For many Americans, July Fourth is a day off from work, complete with barbecues and fireworks. Sadly, though, for way too many Americans, it’s a day to go off the deep end about how evil America is in the grand scheme of things. It’s therefore worth reminding ourselves this July Fourth what’s unique about our country, both past and present.

America is a unique country in world history because it was not formed around historical geography (that is, ancient ties to a particular spot of land), tribalism, religion, or race. Instead, the country of America was formed around an idea.

The idea is that the government serves the people and not vice versa. The documents embodying this profound idea are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. That’s it. That’s America, and the benefits flowing from those documents are freely available to all those who are legally here.

Image: Signing the Declaration of Independence by John Trumball. Public domain.

Both the documents and the ideas contained within them have their roots in English tradition and law and, indeed, sometimes go back even further to Anglo-Saxon, Roman, and Greek traditions and laws. However, in all those cases, the principles were thought to be tied inextricably to the people who developed and practiced them.

What makes America unique is that the Founders universalized those principles through the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. They’re not just the rights of Englishmen or Romans; they’re the rights of all people.

I understand, of course, that for “four score and seven years,” certain parts of America denied those same universal rights to blacks and that we long had an uncomfortable history with Native Americans. (The latter understandably resented the settlers’ taking over their land and failed to understand that their small, and declining, numbers and pre-modern abilities precluded their prevailing in a war with the new American nation.)

However, here’s the important thing and the thing that the left does not want anyone to know: Those failures lie with human nature—and with changing values over time—not with the ideas themselves. The ideas are timeless and universal.

Or at least, for many generations, we Americans thought they were timeless. They were so obvious and wonderful, so tied to success, opportunity, merit, liberty, and all the things that people living before the 21st century took for granted, that it never occurred to us that, in fact, the ideas were ephemeral and could easily be destroyed.

For over one hundred years, the forces of totalitarianism have attacked the liberties that Americans take for granted. And when I say that, I’m not talking about totalitarian attacks against liberty in foreign lands (Bolshevism, Naziism, Maoism, Islamism, etc.). I’m talking about those at home who have attacked American values.

Open economic communism failed because Americans knew they could get a piece of the pie and, therefore, didn’t want the government hoarding all the pieces and handing out the crumbs to preferred classes. Undeterred, American leftists immediately shifted to cultural Marxism. In the past few decades, cultural Marxists have coopted the news media, academia, K-12 education, Hollywood, many of our courts, and large parts of our state and federal governments.

By slowly and steadily taking over America’s institutions, leftists have done enormous damage to America’s principles. They’ve divided our people along tribal lines, defined by race and sexuality, and substituted favoritism and government control for merit and liberty.

There’s a reason Democrats love Biden despite his corruption, lies, and dementia: As America’s figurehead, he got things done. He’s destroyed our borders, weakened our national security, trashed our economy, exacerbated racial divisions, hyper-sexualized our children, and given aid and succor to foreign enemies (Iran, China) while abandoning our friends (most notably Israel and almost certainly Taiwan). No matter your beef with Trump at a personal level, he did none of that in his first term and won’t in his second.

While it’s lovely to see the Democrats in disarray, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. If we wish to wrest this country out of leftist hands and restore a nation that is driven by the values our Founders articulate in the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate today, as well as our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which we should celebrate every day, we must vote, we must (if we can) donate to candidates who will weaken the Democrats, and we must keep the faith.

Happy Fourth of July!