Independence Day marks, of course, the day 249 years ago when the Continental Congress declared the United States to be independent of the United Kingdom, which had founded the colonies. It took over a year of pitched combat for Congress to reach that point. What's really important about it, however, is not so much that the United Colonies declared independence from the mother country, but that it did it democratically and formed a democratic republic immediately. Indeed, the country was acting as a democratic republic before it actually formed one officially.
From the very onset, the United States was a democracy. I'll occasionally hear somebody who doesn't grasp that or understand it say "we're not a democracy, we're a republic". That statements, which indeed was made by our serving Congress woman, shows a lack of understanding on what a democracy and a republic are. We most definitely are a democracy, and always have been.
The initial structure of the country that was arrived upon by the founders of the country featured a very strong congress and a phenomenally weak president. The US Constitution, it should be noted, is the country's second, not first, constitution. The first one that featured that structure was the Articles of Confederation It was John Hanson, not George Washington, who fulfilled the role of President at first.
The Articles didn't work well, but notable in them is that right from the onset the country was that, a country. Some people will also occasionally claim that at first we were thirteen countries. That's nonsense. We were, in fact, a putative country even before the Declaration of Independence, with the initial hope being that the country would be a union of fourteen, not thirteen, colonies. The reluctance of the Quebecois to throw in with the virulently protestant colonies to their sound quashed that dream, with it setting the continuing tone that Canada wants nothing to do with being in the United States of America. Nothing.
The Constitution of the US set us on an ongoing path which gives real concern to conservatives such as myself. Right from the debate on the document there was a struggle between those who wanted to retain a weak national government and strong state governments. States were, in fact, amazingly unrestrained in their powers early on. In contrast, there were those who wanted a strong federal government and weak state governments. The Federalist position, which was the more practical and realistic, ultimately won out, and it would have no matter what. Even those who opposed Federalism found that they used its powers by necessity when they were in power.
That created, however, a structure in which the country converted the President of the Congress into the President of the United States. Lacking a king, but remembering the model, the President occupied a position that vaguely recalled the monarch, in contrast to the British example in which the chief executive of the nation was and is a member of Parliament. This worked well for a very long time, but it did put the US in a situation in which there existed a real possibility of a slow transfer of power to an executive divorced of the legislature.
Indeed, expansion of executive power occurred nearly immediately. It took a big jump during the Civil War, again by necessity, and it jumped again in the 20th Century. Theodore Roosevelt expanded it as it suited his vigorous mindset. Woodrow Wilson expanded it due to the Great War. Franklin Roosevelt expanded it due to the emergency of the Great Depression and then World War Two. Following World War Two the powers already expanded were thought normal, and again the Cold War seemed to make their retention necessary. A President commited the country to a largescale war for the first time in the nation's history without a declaration of war when Truman sent forces into Korea. This repeated itself when Johnson did the same with Vietnam.
Indeed, the disaster of the Vietnam War and the legacy of the Korean War caused Congress to attempt to claw back power with the War Powers Act. The corruption of Richard Nixon resulted in Congress asserting its power as well. But by the late 1960s the Democratic Party has also accommodated itself to revision of the national organic document, the Constitution, by a Supreme Court that simply made stuff up. That accomodation started the development of the Democratic Party simply sitting on its hands and letting the courts rule to a large degree. The Court became sort of an odd co chief executive, with the most egregious example being the absurd decision of Roe v. Wade, at least up until its progeny, Obergefell v. Hodges.
Abuses in the law, with Obergefell being the final example, and a Congress that simply accommodated itself to not really doing anything gave rise to the angered muddled populist far right, and the angry intellectual National Conservatives, the latter of which realised that the former was a plow mule that it could do its work with. National Conservatives basically abandoned the concept of an expansive democracy in favor of a much more limited culturally correct one and took advantage of, and are taking advantage of, a chief executive whose mind is mush but whose ego is titanic. They see him, effectively, as a "Red Caesar".
In the meantime, Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court began to hurl back to Congress the powers that it had dumped on the courts like city people dumping kittens on farms. A Congress used to yapping but not doing anything was not prepared to exercise power once again, and very obviously still is not. Much of what the Roberts Supreme Court has done in recent years really isn't radical at all, but its suddenly getting there, making decisions which are difficult not to view as seeking to empower the chief executive.
We can't tell where this will end up, and hence the pessimism. We may very well be in an era in which, when we look back a decade more hence, we will see a revived Congress that resumed its proper role, and a diminished Presidency, that's returned to its, even if that looks like something from, perhaps, the 1960s or 1970s. Or we may seen an ineffective Congress and a nation ruled by a successor Red Ceasar who has more in common with Victor Orban than George Washington.
Perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that the country has weathered previous existential threads to its democratic nature. The War of 1812 presented one when a large portion of the country wanted nothing to do with the declared war and thought about leaving the infant nation. The Mexican War saw something similar, and the Civil War, in which half the territory of the country attempted to leave in order to keep a large percentage of its population in chains. World War One sparked further crises when it became unclear what the President's powers were in regard to a foreign war, and following the war the country acted wholly illegally towards those on the radical left. During the Depression a right wing threat to the nation caused a putative coup to develop, the news of which was then suppressed. Deep Communist penetration of the government in the 1930s and 1940s, was covered up in the 1950s and the reputation of the Congressman exposing it forever trashed, something his lack of restraint aided in. The disaster of the Vietnam War and the following horror of Watergate caused many to feel that democracy in the US was dying.
Of course, we've never had a figure like Trump before make it into the Oval Office. The closest we've ever had to that was Jefferson Davis, in the Confederate White House, who at least was more genteel. Huey Long was much like Trump, but of course he did not replace Franklin Roosevelt.
Still, there is reason for optimism. Trump is not a popular figure. He's wrecking conservatism which conservatives will have a hard time overcoming in the remainder of my lifetime, but there are signs that his bolt is now shot, in spite of his budget bill. So much political capital was spent on that that it will bring the Democrats into power in Congress in 2026. They'll have to act like a Congress at that time. Repairing the damage will take time, but perhaps not as much time as might be feared. The populists may have done the country a favor by peeling back the lazy ineffectiveness of the pre 2016 Congress, and the National Conservatives may be doing the country a favor by restoring some of the basic elements of conservatism. They're both damaging the country enormously by being inhumane.
When the reign of the Red Ceasar ends, and I think that will be by this time next year, maybe Congress will go back to its proper role and the gutless cowards of the GOP who have allowed this to occur will be retired in disgrace. The country got over the Civil War. There's hope it can get over this.
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