Over the past two decades, traumas at home and crises abroad have shaken many citizens confidence in Americas democratic institutions and the nations ability to achieve positive outcomes at home and abroad. The celebration of Independence Day is an opportunity to reinforce our common identity as Americans, recognize that U.S. engagement abroad advances security at home, and restore faith in our ability to work together to build a better future.
Americans are better connected to one another than ever electronically, but are distant from one another socially, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Social isolation invites vitriol and sometimes inspires violence that divides us further from one another. In his book,”Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” Robert Putnam highlighted this danger, observing that “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.” Putnam published that book in 2000, before social media algorithms designed to get more advertising dollars through more clicks enticed users with polarized and rigid worldviews. In his recent Atlantic Monthlyessay,“The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson explained how the combination of digital connection and self-imposed solitude has reduced exposure to differing viewpoints and made society and democracy “weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”
The trend toward individual solitude aligns with calls for U.S. disengagement or retrenchment from the world. Nativists or self-described realists argue that America has problems of its own and should abandon what they call “liberal hegemony” to prioritize domestic policy. They have joined with unlikely fellow travelers from the postmodernist New Left who ascribe the ills of the world almost exclusively to the legacy of colonialism and, since the end of the colonial era, U.S.-led “capitalist imperialism.” Both groups engage in what we might callstrategic narcissism because they define the world only in relation to the United States and fail to acknowledge that other actors, including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea, have ambitions and aspirations that extend far beyond reactions to U.S. policy. It is true that the United States cannot solve the worlds problems, but problems that originate abroad – from pandemics to jihadist terrorism to nuclear weapons in the hands of a messianic theocracy – can only be dealt with at an exorbitant price once they reach our shores.
In addition to social isolation and calls for retrenchment, we might also recognize a third source of our self-doubt: the neo-Marxist tendency to organize the world into hapless victims and privileged oppressors. Once confined mainly to academia, this way of understanding the world has infected the broader culture, polarized communities, upended student life on college campuses, and amplified calls for American retrenchment. The combination of the valorization of victimhood, a tendency to view people as fragile creatures who must be protected from all threats, including language, and the habitual insertion of the adjectives institutional or structural in front of every problem robs people of agency and leaves them with a toxic combination of anger and resignation. Postmodernist theories also encourage self-loathing in a way that erodes pride in nation. That is dangerous because, as the philosopher Richard Rorty observed, it cedes the initiative to those who undermine security and freedom and prevents us from imagining ways to restore peace, advance liberty, improve security, and promote prosperity.
The first step to restoring faith in one another and in our republic is to come together for meaningful, respectful discussions around questions like, “isnt it possible to recognize the limits of American power and unintended consequences of intervention while also acknowledging that U.S. withdrawal can encourage enemies, result in costly wars, and increase human suffering?” Those who argue in the affirmative might cite how forward-positioned U.S. troops in South Korea prevented war until they withdrew just prior to North Koreas invasion in June 1950. And they might also point to the hellscape and terrorist haven to which Afghanistan has returned to point out what the U.S. military and coalition partners in support of Afghan forces had prevented there.
As we reconnect with one another, we might also talk aboutreforming civic educationandhow we teach our history to Americas youth. The abuse and manipulation of history undermines our ability to work together and improve our nation because it is divisive and saps our pride. As the late philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.” Project 1619, first published by the New York Times Magazine in 2019, falsely portrayed the American Revolution as an effort to preserve slaveryrather than a righteous struggle to found our nation on principles that ultimately rendered that criminal institution unsustainable. The manipulation of the past has implications for the present because it portrays racism as endemic or systemic and robs people of agency. Soon after its publication, the 1619 Projectreached 4,500 classrooms in all 50 states, from kindergarten to college. Those skeptical about the dangers of manipulating history might remember that inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many schools in the South supported the obstruction of equal rights for black Americans asthey propagated the Myth of the Lost Causeand portrayed slavery as benign instead of cruel and the Civil War as a noble effort to preserve states rights rather than slavery.
Pride in our nation should not derive from a contrived happy view of history, but rather from a recognition that our experiment in freedom and democracy always was and remains a work in progress. That struggle included the emancipation of four million of our fellow Americans after the most destructive war in our history. It also included setbacks, including the failure of Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and separate but equal. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement dismantled the legal basis for Jim Crow segregation, but cultural, economic, educational, and other forms of disenfranchisement continued. On Independence Day, Americans should be grateful to live in a nation in which sovereignty lies with the people and founded on the principle put forward in theDeclaration of Independencethat “all men 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” while also recognizing that our nation is and always has been a work in progress.
Backyard barbecues on Independence Day provide an opportunity to end our social isolation, bridge our divides, and restore confidence in our ability to improve our nation at home and advance our interests abroad. On Americas 249th birthday, let us resolve to cherish our freedoms and realize the motto that appears on the Great Seal of the Republic: e pluribus unum – out of many, one. As the patriot and civil rights activist Rosa Parks observed, “We will fail when we fail to try.”
H.R. McMaster is a retired Army lieutenant general who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser from 2017 to 2108.
