This weekend we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. On July 2, 1776, the delegates of the thirteen colonies declared them to be “free and independent states,” and two days later signaled their reasons for doing so. Just how free and independent those states are in 2026 is an open question.

　　What is clear is that the anniversary comes at a time of deep political discontent: Americans are distrustful of their national political institutions, polarized, and increasingly exhausted by politics.

　　Against this backdrop, it is natural that many commentators hope to find some source of revival in the anniversary that we now celebrate. Often, such attempts appeal to American civil religion, mostly in the form of a “creed” of shared ideals (usually Locke-inflected) stated in the Declaration of Independence which are said to be the glue of American unity. We are unified as Americans in that, deep down, we all have the same basic framework for the good society and are all enlisted in a common mission of making those ideals a reality. Political division and distrust only crop up when we “lose sight” of the shared ideals. Getting past the present strife requires a recommitment to the first principles we all share.

　　If only it were so easy. When we look in the mirror of 1776, it does not reveal unity and essential continuity. It shows us just how far modern America is from the political sentiments of the patriots.

　　The Search for Unity

　　The appeal of creedal nationalism is nearly ubiquitous. In part, that is so because it tells us that salvation is (at least potentially) just around the corner. We’ve just been sleepwalking into our current bitterness and distrust, but those things aren’t really part of “who we are.” If we just shake ourselves very hard, we might snap out of it and remember what we all really believe. It is also popular because it satisfies a desire for a usable past that can solve contemporary problems We can easily pick up the language of the founding era, retroactively apply them to historical development, and reappropriate them for our own causes today. But the most obvious reason for the popularity of creedal nationalism is that it appeals to values that nearly everyone can approve of—as long as we don’t get too specific.

　　But it is that qualifier that’s the rub. While it is comforting to think that all Americans share the same ideals deep down, the hope is disappointed once we start to put any substance to the inspiring words about equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In his myth-busting After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman shows how the idea of a creedal nation gained ascendency in the mid-twentieth century as an attempt to accommodate rising religious pluralism, galvanize the forces of “democracy” abroad, cover over racial and ethnic tensions, and take the place of other failed attempts at constructing national identity. But it quickly ran up against the very real differences of principle that continued to exist. The various parts of the creed—liberty, equality, self-government etc.— are quite often in tension, and Americans do not agree on how they can be made to come together. Moreover, the words simply mean different things to different people. The theoretical phrases of the Declaration are not specific or detailed. They must be fleshed out with something outside of the text itself. And the easiest way to do so is to import our own preferences into the capacious phrases.

　　We can all appeal to the creedal words, but that surface-level agreement is a thin veil over the very deep differences about what liberty, equality, or self-government mean. When these “shared” ideals have come into contact with the actual political experiences of recent times, they have done little to bridge the gaps. They therefore ring increasingly hollow in contemporary discourse. “The search for a creedal nation was a failure,” Goldman concludes.

　　Even those promoting the idea seem to realize how fragile that identity is. Yoni Appelbaum, for instance, recently wrote in the Atlantic:

　　A nation defined by blood and soil—built around a shared religion or ethnicity—can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.

　　The admission is remarkable: To hold together, Americans must all think the same way about their “narrative,” which he sees as a progressive fulfillment of creedal commitments. Disagreement on narrative, he says, may be fatal. The land of the free, it would seem, can brook no dissent. (He is also almost certainly incorrect about the supposed advantages of “blood-and-soil” nations, which are, after all, not built on actual blood and actual soil, but on narratives about blood and soil.)

　　But Appelbaum’s “solution” to the difficult task of finding unity is more civic education and pop-history books that tell a version of America’s “shared” story that culminates in the modest center-left political objectives he supports. The arc of history always bends toward the politics of the speaker.

　　The unanimous American love of liberty conveyed in the Declaration may mean disunity on a host of essential questions.

　　The weakness of the creedal narrative has prompted a number of conservatives (J.D. Vance prominent among them) to abandon it in favor of what they see as a thicker, more cultural (and, therefore, they believe, more binding) understanding of American identity. But there is not nearly as much difference between creedal nationalists and their “cultural” critics as either side thinks there is. Culture and ideas are not opposites. Ideas emerge from a culture, and all cultures are composed of ideas, albeit often inchoate, imprecise, and even contradictory ones. And the cultural experience of a continental republic contains multitudes. Today’s right-wing critic of creedalism generally is not interested in this messy tangle of actual experience. He, too, wants useable principle. And so he, too, usually reaches into the past to find something he can crystalize (frontier spirit; filial piety; Protestantism; Englishness) and present as the defining quality of America.

