Mr. Davies will tell you what’s happening here tonight. He’s a good man and has done everything he can for me. I suppose there are some other good men here, too, only they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing. They’re the ones I feel sorry for. ’Cause it’ll be over for me in a little while, but they’ll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin’ everybody in the world, ’cause then he’s just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?

– Donald Martin, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

When I was a child, our family vacationed in Old Orchard and visited the Adirondacks. I grew up with American media. I listened to American music and watched American television. Later, I spent nearly seven years in New Hampshire and during that time I primarily studied U.S. history. I taught the Constitution. Some of my Phillips Exeter students were impressed that I could quote sections of the Constitution verbatim. I hoped that it would be a lesson—that if a Canadian could bother to learn its finer points, perhaps they should. I traveled. On trains, planes, and automobiles, I have visited more than half of U.S. states. After the blue districts of New Hampshire, I have now spent five years in the red districts of northern Maine. I continue to study Franco-American history, that is, the encounter of French-Canadian culture and American life.

None of the above makes me American. But, in my decades-long journey, I have gained some intimate knowledge of, and an appreciation for, the country’s complexity—perhaps in ways that escape some people who have lived here their entire lives. I also happen to have a vested interest in the well-being and success of this country. Yes, I am a taxpayer, but I also take part in the life of my adoptive community, I have many American friends, and, however fallible, I have a moral conscience.

For all of these reasons, the ideals towards which Americans collectively strive are a personal concern. More than a vapid display of performative patriotism, Independence Day should provide all of us with an opportunity to pause and reflect on these ideals.

On July 4, we might celebrate the principles enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. We might recommit to the notion that “all men [all people, in 2026] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and further, “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” We might renew our appreciation for a constitution that has guided the country for more than two centuries—a constitution designed specifically to restrain the power of any one person, any one group, and any one institution.

Though drafted a little more than a decade apart, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the products of different contexts and had very different aims. It remains that both explicitly rejected arbitrary power, sought to protect government by the people, and cemented the rights believed to be the inheritance of any freeborn Briton.

We know well how the country has often fallen short of these principles, or how narrowly it has interpreted them. But it was through these that women could access the ballot box and African Americans could escape human bondage. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 modeled its Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence. Four years later, Frederick Douglass spoke on The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. Douglass took white Americans to task for their failures. “To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty,” he declared, “and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.” Independence Day, yes, but independence for all.

Within the same decade, the leading figures of the burgeoning Franco-American world split over politics. Joseph Napoléon Cadieux became a fully committed Republican due to the party’s stance on slavery. Jacques Edmond Dorion supported the Democrats because the Republicans seemed to have inherited the nativist impulses of the Know-Nothing movement. Both figures acknowledged profound flaws in their adoptive society, yet they continued to embrace the American mystique. They believed in American society and institutions’ ability to overcome these flaws.

Such flaws—granted, a word too light to convey the severity of injustices—did not disappear with the end of the Civil War or with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Individuals who wrapped themselves in the flag murdered Indigenous women and children, lynched fellow human beings, and celebrated the Nazi regime at Madison Square Garden. The government has not been something separate and distinct from this kind of ugliness. Instead it has often expressed it.

Nevertheless, the ideals of the Enlightenment endure, and so does the striving.

In fact, we—Americans and those of us from abroad—expect more of this country because of its stated ideals. American history is the perpetual failure to live out those principles, but also the perpetual struggle to come just slightly closer to their fulfillment.

At the moment, as before, there is much to struggle for and against.

I shivered with George Washington one night at Valley Forge

“Why do the soldiers freeze here like they do?”

He said, “Men will suffer, fight, even die for what is right

Even though they know they’re only passing through”

– Dick Blakeslee, Passing Through (1948)

The largest obstacle may be the power of monied interests, which has led to deregulation, prevented the meaningful protection of workers’ rights and the creation of a social safety net, and blocked action on climate change. Corporate interests have promoted an economic interpretation of the spirit of political freedom that gave birth to the American experiment. They have also enrolled the government and the armed forces when their economic interests have been threatened at home and abroad.

Monied interests are also behind the crippling burden of debt that millions of Americans must bear from pursuing higher education or experiencing medical emergencies. Poverty traps are the outcome.

There is an uglier side to the American experiment. This is a country built on the dispossession of Indigenous nations, the enslavement of Black people, and the exploitation of migrants and immigrants. These were not bugs; they were features. Well-placed people chose to cement and to perpetuate these evils. To be sure, none of this is unique to the United States. All of this occurred to varying degrees across the Americas. But the transnational character of these practices does not absolve Americans from contending directly with their past and its legacies. This is particularly difficult when school districts, states, and the federal government whitewash history and when politicians ride on the animosities they foment.

A political system that seemed destined to succeed—and largely has for more than two centuries—has recently faced critical tests that it seems to be failing. Electability seems to depend on access to deep coffers rather than ideas. Gerrymandering skews the will of the people. Primaries and caucuses have rewarded ideological purity and led to increasing polarization. Checks and balances are, as it turns out, non-existent without elected officials’ willingness to protect the independence of different branches of government. Meanwhile, some media outlets deliberately conceal the truth, acting as partisan mouthpieces rather than serving as the fourth estate. A failing education system, worsened by the erosion of civics education, provides little hope. Apathy, alienation, and anger have filled the vacuum of healthy political engagement.

In light of all of this, it may not be so surprising that National Park Service sites will have been scrubbed of the story of freedom for all in time for this year’s Independence Day—that celebrations have already featured grown men beating the living daylight out of one another for entertainment—that the highest office in the land seems committed to an unironic reenactment of Duck Soup each and every day.

Much of what we see is unprecedented. But the hardship is not—and across the struggles, the spirit of fight has endured. A year into the national conflagration of civil war, Julia Ward Howe penned the Battle Hymn of the Republic; in the year after the Nazi rally in New York, Woody Guthrie penned This Land Is Your Land. Both continued to believe. They did not doubt what is right and true, nor the legitimacy of the struggle for what is right and true. In our day, if anything is preserved, it will be because of people who likewise bothered to do something, driven by a recognition of humanity and dignity in others, and by the idea that law should govern all equally.

So, this Independence Day, while there is ample cause for despair, perhaps we should take a moment, after all, to celebrate—to celebrate the things that are bigger than our historical moment.

As long as there is fight in this country, and a fight for the ideals that gave birth to it, why should we keep from singing?