America a quarter of a millennium ago was where the words of the European Enlightenment became flesh. In the 13 colonies’ declaration of independence, the dreams of the new age’s rationalists, free thinkers and anti-monarchists were made actual. Power comes from the people, they said. Rulers must govern with the consent of the governed. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they asserted. They were right, which is why Britain had lost the battle for America’s soul before the first cannonballs were exchanged. Little is self-evident today to Americans, except that they cannot agree on what they are celebrating.
That America’s semiquincentennial is a flop may be an accident of timing. The bicentennial was very different. Those 1976 celebrations were led by Gerald Ford, an unexpected president who was modesty personified. “The excitement of this occasion is that they [the declaration’s principles] still work.” Ford was referring to the resignation two years earlier of his boss, Richard Nixon, to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal. The system had successfully checked executive power. What better moment to light the fireworks?
Half a century later, Nixon is depicted by JD Vance, today’s vice-president, as victim of the “deep state”. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” Vance said last week. There was nothing deep-state about Nixon’s downfall. He resigned only when he realised that his Republican colleagues were boarding the impeachment train. The US Supreme Court precipitated that moment when it ordered Nixon to publish his incriminating Oval Office tapes.