　　Both the creedal and non-creedal versions of nationalism share the assumption that for a country to thrive, it must have a penetrating hold on its people: a political identity that cuts to their very core, tells them who they are, provides them with their most sacred values, and lays out a mission they are to fulfill. Appelbaum speaks of a “common project”; Vance calls for “aligning the goals and ambitions of Americans at all levels of society.” They both take some aspect of America’s past, boil it down to an essential quality, and have it serve as a commanding value for directing American life. It is the domination of what Robert Nisbet called the political community over the other, plural sources of social authority.

　　Harmonious Sentiments

　　Defenders of the creedal identity may reasonably object that there is a real meaning to the Declaration of Independence to be recovered. Its ambiguities can be fleshed out not by pouring our own preferences into them, but by recovering its historical meaning. To this, a hearty “Amen.” But in doing so, we must recognize that we give up on the hope that it offers a unifying, thick, purpose-giving creed.

　　First of all, the Declaration was not attempting to articulate a substantive ideological framework or a distinct philosophy that provides us with our principles or commits us to a national mission. Rather, as Jefferson famously wrote to Henry Lee in 1825, it was justifying a specific political act using the “common sense” language of its time. “All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.” And it was, in Wilfred McClay’s words, “a great river of oratory that is fed by various streams.” It cannot be properly understood without recognizing a complex intellectual background: the Christian moral sentiments dominant at the time; the veneration of the “ancient” Saxon constitutionalism; the classical texts that the founding generation were steeped in; Country Party ideology; Whig republicanism; Enlightenment ideas of toleration; Scottish moral sense philosophy; and perhaps most importantly of all, the actual experience of the American colonies under the British crown.

　　The Declaration thus points us to a broad and complex tradition, which if pushed to offer a comprehensive model for political life, could point us in many different, conflicting directions. It did aim to “harmonize” those sources, but only on the limited question of Americans’ right to throw off British rule. It did not purport to reveal a comprehensive unity of mind on all great political principles. Hans Eicholz, describing the Declaration’s harmony, notes the importance of its limited objective: “It was not intended to prescribe what the new regime should look like and could not get any more specific…about the shape of things to come, other than to assert the right of the colonists ‘to provide new Guards for their future Security.’”

　　The limited unity conveyed in the Declaration is thus around a shared political disposition that informed the specific act of separation. Nodding to natural rights, to protestant resistance theory, to traditional English rights, to the insights of moral sense philosophy, it does not rely exclusively on any of them and thus does not invite us to build a comprehensive system around any of its sources. As Eicholz also notes, the Declaration recognizes the limits of human knowledge when it comes to the specific contents of our natural rights and the precise scope of the legitimate use of government. Such weighty questions, therefore, were not to be given a single universal answer, but decided (sometimes in very different ways) locally by the reasoned consensus of the people of those free and independent states. The unanimous American love of liberty conveyed in the Declaration may mean disunity on a host of essential questions.

　　The sentiments all point to a jealous skepticism of any political power that is untethered from the judgment and consent of the community over which it is exercised. The phrase on Jefferson’s personal seal captured it: “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” The patriots were deeply suspicious of concentrated, unlimited, and arbitrary power, and they were ready to resist speedily the approach of tyranny that sees power as a tool for reorganizing, controlling, or making use of society for extrinsic purposes. “They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze,” wrote Burke of the Americans one year earlier. They would have nothing of a theory of sovereignty that saw their communities as pieces to be moved around an imperial chessboard.

　　New Guards for Our Future Security

　　These sentiments were expressed beautifully in the Declaration, but it is neither a creed, nor catechism nor instruction manual that we can turn to for answers when the people have lost the habits of freedom and self-government. It can’t hand us principles we don’t already feel in our bones. Accordingly, the Declaration’s sentiments sadly do not unite us today. Rather, they indict us. Americans today are disposed to welcome concentrated power uncritically, and to believe naively in the promises it makes. Political liberty was not an abstraction to the patriots, but a very real experience. It’s not clear that we can say that of ourselves.

　　The difference today is not just the size and scope of the gargantuan national government. It is more vitally the mindset of a people who welcome it and willingly hand over their personal, familial, economic, communal, and institutional responsibilities to it. The Declaration intimated that political power was to be exercised in order to protect the freedom of a preexisting society largely capable of managing its own affairs. Instead, we now invite it into our homes, our shops, our churches, our schools, and local communities to direct them, take responsibility for them, and transform them in ways we could not.

