This Fourth of July felt different. There were fireworks, grilling, and laughter. But beneath it all, a quiet dread — like we’re celebrating freedom and we’re no longer sure it will endure.
At least that’s how it felt in my world. We grilled as usual (added to the menu: grilled beef salami — surprisingly delicious, a recipe courtesy of a political email!). We watched PBS’s new documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny. And we gathered for dinner, where a longtime member of the Arendt Center read the Declaration of Independence in full.
I remember the first time I heard the Declaration read aloud in full — at a firehouse in a small New England town. The whole town seemed to be there. What struck me wasn’t the lofty preamble but the long, angry litany of grievances. I had forgotten how much of the document is devoted not to ideals, but to detailing tyranny.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence affirms the Natural Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Maybe more importantly, it affirms that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And, of course, it announces that there are rare moments “in the Course of human events,” when “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
These are the parts of the Declaration I know well. But they are less than half of the text. The vast majority of the text is taken up by a list of 27 grievances against “the present King of Great Britain.” The King has “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
The first grievance is that the King “has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The list goes on, including some that seem eerily relevant in today’s context: “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone”; “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures”; and he has enabled “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
Jefferson’s list of grievances cuts close to home in 2025. Judges beholden to power. Armies patrolling our streets. Pretended offenses met with trials. People detained without trial — or disappeared into offshore detention centers. What the colonists once suffered from a distant monarch, we now risk from within — through an expansive, unaccountable bureaucratic apparatus like ICE.
The long list of grievances reminds us that the Founding Fathers were developing an idea: that every people has a right to live freely. When that right has been taken away, they have a right to rebel and form their own government.
The right to live freely was then, and is still today, a radical idea. It underlies the fundamental guarantee in Article Four of the United States Constitution — that the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.
What Hannah Arendt found most radical about the United States was not its democracy, but its republicanism. Democracy is rule by the majority. Republicanism is government by the people’s consent, bounded by constitutional protections against majority tyranny.
For Arendt, the threat to republican government in the modern age is not monarchy or mob rule — it is bureaucracy: the “rule of Nobody” — a power centralized in the executive branch, dispersed across multiple agencies, and accountable to none. Bureaucrats, unelected and unaccountable, govern through opaque regulations rather than public laws. No elected officials take responsibility. The result is a hollowed-out republic, drained of its lifeblood: self-government by consent.
Arendt believed that the greatest danger to freedom is not governmental overreach but civic withdrawal. When citizens retreat into private life, neglecting public responsibility, the foundation of the republic begins to erode.
The Trump presidency’s sweeping assertion of centralized power represents not only an authoritarian impulse but a symptom of deeper decay. The threat to republican freedom is not one man — it is a citizenry that no longer demands accountability or safeguards against power.
What Arendt valued above all in the United States was that what united the people of the states was an idea. We are not Americans by race, sex, ethnicity, or wealth. Outside the Native Americans, who we largely killed, and the Africans who were brought here by force, we are a land of immigrants. What holds us together is fidelity to the idea of freedom and the promise of equality.
This is what we celebrate on July 4th: not simply flags, but an audacious idea — that a people can govern themselves, and that no one rules without their consent.
That idea is fragile. And today, it is in danger — not just from demagogues, but from the creeping weight of bureaucratic rule, from a political culture that shrinks from responsibility, and from our own loss of faith in the promise of the republic.
To keep the spirit of 1776 alive in 2025, we need more than ritual. We need courage to act, judgment grounded in reality, and a renewed commitment to the radical promise that we are a people bound not by blood or soil — but by freedom. The Republic is ours to keep, but we have work to do.
For thoughts on how to revitalize democracy, check out “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Republicanism, and Citizen Power.” For another thoughtful reflection on July 4th, read Eli Lakes’ essay “America Has Always Been a Dangerous Idea.” And I highly recommend the discussion I had with Ian Buruma: “Staying Decent in an Indecent Society.”
Oh, and about that grilled salami. This is the recipe courtesy of Senator Elissa Slotkin: “First, get an all-beef salami, like Hebrew National. Cut it into half-inch slices. Grill until you get grill lines on both sides, and the salami starts to bow up like a bowl. Put onto a plate covered in paper towels. Pat off the extra grease. Eat hot, with yellow or Dijon mustard. And thank me later!”
