The Most Important July Fourth of Your Life

This Year It Can't Be Just a Celebration, It Must Be a Call to Action

My father saw America as a kind of a miracle. He was a scientist. He did not take miracles likely. But it was America that offered refuge to his family from the Nazis. It was America for which he went off as a young officer to fight those Nazis just four short years after he arrived in this country. It was America that opened up a life of unexpected rewards for him and the family he made in the years after his return from the war. It offered him a GI Bill that paid for his education up to and including his PhD. It offered him the chance to work with top military scientists throughout his career. It enabled him to become a department head and spend the bulk of his career at the greatest scientific research facility in the entire world, Bell Telephone Laboratories.

My father, Ernst Rothkopf, was not a sentimental man. In fact, as a scientist, he was a professional skeptic. (I’ve often thought that the fact we both taught at Columbia made that our “family business” but in retrospect, it is clear to me that the family trade really is being skeptics for hire.)

But every July Fourth, my dad, usually in a pair of khaki shorts with lots of pockets and the navy blue Lacoste polo shirts he favored, would come downstairs in the morning and head to the front hall closet. There he would fish around in the back until he found our flag and flag pole and he would walk the few steps to the front door and place the flag in its bracket.

He’d step back, survey the yard on what was usually in July, a sunny morning and survey the neatly trimmed lawns of our suburban Summit, New Jersey community. What he was thinking, I’ll never know. But I imagine somewhere in his thoughts were his childhood in a ramshackle Vienna apartment building with too little to eat, the horrors to which virtually all of his family and friends ended up being subjected, and then his incredible good fortune to find his way to America.

A Holiday With Many Meanings

July Fourth means different things to all of us. For some it is a long history in this country. (Parts of my mother’s family came to the United States in the 18th Century. One ancestor was the last chief constable of New York City in the first half of the 19th Century. A doctor’s daughter whose father and grandfather had both had the good fortune to attend to Columbia…as my parents and I and my daughters have done…my mother’s story was different. She grew up on Park Avenue, went to a private school, wanted for nothing. But she too realized the role this country played in making that story possible.) For others it is history marred by slavery or our still too little acknowledged genocide against those whose land this was for thousands of years before Europeans came. For some we think of service and sacrifice in foreign wars. For others we simply think of the elusive and shifting idea of the American dream and what it has meant to us.

But on this July 4th, the 248th anniversary of the day we choose to celebrate signing our Declaration of Independence, we find ourselves at a perilous crossroads in our country’s history. The core ideas and ideals for which this country’s founders fought are now being undone before our very eyes. In an act that would shock and appall those founders, our Supreme Court—an entity that has arrogated onto itself far more power than the authors of the Constitution ever envisioned it having—has granted to American presidents the powers of a monarch. The idea that lay at the heart of the new nation, that no one would be above the law, lays bloodied and dead on the steps of the court thanks to the radical action of six extremist justices who have not only disregard our law but they have shown active contempt for it.

In all their actions and the actions of the party for whom they are just high-toned lackeys, they have done the unthinkable. They have worked to restore not just a kingly role in our society that is beyond the reach of the law but, through other decisions over the past several decades that have weakened the government and accelerated this nation’s gross inequality, they have also restored an aristocracy to this country.

Kings and aristocrats. A class of Americans for whom the rest of us must work and to whose wishes the rest of us must bend our lives.

No Longer the World’s Leading Democracy

But that is not the worst of it. Although no nation in which the gaps between the rich and poor are so great and the social mobility is so limited can truly call itself a democracy, especially one with such a long history of denying opportunity and voice to citizens based on race or gender, until now we have at least had the sense that as citizens empowered to vote we had a say in determining our country’s course.

With decisions like Citizens United, Shelby County, Dobbs, and this weeks contra-Constitutional edict granting immense new powers to presidents, this court and its authors and benefactors in the Republican Party, have made it impossible for the United States to say on this July Fourth as we have on so many others that we are the world’s leading democracy, a beacon of freedom unto nations. We are not. Today, many other countries grant citizens with more rights and better protect those rights than we do. It is a fact. We must learn to live with it unless we find it within us to change it.

Changing it, however, will become dramatically more difficult if we do not rise to the challenge with which history now presents our generation, one that may prove every bit as decisive to the history of our democracy as anything our founders experienced. If in November, the people of the United States elect the candidate for president who has promised to be a “dictator from Day One,” who has promised to implement plans that would gut the checks and balances in our government, appoint only loyalists, ignore the Constitution when it suited him, jail his enemies, create concentration camps for immigrants, and embrace our enemies…then this could very well be the last July Fourth we celebrate as a democracy.

That is not hyperbole. If it is only a warning, it is not enough. It must be seen as a call to action. This July Fourth we no longer have the luxury of celebrating what has been achieved in the past, what has made this country great. We must stop and consider the meaning of the day and then recognize that those ancient words that are so often invoked as part of our holiday festivities are now a call to action. We need to think not of what our founders did but rather on why they did it.

Why you may ask, did a group of comfortable citizens enjoying the bounties America had to offer, decide to risk everything, to put their lives on the line and fight for change. Their words tell us why:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you make the wrong choice in November, if we do not fight to ensure that a resounding majority of Americans turn out to defend our democracy then Donald Trump and the Supreme Court and the MAGA GOP establishment have promised us with their words and actions that the U.S. government will no longer be obliged to derive its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Slowly but surely rights we long thought were inalienable—like free speech, freedom of assembly, protections against having religious views imposed on us by others, the right to a fair trial and so many more—will be stripped away. Trump wanted to gut them during his last term in office. He now has the blueprint and the new powers he needs to succeed this time around.

A Call to Action

July Fourth marks a story in which people who sought freedom and a nation of laws overcame enormous odds and achieved world changing results. It should not only be a call to action for us, but also a source of encouragement and hope. What we need to do is achievable. We have the majority. We still, for a few months at least, have the tools. Now it is a question of doing it.

The momentary distraction of the Democratic Party debating who is the best to lead them and us in this effort should not be overplayed. It is important. It is a debate we should have. We should do everything in our power to ensure we are successful in November. But in the end, I have faith that as it has in the past, our debate and the reflection that goes with it will strengthen us.

I believe that in the end, if we use this day as the inspiration, guide and call-to-action it should be, that Democrats will come together, mobilize voters, highlight the dangers posed by Trump and the promise of a Democratic agenda grounded in the achievements of the Biden-Harris administration...and we will win. There are multiple paths to this outcome and I am confident we will pick the right one and turn it into a historic success.

But clearly, such optimism should not forestall our action or reduce our resolve to work hard. In the spirit of whatever the Fourth of July and the country means to you or to those close you you, we must in fact produce the maximum effort each of us can muster.

On this July Fourth, therefore it is essential we direct our attention to the history we must make rather than that we have received from past generations. And if we do, if we recognize and comit to using the power within us to rise to the moment, there will be even more to celebrate on Independence Days to come.