　　We look to it for economic security, for knowledge, for cultural transformation or cultural renewal. We want it to give us our moral principles, personal affirmation, even dignity and purpose. This attitude distorts our moral life, which has steadily transformed from a habit of responsibility and restraint to a practice of proclaiming and imposing the correct socio-political beliefs. Millions of Americans even craft their personal identities around alphabet-soup national interest groups.

　　Those who promise Great Societies and Golden Ages in exchange for freedom are always doomed to break their promises. Perhaps the most essential quality of a free people is the ability to see through such designing men.

　　Of course, we also complain about this leviathan, but not usually because it has absorbed our freedom and responsibility—but because it does not live up to the exalted expectations it sets for itself. As Nisbet observed nearly 40 years ago of bureaucratization and centralization, Americans “curse it, deride it, abhor it, all the while they are beckoning it to them with one hand.”

　　If we are to take 1776 as a normative example today, therefore, it can be nothing if not an indictment. It is fair to say there is no significant force in national politics today that shares the Declaration’s disposition toward power. As Democrats nominate overt socialists, the brightest minds of the MAGA “new right” debate with straight faces whether America needs a Caesar.

　　A simple “rededication to principles” will not be availing. A people will not be talked into the same political principles with a transformed culture and a very different political experience. And those are not things that can be magically brought back into being. The spirit of 1776 is still very much a part of our political tradition, but it is now overshadowed and distorted by other forces that cant be waved away. And some of them shouldnt be: resistance to tyranny is not the end-all and be-all of human social life. Some of those forces of transformation were likely inevitable, and some had worthy aims. Others were purely malignant. Many smuggled in radically new attitudes under the cloak of traditional language—indeed, under the “creedal” language of freedom, equality and self-government. But there has clearly been a steady march away from local liberty and toward distant power that is worth reversing.

　　That would require a major pivot in our political culture. Any such change would, as all salutary change does, draw on ideas and symbols from our past to help make sense of our situation. But we will ultimately have to learn anew the value of freedom from our own experience.

　　And here, the atmosphere of discontent and distrust that characterizes our politics may be a counterintuitive source of hope. The political pessimist knows most of all never to despair at the pretensions of self-righteous would-be tyrants, even when they seem to be succeeding. For the pessimist knows the many qualities of the human condition that prevent the empowered few from actually achieving their grand designs. Those who promise Great Societies and Golden Ages in exchange for freedom are always doomed to break their promises. Perhaps the most essential quality of a free people is the ability to see through such designing men.

　　If, as the Declaration suggests, the good of freedom is woven into our nature as created beings, then the lessons of our human experience will always point us to it in some way, if we will learn them. Today, Americans have every reason to be distrustful of politics and dismayed at its current state. And perhaps the attitude may give birth to a newly skeptical eye toward those who ask for the reins. For now, Americans seem disposed to throw themselves back and forth between rival sets of flatterers making different sets of promises. But sometimes experience must hit us over the head several times before we learn its lessons.

　　Moreover, while we may not have the experience of political liberty that the signers of the Declaration had, the freedom of the human person is not something that can easily be snuffed out. Thus, in spite of the drift of American politics, many pockets of freedom and responsibility persist and thrive in activities that Washington DC has not yet found a reason or capacity to control fully. Here, Americans use their own judgment in voluntary association with their neighbors to manage their own affairs, great and small. I would wager that most Americans find those pockets far more conducive to the pursuit of happiness than the “common projects” and “aligned goals” promoted by national politics.  

　　Even some recent political developments, exceptions to the general drift, contribute to this hope. The rise of school choice puts the heavy responsibility of educating children at least partially back in the hands of families. The Supreme Court has made protections for religious liberty more robust. And the most contentious political issue of the previous generation, abortion, has been handed back to state legislatures, forcing Americans to confront it themselves locally, rather than have a single answer handed to them from First Street in Washington, DC.

　　The sentiments found in the Declaration do not tell us exactly how to order our government or society. And we certainly will not recreate an idyllic Jeffersonian republic. But the pockets of freedom we experience, the political and constitutional limits that still persist, and the repeated failures of grand national designs—along with the great symbols of American’s tradition like the Declaration—may generate new sentiments in the American heart that would incline us to guard jealously their freedom as the patriots once did. Americans might again learn to distrust unbounded power; again take more direct responsibility for great civic questions; and again build “new Guards for their future security.”

　　Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.