250 Years On: What We Owe This Moment

Raise a glass to freedom, something they can never take away.

My favorite song from Hamilton has been going through my head nonstop all week (my second favorite week of the year, after Mardi Gras!).

Every Independence Day, my family does what most Louisiana families do. We cook, we light things on fire, and we try to stay cool in the July heat. (I particularly enjoy mixing sweet tea vodka and lemonade…) We also watch all our Americana favorites: the Declaration episode of John Adams, the 1776 musical, Independence Day, and, of course, Hamilton. The classics. There’s something beautifully ordinary about these rituals. But this year is special. This year, America turns 250 years young.

Two and a half centuries. More than a dozen generations of Americans who inherited something extraordinary and were asked to keep it alive. I find myself this Independence Day thinking less about fireworks and more about that charge, and whether we are living up to it.

The Weight of 250 Years

There is something humbling about anniversaries that end in a zero, and something particularly sobering about this one. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not guaranteed to survive the bet they made on July 4, 1776. They pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” and they meant it. Some lost all three.

What they built was not a perfect nation. It was something rarer and more honest than that. It was a nation with a perfect aspiration: the idea that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights (read Walter Isaacson’s brilliant book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, on this point, or listen to his (LINK) speech to our March Solutions Summit audience (/LINK)), was not fully realized on Day One. It has been the long, messy, beautiful project of every generation since to move closer to that promise. And that project is not finished.

Never before in human history had a nation been founded not on ethnicity, not on religious identity, not on conquest, not on dynasty, but rather on an idea. The idea that government exists to secure rights that pre-exist it. The idea that those rights belong to the individual, not to the state.

The free enterprise system that was fostered and grown from that founding idea has done more to lift human beings out of poverty than any government program in history. Not because markets are perfect, but because they harness human creativity, ingenuity, and ambition in ways that central planners simply cannot.

That Constitutional framework was not designed for convenience. The separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights were designed precisely to make power hard to consolidate. The Founders had read their history (later confirmed by Lord Acton’s observations on unchecked power). So they built a system of friction. Of checks. Of argument baked into the structure of government itself.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that framework remarkably still stands.

The Forgotten Virtue: Civil Discourse

I’ve written about this previously: the state of our public conversation worries me more than most of the policy debates my colleagues and I wade into every day. And we wade into some heated ones.

At a recent national symposium on civil discourse, I was really struck by the observations shared. Too many of our fellow Americans have mistaken volume for strength and contempt for conviction. We scroll past nuance and share outrage. We sort ourselves into camps where everyone agrees with us and then wonder why we can’t persuade anyone. The algorithm rewards the provocation. Somewhere along the way, our neighbors became our opponents, and our opponents became our enemies.

This is not who we are. Or at least, it’s not who we have to be.

The Founders were themselves bitterly divided on slavery, on the structure of government, on the proper role of the federal authority, on foreign alliances, on commerce and many other issues. Hamilton and Jefferson despised each other. Adams and Franklin had to be kept apart at moments. And yet they built something together. They disagreed with fury and then stayed in the room (where it happens?).

Civil discourse is not weakness. It is not naive. It is not a concession to the other side. It is the oxygen of representative government. Without it, what you have is not a republic. It is factions, and factions eventually consume themselves. (A re-read of Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10is a wonderful refresher on this.)

Louisiana’s Special Place in the American Story

I want to take a moment to say something that doesn’t get said enough: Louisiana has played a genuinely extraordinary role in the American story.

We are the crossroads of the continent: the place where the great river meets the sea, where French, Spanish, African, Native American, and Anglo cultures collided and created something the world had never seen. New Orleans is, and has always been, one of the most singular cities on earth.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 didn’t just double the size of the United States. It opened the entire American West. It made continental expansion possible. Without Louisiana, the American story simply does not unfold the way it did. (Aside: In 1804, the Ursuline Sisters in New Orleans wrote to President Jefferson asking for clarity on their ability to maintain ownership of their property, and Jefferson’s brief response is worth reading.)

The Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, though fought technically after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, electrified a young nation still unsure of itself on the world stage. Andrew Jackson’s ragtag coalition of regulars, militia, pirates, free men of color, Choctaw warriors, and Louisiana Creoles handed the British a stunning defeat on the plains of Chalmette. It told the world, and Americans themselves, that this republic could defend itself. Louisiana gave America that moment.

What We Owe This Moment

I am blessed to spend my days working to make Louisiana freer: freer in its markets, freer in its schools, freer in its government structures. I believe in that work with everything I have. But I also know that policy is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of character.

The American experiment is, at its core, a character experiment. It asks whether a free people can govern themselves. Whether citizens who disagree can still find enough common ground to keep the republic alive. Whether we can hold onto the principles that made this place extraordinary while continuing to do the hard work of extending those principles to everyone.

As we mark this 250th birthday, I want to make a few requests, not as a policy advocate, but as a fellow citizen.

• Know your history. Not the sanitized version or the purely critical version, but rather the full, complicated, glorious, tragic, ongoing story of this republic. Read the Declaration again. Read the Federalist Papers. Read Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech from 1852. Understand what was at stake, what was lost, and what was won. Our team put together a (LINK) reading list (/LINK) you might also enjoy.
• Engage, don’t retreat. Get in the game of civic life. Attend a school board meeting. Go to your state legislator’s town hall. Vote in the local elections that actually shape your daily life. The republic doesn’t run itself.
• Defend free enterprise and make the case for it. The market economy is not a luxury. It is the engine that has produced the longest sustained reduction in human poverty ever recorded. We should be proud of that and unapologetic about making the case for the conditions that empower every person to pursue opportunity: free markets, limited government, rule of law, property rights, and free speech.
• Lean into the hard conversation. The echo chamber is comfortable. Seek out the person (maybe even family member!) who disagrees with you, and treat them with the dignity the Declaration says they are owed. Try to understand their point of view and really listen. You might not change their mind. You probably won’t change yours. But you will both have practiced being citizens, and that matters.

Two hundred and fifty years. The candles on this cake are getting harder to blow out. But the flame itself—that stubborn, improbable idea that free people can govern themselves and build something worth passing on—still burns brightly.

“Raise a glass to the four of us. Tomorrow they’ll be more of us. Telling the story of tonight.”

Tell that story proudly. Happy Independence Day!