest vision of human freedom in history.” Just twenty years ago, Mark Tushnet argued that Americans viewed the Constitution as “entirely adequate to meet the needs of contemporary society.”
Almost fifty years since the Boston Oil Party and the release of “I’m Just a Bill,” another milestone looms. Within days of his closed-door inauguration, Donald Trump promised to throw a “spectacular birthday party” to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026. His opening moves included reinstating an executive order targeting “pro-Hamas-related vandalism of historically significant public monuments” and “vandalism of the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain and Freedom Bell at Union Station.”
As in 1976, the state-directed semiquincentennial is set to be another ostentatious display of American pride. Congress has authorized commemorative coins and postage stamps as well as the commissioning of patriotically named naval cruisers. In Philadelphia, a time capsule will be buried with a scheduled unearthing planned for the quincentennial. George W. and Laura Bush, alongside Barack and Michelle Obama, will serve as the honorary national cochairs of the official commission.
Half a century ago, most Americans, including many on the Left, were under the impression that the United States was a democracy with a political system that would eventually represent majority interests. Neither the civil rights movement nor the New Left and its various offshoots, including the People’s Bicentennial Commission, identified the Constitution as the main obstacle to progressive policies.
But much has changed. Today constitutional veneration is nowhere near as strong as it was when the Freedom Train and Preamble Express were chugging across the country. In fact, the Constitution’s role in our current political crisis and rising authoritarianism has become “a kind of truism, both within the sort of left of center constitutional law academy, and also . . . the commentariat more generally,” says Rana. “That’s a big shift.”
Martin Luther King Jr called the Declaration of Independence’s universalist promise of equal rights a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Yet that promise has yet to materialize. Two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration was written, we still lack a constitution based on universal suffrage, equal representation, and enforceable social rights such as affordable health care, equal pay for equal work, and self-determination for indigenous peoples. The American Revolution might have helped bring about the downfall of kings, aristocracy, serfdom, and eventually slavery, but it did not lead to a political system in which “we the people” rule.
Next year will bring a deluge of hymns to America and its founding documents. But we should really be talking about the need for a new democratic founding that will allow for actual majoritarian rule: a constitution that places supreme authority in a single federal legislature (elected through universal and equal suffrage) and establishes civil and political rights for all. Two hundred and fifty years without democracy is long enough.