The 4th of July as a Festival, in 2022
Excerpts from Adams, Pieper, "Biden," and Yours Truly about Why the Feeling Is No Longer There
I hope you read Pavlos’ fine piece for the 4th on patriotism, and his linked review of a book in which Steven B. Smith apparently failed to wisely apply his immense wisdom in political philosophy (see Smith’s Yale lectures on youtube) to the issue of American patriotism. Pavlos ended his piece with this apropos excerpt from John Adams on the 4th of July:
I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
I would like to add a couple more excerpts, however, first from one of Josef Pieper’s little books, this one being In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity. If you’re unfamiliar with Pieper, what you need to know is that he was a German Roman Catholic immersed in Thomistic philosophy and the history of philosophy generally (esp. German), and that he published this in 1963:
Not even the idea of freedom can inspire a people with a spirit of festivity, though the celebration of liberation might—assuming that the event though possibly belonging to the distant past, still has compelling contemporary force. …Strictly speaking, the past cannot be celebrated festively unless the celebrant community still draws glory and exaltation from that past, not merely as reflected history, but by virtue of a historical reality still operative in the present. (p.24)
Very fine book. But the quote prods me to ask myself: am I, on July 4, 2022, drawing “exaltation” from the American past? Hmm…
Well, it is good to dwell upon that past, as an emotional reprieve from looking at America’s present. But that means it feels divorced from the key governmental and societal realities I regard as most “operative” and authoritative “in the present.”
So “exaltation?” No. I’m not feeling that.
For that matter, is there even a “celebrant community” in America, circa July 4th, 2022? Well Pavlos speaks of one in his Wyoming town, and I could tell you some things about Utah communities, but consider this third excerpt, from the speech some kosher-to-our-progressivist-masters speechwriters set in place for President Biden to read upon his inauguration:
Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.
What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans?
I think I know.
Opportunity.
Security.
Liberty.
Dignity.
Respect.
Honor.
And, yes, the truth.
The sad truth, beyond the elementary-level phrasing, and the fact that is impossible to associate any of these words with the President who delivered them, is that by the definition Biden’s writers gleaned from Augustine, namely, that a people is defined by “the common objects of its love,” the Americans no longer are a people, and no longer capable of being a single “celebrant community.”
To celebrate, in our time, the common American love-objects and exaltations that John Adams hoped we would, one can do so only with certain sets of those who are your fellow citizens. At least, one can only do so if one desires to avoid entering into disheartening gestures of “Pretending.” No-one should seek to avoid making such gestures entirely or in all times, but at a certain distance from reality our pretense games—here, ones about what we as Americans hold in common anymore—do become unhealthy.
I no longer have the heart for them. The gap is now so wide, that the polite pretenses feel like poison to the soul. They no longer feel like aspirations that might subtly draw those in error about their nation and its democracy closer to the truth. They feel like an enablement of a toxic denial.
In the strictly legal sense, yes, those who were for stripping me of numerous rights, to the extent of reducing me to a second-class citizenship status, on the basis of my disagreeing with them about vaccines, are still my fellow citizens. But something basic to our fellowship—basic trust in the basic honoring of citizenship and social contract rights--no longer exists. In the spiritual sense, they are my enemies.
Similar, if less-in-our-faces, reasoning applies to the betrayals of 2020.1
Yes, I know that Jesus calls me to love my enemies. But he talks in a way that suggests that the category “enemies” is a meaningful one; like the category of the “poor,” it seems it is one that will always be with us, until his return.
So no, I do not feel festive today.
I feel more like a John Adams of the 1760s or early 1770s than the one who penned the fine words above. Yes, I am happy to celebrate the 4th in the spirit of Van Morrison’s “Western Man” with those who grasp and feel that song’s message, and I agree about the pressing necessity of stirring spirit and pride, and about using the glory of the 4th as kindling for that, but I refuse any longer to look many of my official-citizens in the eye and pretend to talk about any “we” that is celebrating truths, loves, and hopes “held in common.” I have far more in common with folks like the British commentator Neil Oliver who recently said (45:27) that “at some point over the last two years, I realized that the world I thought I knew had died,” than I have with any so-called moderate or so-called liberal American who knows how to utter the famous phrases of Lincoln, the Founders, etc..
