This article looks ahead to a heavy season of anniversaries: the nation’s 250th birthday and the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and it argues that both moments call us back to the same idea at the heart of the American experiment — liberty defended by law and courage.
We have a month until the Semiquincentennial and only a few more months until the grim anniversary of September 11. Both dates demand a clear answer to a simple question: what do we mean by freedom and why are we willing to defend it? Families and communities should use the coming weeks to talk about those answers plainly and honestly.
The Declaration of Independence still frames our case for liberty, and its words matter because they announced what we were willing to risk everything to protect. “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.”
Celebrating the fourth is not just party and pageantry, it is gratitude for a system that prizes the individual and limits power. The founders risked everything to declare those principles, and millions since have kept that promise alive through sacrifice and hard work. That is the real core of the holiday: a commitment to ordered liberty and the rule of law.
We should honor the courage of those who voted for independence and those who signed the Declaration in the face of a superior empire. The Revolutionary struggle stretched from the first shots at Lexington and Concord to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and it defined what it would take to make freedom durable. Those long years of conflict taught the nation how fragile liberty can be and why it requires constant stewardship.
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights turned revolutionary ideals into a functioning republic, one that balances powers across branches and levels of government. The First Amendment protects both free exercise of faith and freedom from state-imposed religion, a principle that confounds absolute-minded enemies of pluralism. That separation of church and state, and protection of conscience, is a central reason why free societies thrive.
Fanatics who struck on September 11 and those who threaten us today in Iran and its proxies attack precisely what ordered liberty defends: pluralism, free speech, and the right to choose belief or none at all. Their hatred is not only foreign policy; it is ideological. We fight them because they want to impose a single truth and crush dissent.
America is part of a larger Western tradition that traces back to multiple sources: legal charters like Magna Carta, the philosophical roots of Athens, and moral strands from Jerusalem. The Declaration became a touchstone beyond our borders, inspiring movements for independence and human rights across the globe. Nations that protect individual rights and expand literacy and law are moving toward that same standard.
Today’s geopolitical contests are extensions of that old struggle. The conflict with Iran and its networks and the rising strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China reflect different faces of the same threat to free peoples. Allies like Ukraine and Israel matter because they, too, are fighting for citizens’ rights against authoritarian forces that would take them away.
Looking ahead, we should hope for a wider spread of liberty in regions now closing up and for reforms in places that suppress their people. We should also resolve that every generation will shoulder the work of defending free institutions, just as the founders and those who followed did. If Americans keep that resolve, the republic will remain a model and a shield for liberty in the world.
