On
the Fourth of July
July 5,2025
I have seen a couple of people on Facebook post Fredrick
Douglas’ famous piece “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.” In it,
he excoriates the United States for its maintenance and tolerance of the brutal,
abominable, sinful institution of slavery, and he was perfectly correct in
everything he said. The racism that so appalled Douglas and must appall all of
us is still with us, and we must continue the civil rights struggle in which
Douglas is such a towering figure.
Today, however, on the day after the Fourth of July, I think
we need to ask a different though related question, namely: What does the
Fourth of July mean to those of us who understand the catastrophic nature of
the things we are living through under the Trump administration? To answer that
question, we need first to understand just what it is that we’re supposed to be
celebrating on that holiday.
In 1776, the thirteen territories that would become the
United States were all British colonies. As colonies, they were ruled by the
British government in London, and they had no representation in that
government. Many of the residents of those colonies believed, with good reason,
that the British government under King George III was oppressing them with
taxation in the imposition of which they had no say at all. Many of their
leading citizens yearned for freedom from what they considered to be the
British yoke that was hampering the economic development of the colonies in
which they lived. In the summer of 1776, a number of these leading citizens met
in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress. On July 2, 1776, representatives
of twelve of those colonies (New York abstained) declared that the colonies
they represented were free from Great Britain. On July 4, 1776, the Congress
adopted the Declaration of Independence.
The second paragraph of the Declaration begins with one of
the most famous sentences in US if not in world history: “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.” This sentence, which Thomas Jefferson
wrote, when interpreted in our present context, states the foundational
principle of the United States: All are equal. All have an equal right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We can, I think, take the right to the “pursuit
of happiness” to mean the right to live one’s life as seems best to the one
living it, within the bounds of the law of course.
There are of course many comments and objections that can be
made to this sentence. Today we don’t much believe that much of anything is
self-evident. We do not put the stock in human reason that the drafters of the
Declaration, adherents of the European Enlightenment all, did. We know that by “Men”
they meant property-owning white men and no one else including neither women nor
Blacks, something to which we must vehemently object. The Declaration of Independence is far from a
perfect statement for us of the truth it seeks to convey.
Nonetheless, it is signing of the Declaration on July 4,
1776, (not the actual vote for independence on July 2) that we celebrate every
year with parades, barbecues, and fireworks. We put up American flags all over
the place. We thank our military for preserving our independence (something our
military hasn’t actually done since 1812, but never mind). Politicians make
patriotic speeches. We crow that we are “the greatest country in the world,” (which
we aren’t and never have been, but never mind). July 4 is our great national
celebration of who we think we are. It is a celebration of the indispensable truth
of each person’s right to life, liberty, and the freedom to live as one wishes.
Today that truth is under vicious attack by our nation’s
federal government. That attack has been instituted and is led by one man,
Donald J. Trump. It seems inexplicable how this country elected this
despicable, completely unqualified man president not once but twice, and the
second time after he had been given due process of law and convicted of
thirty-four felonies. Yet that is precisely what the voters of this country
did. The second time they elected him, though not the first time, they gave him
a majority of the popular vote. Because the American voting public was so
ignorant, so bigoted, and just so downright stupid as to elect this personally
immoral, mentally unstable, megalomaniacal criminal as president, we are faced
with a great crisis as we celebrate our nation, or contemplate whether or not
we should celebrate our nation, in this season of such celebration. The list of
outrages the Trump administration has committed is so long one can hardly get
one’s head around it, but here I’ll mention just three of them that I believe
to be the most serious of all.
First, Donald Trump is leading an assault on the rule of
law. Immediately upon becoming president for the second time he pardoned all of
the people who had been convicted of crimes committed when he sent his mob to
attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In doing so he told the world that it is
perfectly acceptable for rabid humans to storm and damage important
governmental buildings, assault police officers, and interfere with the
constitutional functioning of their government. He made a woman Attorney
General who has no credentials for the job but who will kiss Trump’s ring
whenever he tells her to and will use the Department of Justice as Trump’s
personal law firm. He maintains that the president does not have to obey orders
from federal courts. The constitution and other American law means nothing to
him. He sees it not as the guarantor of public order and personal freedom that
it is supposed to be but merely as something that gets in his way as he tries
to be an authoritarian not a democratic ruler.