Sorry to report what I honestly feel.
Here’s my final excerpt, from some draft material of my own, for a book I’ve toyed with writing, about Democracy-Rescue in America—I wrote this about a year ago:
Will democracy still be widely practiced in the 22nd century? Will America still exist as something we might recognize as America, a single nation bound by its Constitution and characterized by popular government and lawful liberty?
As recently as the early 20th-century, it was fairly easy to answer such questions in the affirmative, and especially the second one. In those days, it was difficult to imagine the possibility of a successful coup against America’s government, or that of an American citizenry wanting to broadly curtail freedom of speech. The fact that we then held what now seem strange debates about whether popular government would spread all over all the world, and how we might best help its advance along, is a telling one. Moreover, whatever setbacks we admitted that modern democracy might experience on the world-stage, we were so confident that it would be maintained in America that we seldom even considered the possibility of its collapsing there. This was especially the case if we were ourselves Americans.
Alas, in the wake of the annus horribilus 2020, we face much grimmer prospects. We cannot believe how many middle-ways that once seemed so solid, and even to constitute the essence of the modern and liberal way of life, no longer can elicit our belief. For now, we see only the starkest of outcomes. Either, the 21st century will prove to be one of democracy’s rescue, or, one of its replacement, whether suddenly or gradually, with some form of despotism. Something fundamental has changed, or many small changes have added up to the same effectual truth, such that many of us now think that republican liberty really might fail across the world, and, that its most precipitous fall might occur in America itself. On our gloomier days, we think we might live long enough to see just what kind of political monster and sociological freak a post-democratic America would turn out to be, with many of us suspecting it would be some sort of “Potemkin democracy,” a false show of popular government with regular “elections” and “debates,” but in which the real power is wielded by an oligarchic council or a dictator-for-life.
True, we may suppose a third possibility, that of a long and decadent era of continually unresolved conflict between the remaining practices and principles of constitutional democracy and the newer ones of 21st-century managerial despotism. But what ought to be clear in 2022 is that our politics have changed forever. We are sure that democracy will die if it continues on in its usual 1990s-2010s pattern, and so we know that our rescue-effort must be some combination of old truths and new paths, in which we will hold resolutely to certain practices, attempt to revive some we have never practiced, and utterly reject and repent of quite a few we have become all too used-to. It will be have to be both an affirmation, and a partial rejection, of the America that raised us. And we will not be talked out of our mission by those who intelligently muse [I was thinking of Ross Douthat here] about the possibility of an extended period of decadent half-failure, because we know it inexorably must lead to full failure, and, because we can no longer stand it.
Those of us who will dedicate ourselves to the rescue and rejuvenation of democracy, who will be mostly classified as conservatives or populists or populist-conservatives, and only in rare cases as moderates, “old-school liberals,” libertarians, and dissident leftists, we cannot return to our old illusions about our fellow citizens’ simply disagreeing with us. The post-2020 truth, as difficult as it is to face, is that most of them have turned, wittingly or not, against democracy itself.
So here’s a July 4th, 2022 toast, to the truths that some of us still hold.
But sorry, there are many Americans I can no longer look in the eye when we are called to celebrate the 4th. I am feeling more urgently grim than naturally festive about this day anymore. Even more horribly, the feeling extends to Thanksgiving...
Easter—now that, as Pieper knew, is a festival to look forward too!
To review: decisive numbers of your fellow citizens, and most particularly, decisive numbers of those who occupy positions of authority, betrayed American democracy. They signed onto or bowed before a system of vengeance-seeking race-essentialism, of administrative overriding of democratic decision-making, of social-media control over freedom of speech and association, of on-offense violence for political ends, of coercing and firing dissenters, and of “2+2 = 5.” As shameful as one might conclude that the facts of “Donald Trump was president for four years” and “January 6th” are, they are small facts compared to this set of betrayals.
I put two quotes from this on Twitter. I would’ve posted on FB too, but I’m in FB jail. Fight the good fight.