Can polarized people proceed to party?
Liberals must get ready to celebrate the Semiquincentennial with their President
The events of Saturday, June 14th should worry us.
Our polarized nation has been coming apart at the seams for 20 years and Saturday was another low point.
On Flag Day, the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army, instead of celebrating, liberals staged nationwide protests of the Army’s Commander in Chief. It was not only a tasteless offense to the brave soldiers who protect our freedom to protest, it’s a warning about what could come next year.
In 2026, the nation that will celebrate its 250th birthday – or at least that is the plan. The ugly timing of Saturday’s marches should make us worry whether political lefties can celebrate their country’s greatness while Donald Trump is their president.
I was just a child when America’s Bicentennial was celebrated in 1976, but I remember it as a joyful inclusive celebration.
A wagon train traversing the country to celebrate the pioneer spirit came through my Tennessee hometown and I remember what seemed like the whole county’s population showing up to see it. I remember contests at my elementary school to make Uncle Sam hats and learning the words to “America the Beautiful” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
I still possess my collection of commemorative Bicentennial postage stamps and coins. I remember my uncle making a trip to Philadelphia for Independence Day and coming back with stories of the Bicentennial replica tall ships that sailed there ceremoniously rom New York. The party was big enough to make plans around it.
My parents told me later they remembered the Bicentennial as a moment of national healing after the turmoil of Vietnam and Watergate. No one recalls it as a stage prop for political division, even though it happened in the year of a razor-close Presidential election – one in which my parents split their votes.
Are Trump’s opponents willing to come together and lock arms with even his most red hatted supporters to toast a Semiquincentennial? Can they enjoy a party with him on stage? Without caveat or cooked-up controversy? It should not test the tensile strength of our bonds as a nation, but it may.
The last several elections have been straining both ways. But elections are competitions, and projections onto celebrity; one can channel cleansing anger at the opposing candidate, on partisan media pundits, or on the process itself. A refusal to celebrate the 250th in a bipartisan spirit will be more damaging; it would be interpreted by neighbors as a repudiation of the bonds of nationhood itself.
Presidents are term limited. The Declaration of Independence, the flag, and our legacy of national greatness are not. Presidents, the ones we like and those we don’t, are elevated because our system works, not because it is broken. We must be able to compartmentalize the difference.
In 2004, in the breakout moment of his career, an Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama admonished the Democratic National Convention against division, red state from blue state:
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope? - Barack Obama, 2004
But in the years hence, Obama’s party stopped seeing red, white, and blue together, at least not outside a mashup of other colors. Today’s Democratic Party is mostly a coalition of “intersectionality,” and its flag too often not Old Glory, but a noisy amalgamation of the rainbow, the pink-and-blue triangle, and maybe other elements us non-professors cannot even explain. This “progress flag” and its shared critique contends America’s history is too racist, too sexist, too capitalist, too puritanical, too religious, too imperial, too polluting, and/or too colonialist to be admired.
Can a political movement defined by its common gripes about America’s DNA celebrate America’s greatness on a milestone birthday? And more practically, can liberals clap, not for Trump, but with him?
On CNN Sunday, I expressed my fear that Democrats’ defiance of what was a very normie Army birthday parade – no more political than an ROTC awards banquet – bodes ill for the Semiquincentennial. Former Democratic Rep. Andy Levin took issue with me, and claimed these protests were “a massive outpouring of patriotism.” Noted liberal Substack columnist Noah Smith at Noahpinion agreed, saying it was “the most patriotic protest I’ve ever been to” because American flags “overwhelmed the number of Palestine, Mexico, trans, Ukraine, and other flags.” I’ll leave the exegesis of that analysis up to you; consider me numerically unpersuaded.
I’m a First Amendment absolutist. Personally I prefer prose to protests, but I believe in your right to peaceably assemble and speak about almost anything, in good order, on the courthouse steps or the city park. Demonstrating against any President on Tax Day, Earth Day, or the anniversary of some Supreme Court case we don’t like is a right we should cherish and steward. Disciplined dissent – and tolerance of it – is the keystone of free society.
That doesn’t mean you should have the bad taste to counter-program a salute to soldiers who back up the First Amendment with blood, and it certainly does not mean you should dilute the country’s birthday next year with your political pique.
So now hear this, my lefty friends: get this bile out of your system. Write your congressman. Slap more bumper stickers on your Subarus and “In This House” signs in your yard. Donate to AOC. Make defiant Instagram posts this summer while you vacation in Europe. Start a Substack, if you must. But get it all over with before 2026. We’ve got plenty to celebrate and we need to party together.
Our national motto is the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum: “out of many, one.” It has always been an audacious and marvelous idea. We’ve struggled to pull it off consistently this decade, but for the 250th, we should try.