Second, our law, from the constitution on down, establishes
and regulates a democratic republic, but Trump does not believe in democracy. He
is leading a nationwide effort so to distort our democratic processes that only
he and his anointed minions will be able to win elections. The federal
government does not conduct elections, the states do (with some federal
regulation to prohibit things like racial discrimination in voting); but Trump
is trying to force all of the states to adopt undemocratic voting procedures
and abandon their own democratic ones for the benefit only of Donald Trump and
his MAGA subordinates.
It is tragic, but Trump is today our duly elected president.
He, however, will never be satisfied with being a president duly elected by the
people of the country of whose national government he is the chief executive. Trump
doesn’t like either capital D or small d democratic politicians either here or
abroad. He model of leadership appears to be Russia’s Vladimir Vladimirovich
Putin, an anti-democratic national leader and a war criminal if ever there were
one. Trump wants to be America’s Putin. He has not ruled out seeking a third
term as president, the constitution limiting him to two terms be damned. He
will make himself America’s dictator if he finds a way to do it and we let him
get away with it.
Third, there is what Trump and his people are doing to
immigrants in this country. His model for what he is doing appears to be the
way Hitler treated Europe’s Jews at least up to the point when he started
murdering millions of them. When Hitler came to power in Germany in January,
1933, Germany was not in good shape. The country had myriad problems. The Great
Depression was on worldwide. Unemployment was high. Germany had not only lost
World War I, it had been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles in numerous
profoundly unfair ways. Among other things, it had had to give up territory and
was severely restricted in its ability to defend itself militarily. It owed
massive war reparations to the victorious allied nations in that war.
Hitler, of course, promised the German people that he and
his Nazi party would solve all those problems. He could probably have done that
legitimately through proper legal measures, but that is not what he set out to
do. Rather, he acted like the fascist he truly was. He created a cult of
personality around himself, claiming that only he personally could make Germany
great again. He suspended Germany’s laws and political system and made himself
the country’s dictator.
And he did something else that fascists do. He gave the
people of the country a scapegoat. He blamed the country’s problems on a group
of people who had little or nothing to do with them, namely, the Jews. There
actually weren’t that many Jews in Germany in 1933. Microsoft Copilot tells me
that they made up only .75 per cent of the country’s population. But Hitler
grew up and operated in a German culture (and an Austrian one, Austria being
culturally and linguistically German) that had been violently antisemitic for
centuries. It was common throughout Europe for Christians to call all Jews “Christ
killers”, never mind that it was the Romans not the Jews who killed Jesus. Europe
had a long history of Christian violence against Jews, violence the church(es) fomented
rather than stopped. For example, men going on the Crusades often stopped along
the way to slaughter Jews. Spain, England, and other countries had simply expelled
all of them. That’s why there were to many of them in central Europe,
especially in Poland. The great German Reformer Martin Luther was a despicable
antisemite. The ground was fertile for Hitler’s genocide.
Hitler took full advantage of that fact. He told the German
people that the Jews caused all of their problems. That claim was patently
absurd as a matter of fact, but it didn’t matter. The German people wanted
someone to blame for their problems, and Hitler gave them he Jews. He first set
out simply to move all German Jews out of Germany. At one point he wanted to
move them to Madagascar with only the presence of the British navy stopping him
from doing it. When he couldn’t do that, and when it became clear that he would
lose the war he had started, he increased the rate at which he slaughtered them
to proportions far beyond human understanding. Auschwitz, for example, always a
brutal place, became a major center for killing Jews only in 1942.
