America turns 250 this week, but the real celebration depends on whether we have kept the principles that made independence worth winning.
The following ran in the 2 July 2026 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
Every Fourth of July, Americans gather beneath fireworks and flags. But the day itself commemorates something far more profound. It commemorates a people who believed their rights came from God, not government, and who were willing to risk everything to defend that truth.
Two hundred fifty years ago, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not launching the American Revolution in the French sense of mobs, guillotines, and ideological chaos. They believed they were defending an older inheritance: ordered liberty, representative government, and the ancient rights of free Englishmen.
The colonies had been chartered by the king, not governed by Parliament. Their own legislatures held the taxing authority, and the Declaration’s complaints were directed at the king for failing to protect them from Parliament’s unconstitutional reach.
That distinction matters today because many Americans increasingly feel ruled by distant bureaucrats they never elected.
The Founders feared concentrated power because they understood human nature. Men are fallen. Governments expand. Bureaucracies protect themselves. Liberty erodes gradually, then all at once. That is why the Constitution divided power and pushed authority downward whenever possible: to states, local communities, churches, families, and citizens themselves.
Today, much of that constitutional order survives only in form.
Americans now live under thousands of regulations written not by Congress, but by agencies most voters could not name. Entire industries rise or fall based on administrative rulings issued far from public scrutiny. The same country founded in outrage over British “writs of assistance” now tolerates widespread digital surveillance, financial monitoring, and speech policing in the name of security and public safety.
And both parties helped build it.
Republicans speak about limited government while expanding debt and executive power whenever convenient. Democrats claim to defend democracy while increasingly favoring censorship, centralized bureaucracy, and administrative control over speech, education, energy, and commerce. Meanwhile, the national debt now exceeds $39 trillion as D.C. borrows against the future like arithmetic itself no longer matters. Instead of securing the blessings of liberty for our posterity, we are mortgaging that inheritance.
But political failures are not the deepest problem.
A constitutional republic cannot survive without citizens capable of governing themselves. The Founders understood this clearly. John Adams warned that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate” for any other.
Liberty requires virtue.
A free people must possess discipline, restraint, honesty, courage, and personal responsibility. Instead, modern America increasingly celebrates dependency, self-indulgence, outrage, and victimhood. We demand liberty while refusing the discipline liberty requires. We want freedom without accountability, prosperity without sacrifice, and order without moral standards.
The decline shows up everywhere.
Schools struggle to teach basic reading, writing, math, and civics while producing students fluent in activism and grievance. Public discourse increasingly rewards emotional manipulation over truth. Millions of Americans now look first to D.C., not family, church, neighborhood, or local community, to solve nearly every human problem.
A people unwilling to govern themselves personally will eventually be governed externally.
That is the real danger facing America at 250 years.
The answer is not despair, nor some fantasy of recreating 1776. The Founders themselves were imperfect men governing imperfect people. But they understood eternal truths that modern America increasingly forgets: rights come from God, not man; raw power must be restrained by lawful authority; liberty requires responsibility; and self-government begins with self-discipline.
In his Farewell Address, Washington understood that a free people would keep their republic only if they held together, honored the Constitution, and preserved the moral habits that liberty requires. He warned that religion and morality were ‘indispensable supports’ of political prosperity. The Constitution can restrain government, but only character can restrain a people. Those principles remain true whether we acknowledge them or not.
The Fourth of July should therefore be more than nostalgia and patriotic ritual. It should be a national examination of conscience. Are we still capable of sustaining the kind of republic we inherited? Do we still value liberty enough to practice the habits necessary to preserve it? Or have comfort, debt, dependency, and centralized power dulled the fire that once made the Founders resist?
The spirit of 1776 was never about rebellion. It was about lawful resistance to unlawful authority. It was about ordered liberty under God, defended by citizens willing to accept the burdens of freedom.
So come celebrate No Kings Day on July 4, as Americans did 250 years ago: not against order, but against unlawful rule.
Two hundred fifty years later, the question is not whether the fireworks still explode overhead. The question is whether Americans still possess the discipline, courage, and moral seriousness to keep what they were given.