This Fourth of July felt different, dimmed somehow. Maybe it was the jet lag from my return flight from Vietnam the night before. Or maybe it was something deeper, something echoed in the articles and social media posts I read that morning. Many were naming the same elephant in the room: a reluctance to celebrate, a question about who we are and where we’re headed. I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.
After nearly half a century on this earth, I’ve learned that not every birthday gets more carefree with time; some are joyful, some are disappointing or complicated. America’s 249th birthday felt like the latter. And yet, in my jet-lagged haze, waking up at zero dark thirty Eastern Time when my body thought it was time to party in Saigon, I found myself watching more sunrises than usual, breathing in fresher air, and holding my loved ones a little tighter after being half a world away. Home is where you are known best.
One sleepless night, in between articles full of gloom, I stumbled across a new podcast series that offered perspective and tempered hope. Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, has launched a series in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday on her Honestly podcast. On this past Fourth of July, her first conversation was with Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar who doesn’t shy away from America’s flaws while retelling America’s extraordinary origin story.
It was exactly what I needed to hear.
Amar speaks not only of the founding ideals but of the radical nature of the American experiment. In 1776, no nation had attempted a representative democracy at national scale based on popular sovereignty with a written constitution. And now? Of the 195 countries in the world, over half (about 95 to 100) are some form of democracy, many of them modeled in spirit or structure on the one launched by the Continental Congress.
While serving in diplomatic roles overseas, I’ve often found myself on the receiving end of pointed critiques from foreign diplomats demanding to know why U.S. policy was doing this or that. At first, I took it personally, feeling helpless and too junior to fix what felt broken. But over time, I came to see my role differently; not to defend every policy, but to listen, to validate concern without overstepping, and to remind others that the United States remains the greatest political experiment the world has ever known.
One Egyptian diplomat, who would later become a friend, challenged me frequently until I once asked, “Who else is even trying?” He paused, then nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “You may not always get it right, but America tries. And that’s more than most.” (Sidenote: This same friend used to joke with me about his visit to a U.S. history museum and seeing that the oldest artifact was from the 1500s. “You are a fledgling nation,” he laughed, “but one that has changed the world.”)
And he’s right. Amar reminds us that the Declaration of Independence with its eloquent words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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” wasn’t the headline in 1776. But because of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the sacrifices of people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and countless others, those words have become the guiding light of our national story.
My time working in West Africa, particularly during volatile election cycles in Côte d’Ivoire, underscored how rare it is to live in a country built on an idea rather than ancestry. There, leaders debated who counted as “Ivorian” and sought to delay fair elections by narrowing that definition. These kinds of questions of who belongs and who doesn’t can destabilize nations. America’s founding idea, that one can belong through belief and not blood, is still extraordinary.
Today, some on the far left argue that America is too flawed to be exceptional or worth fighting for. Some on the far right want to reserve it for those whose ancestors arrived first. But most of us, quietly, hopefully, believe the American Dream belongs to anyone willing to carry it forward. We believe this country can reckon with its past, repair what is broken, and keep trying to make amends. That’s the real gift of turning 249: not perfection, but the promise that we’re still growing up.