I’ll give Donald Trump this much credit: He hasn’t started
mass extermination of any demographic group the way Hitler did with the Jews. Yet
it remains true that Trump is following Hitler’s pattern of bigotry and harm. In
true fascist fashion he is giving the American people a scapegoat for what they
perceive to be their problems.[1]
That scapegoat isn’t primarily the Jews, though Trump and his MAGA fanatics are
clearly antisemitic. It is our country’s immigrants.
The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants and
their descendants. I suppose the first immigrants to North America were the
people who migrated here from Siberia thousand of years ago. Their descendants
are with us today as Native Americans or, perhaps more properly, people of this
country’s First Nations. That, however, is not what the word “immigrant” refers
to today. The word refers first of all to people who migrated to what became
the United States from Europe beginning in the early seventeenth century CE. A
very large number of people migrated to this country in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries before the country adopted restrictive immigration
laws. I have ancestors who came to this country from various parts of Europe in
the seventeenth century and ancestors who came in the nineteenth century, and
my family history is far from rare among us Euro-Americans. There were in the
nineteenth century also a great many immigrants to this country from Asia, particularly
from China. And of course there were the involuntary immigrants African descent
most of whom were slaves until 1865 and who were and are people of such African
descent right up to the present day.
Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans are
not, however, who Trump means by immigrants though he certainly is bigoted toward
African Americans and others. By “immigrants” means people who came here, or
whose parents came here, much more recently. They have come mostly though not
exclusively from Mexico, the nations of Central America, and South America. Not
all but a great many of them are people of color, not necessarily Black people
(though some of them are) but people whose family history includes a large
percentage of First Nations heritage. They aren’t white like those of us of
pure European heritage are. Many of them don’t speak English, their native
language being Spanish or some other tongue. They are in some significant ways
different from the majority of the people of the United States.[2]
Many of them are relatively easy to identify, though a great many native-born American
citizens have ancestors from the places from which these immigrants come and
look not dissimilar to them.
These immigrants are not the cause of our nation’s economic
or other problems. Most of them are constructive members of society. In fact,
it is clear that American agriculture would collapse without them. So would the
building trades. Many of them work in the landscaping, hospitality, and other
industries. They pay taxes, and those of them who are not here “legally” receive
no benefits from those taxes.
Which raises the question of legal versus illegal
immigration. Since the 1920s, the United States has had extremely restrictive
immigration laws. We have established quotas of people who may move here
legally from the other countries of the world. These laws were probably
motivated by bigotry toward Jews and Asians, but they apply to everyone. As far
as I know, people wishing to move to the US fill those quotas every year. They
are the “legal” immigrants among us.
A great many people, however, enter our country without
going through immigration process American law, for better or for worse,
establishes. They are the “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants among us. Most
of them come from Central America. They come mainly from countries like El
Salvador, where poverty is rampant and the government is oppressive and brutal.
They come to avoid governmental violence and the poverty that makes it hard for
them even to survive. I suppose there are “illegal” immigrants who do not fit
that pattern, but most of them do. Microsoft Copilot tells me there were approximately
eleven million undocumented immigrants in the country in 2022. They thus make
up a grand total of around 0.03% of our country’s population. They don’t make
up much more of a percentage today.
Now here’s a truth far too few Americans understand. Under
international law, every person has the right to enter a country other than
their own for the purpose of seeking asylum. They seek a place of safety from
the brutality and poverty of their home countries. They seek a better life for
themselves and their children. A great many supposedly “illegal” immigrants
come here for that purpose. Whether they qualify for asylum or not isn’t our
issue. Our point is that though they did not come here through legal US
channels, under international law they are not here illegally. They are
exercising a perfectly legal right under that international law.
