One might have thought, in these enervated times, that the spectacle of a nation turning 250 would be an occasion for the usual dirge: solemn academics in tweed lamenting the death of everything, NGOs wringing their hands over carbon footprints and historical sins, and European commentators sighing that the whole experiment had finally run its course. Instead, America threw a party. Fireworks blazed, crowds gathered, and the doom-predictors were left looking like minor prophets who had booked the wrong apocalypse. It was, in its noisy, excessive, slightly vulgar way, rather magnificent – a reminder that while the rest of the world perfects the art of managed decline, the United States still specialises in unmanaged exuberance.
The global elite, that loose confederacy of Davos devotees, Brussels bureaucrats, and Silicon Valley saviours, had hoped for something different. Their preferred script involved genteel failure: empty malls, polite protests, and a grateful populace ready to accept the soft tyranny of net-zero serfdom and equity quotas. For years they have peddled the miseries of global communism by another name – centralised control dressed up as compassion, surveillance as safety, and the slow erosion of the individual beneath the weight of the collective good. America, stubbornly, keeps declining the invitation. It has done so since 1776, and with a certain cheeky consistency ever since.
Consider the flaws, for they are legion and loud. America is brash where others are subtle, litigious where others are resigned, and occasionally capable of electing leaders who speak like auctioneers on a caffeine jag. Its cities can be violent, its inequalities glaring, its popular culture a riot of junk food for the mind. Yet these are not bugs in the system; they are the inevitable by-products of a society that refuses to sit still and be improved by experts. In more orderly nations, the trains may run on time, but the spirit has often missed its connection. America’s chaos is the sound of people still arguing with one another, still inventing, still failing upwards. From the Wright brothers to Silicon Valley, from jazz to the moon landing, its greatest hits have emerged not despite the mess but because of it. Personal liberty is a messy business. It permits bad taste, bad choices, and the glorious right to be wrong.
No recent figure has embodied this raucous refusal quite like Donald Trump. Love him or loathe him – and the chattering classes have made their preference abrasively clear – he promoted America with a salesman’s gusto that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris could have mustered on their most caffeinated days. Where his predecessors offered managed decline wrapped in progressive pieties, Trump flogged the old republic like a slightly dented but still serviceable classic car: loud, powerful, and unapologetically itself. He understood that nations, like individuals, thrive on confidence rather than constant apology. Under his watch, the 250th birthday became less a funeral for the past and more a defiant birthday bash. The elite recoiled in horror; the country, by and large, enjoyed the fireworks.
This is not to say America is flawless or that its founding beliefs are immune to corrosion. The constitutional architecture – that Enlightenment scaffolding of limited government, free speech, and the right to pursue happiness on your own terms – requires constant maintenance. Yet as long as enough Americans remember that government is their servant rather than their shepherd, the republic retains its improbable vitality. Socialism, in its various fashionable guises, has failed everywhere it has been tried with sincerity: the body count in the last century remains a grim testament. Each time it reappears in fresher packaging – stakeholder capitalism, climate emergency authoritarianism, digital social credit – America serves as the control group that refuses the experiment. Its very existence is an affront to the planners.
The sardonic truth is that humanity’s best chance at freedom now rests with a country the sophisticated affect to despise. While Europe drifts into demographic winter and regulatory paralysis, and while rising powers perfect new forms of authoritarian efficiency, America remains the last major redoubt of the heretical idea that ordinary people, left largely to their own devices, can achieve extraordinary things. Its culture – raucous, commercial, endlessly renewable – exports both its best and its worst, but the worst is at least optional. You can switch it off. Try doing that with the mandatory ideologies elsewhere.
So let the elites continue their seminars on how to make the world more “equitable” by making everyone equally miserable. America will keep producing vaccines in record time, blockbusters no one asked for, and eccentric billionaires who want to colonise Mars. It will argue with itself, sue itself, and occasionally embarrass itself on the world stage. And it will, with any luck, continue to reject the velvet handcuffs of collectivism. Protect that raucous, flawed, indispensable republic – its Constitution, its wild culture, its founding suspicion of power – and the rest of us retain a fighting chance.
The evils of socialism have been defeated before. With America still in the ring, throwing punches and cracking jokes, they will be defeated again. The fireworks, one suspects, are only just beginning.