“I like the Fourth of July, it breathes a spirit of revolution,” said Eugene V. Debs in a 1901 Independence Day speech. The socialist firebrand was far from blindly patriotic (“I am not of those who worship the flag,” he added in the same speech), but throughout his life, Debs refused to let the American flag, the Fourth, or the revolutionary inheritance of 1776 fully fall into the hands of reactionaries.

Debs consistently cast himself as an heir to a native tradition of dissent, invoking not only John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, but also Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln. For Debs, these figures were not just ancestors cast in marble, but unfinished business. The American Revolution had announced a principle that capitalism, racial hierarchy, and class rule had betrayed. Socialism, in Debs’s telling, was not some foreign poison poured into the American bloodstream but the next democratic demand made by the same revolutionary spirit that had once waged a war on monarchy itself. Why abandon the American democratic promise when you ask it to live up to its own ideals?

Yet, “I like the Fourth of July” is not a popular take on the Left in the twenty-first century. This is a mistake. It’s one thing to say the American Revolution was compromised. It is another to say it is useless. The Left has increasingly confused the two. As Debs proves, it’s entirely possible to separate the art from the artist.