Though most of them are in fact not here illegally (at least
under international law), and though most of them make positive contributions
to our country, Trump is using them in very much the same way Hitler used the
Jews. They are the scapegoats he is giving his followers. They are a small,
vulnerable group, making them a good target for the bigotry of fascists and
good scapegoats for our fascist leader to use in this way. Trump has turned ICE
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) into a Gestapo-like force for attacking
immigrants and even people who aren’t immigrants but who look to ICE agents
like immigrants. These agents cover their faces, making individual agents
impossible to identify. They operate largely without warrants. They burst in on
businesses and on any sort of public gathering an haul people away. They have
generated great fear among not only immigrants but among American citizens who
have reason to believe that ICE agents will take them for immigrants.
Once ICE hauls someone away, that person often ends up in
what can only be called a concentration camp. The most recently constructed and
most infamous of these camps is called Alligator Alcatraz, or sometimes,
Alligator Auschwitz though it is not an extermination facility, at least not
yet. It is located in marshlands in Florida surrounded by water with alligators
obviously present, hence the facility’s popular name. People are sent there and
to other detention facilities without due process of law, and they get no due
process of law while they are there. Alligator Alcatraz bears a startling
similarity to the detention barracks at Auschwitz, a similarity that should be
unsettling to all Americans and certainly is to me.
All of that is just some of the abomination taking place in
our country today, We call ourselves “ the land of the free,” but an enormous
number of us are not free but are held, probably illegally, in ICE detention
facilities. We say we are a country governed by laws not by the whims of any
person, but today much of our federal government serves not under the law but at
the whims of Donald Trump. We call ourselves the world’s longest established
republic, and in a sense we are. But our republican (and I mean small r
republican here) form of government is under assault by a president who wants
to be a dictator and who may think that he already has dictatorial power that
others, especially the federal courts, are keeping him from exercising. We are
governed not by committed democrats (and I mean small d democrats here) but by
an American fascist and those who kneel before him.
So we have to ask: What was there to celebrate yesterday,
July 4, 2025? Congress just passed and Trump just signed one of the most unconscionably
unfair and destructive pieces of legislation in the country’s history. Are we supposed
to celebrate that abomination of a law? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump
building (or at least gloating over) concentration camps in alligator-infested
swamps? Are we supposed to celebrate the way the president isn’t sure he is
obligated to obey the constitution and who thinks the nation’s courts have no
power over him? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s assault on our democratic
system of government? Are we supposed to celebrated his celebrated personal
immorality? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s fascist campaign against the
immigrants among us? Are we supposed to celebrate Trump’s MAGA movement with
its irrational anger, bigotry, and violence?
Well, far too many people among us think all of those
abominations are good things. They are happy to celebrate the country in which
they are taking place. I and a great many others know that these and so many
others are disastrous things Trump is doing to our country not good things for
it. They make celebration of our country in the tradition of the Fourth of July
simply impossible for me and for a great many others. Yes, my country was
founded on principles of democracy and freedom, though it has never lived up to
those principles as much as it claims to have done. But my country today is a
political and social wasteland. It is ruled by a mob of wholly irrational
people who made the least qualified man ever to hold the office president not
once but twice. A mob that celebrates illegality and authoritarianism at the
highest levels of our national government.
So no, I did not celebrate yesterday. I will not be able to
celebrate my country in any way at all until we wake up from the nightmare of
Donald Trump. Yes, something of world significance happened on July 4, 1776.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence is in many ways one of the most powerful
and significant documents in human history. But my country lives under a dark
cloud, the dark cloud of the fascist Donald Trump. He distorts and rots nearly
everything about my national government, and his congressional acolytes
facilitate his doing it. At the ends of their sacred Seder meal Jews often say:
“Next year in Jerusalem.” Today I say, maybe some day in America, but not
today. Not yesterday. No July Fourth until we are rid of Donald Trump and his
American fascism. May that day come much sooner than later.
[1]
And he tells them that their problems are far worse than they really are.
Fascists need a people in despair if they are going to become true
totalitarians.
[2] I
first wrote “America” not “United States” here, but then it dawned on me that
most of these immigrants also come from America, just other parts of the
Americas than most of us do.
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