Americans like to tell themselves that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world. As with the “God bless the United States of America” that ends so many political speeches, frequent repetition has hollowed out these words, leaving them mostly a shibboleth to register a speaker’s patriotism.

U.S. history has far better examples of political rhetoric that serves the country and the common good. Rather than political expediency, those examples name both American aspirations and failures. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, beset by a politics that grows ever more polarized, fueled by a rhetoric of division and exclusion, we need such honesty more than ever.

Some may find it hard to celebrate a nation that seems divided against itself or fear that doing so amounts to an endorsement of one set of partisan claims over another. Despite such tensions, July 4 still can and should serve as a time to honor the common past Americans share and to reflect on how to “form a more perfect Union” together.

In the summer of 1852, Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and himself a person who had been enslaved, addressed the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, N.Y., to commemorate the day that he described as “yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

For Douglass, July 4 was a day that revealed to the millions still enslaved “the gross injustice and cruelty to which [they are] the constant victim.” He added, “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”

Douglass bluntly called out the hypocrisy of the nation for ongoing oppression, but he also held out hope that the Constitution, properly interpreted, would be recognized as a “glorious liberty document” and took consolation in the thought “that America is young.”

It is the promise of what the nation aspires to be that Americans celebrate as the United States of America marks its 250th year. Americans should reject the false choice between an uncritical celebration that papers over the nation’s sins and a despair that is cynically blind to the country’s virtues.

America’s founders envisioned a nation that would recognize the natural rights of individuals and would realize popular sovereignty through representative government. In Federalist 55, James Madison argued that this form of government presupposes an “esteem and confidence” in human nature, even as it guards against “a degree of depravity in mankind.” The founders maintained that no human being has a natural right to rule another and, consequently, rejected the divine right of kings. They insisted upon the rule of law and safeguarded the freedom of the press and of religion. 

This idealism coexisted with the glaring contradiction of the institution of slavery, and its commitment to freedom has been a work in progress ever since it began. The independence declared on July 4, 1776, marked the conception of a nation, not its final formation. The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation in 1789 and has been amended 27 times since. 

While this imperfect union suffered through its bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, during which 750,000 Americans died, Douglass attended Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which was delivered with the war still unfinished. Like Douglass, Lincoln forthrightly confronted the nation’s sins but guarded a profound hope nonetheless. 

The nation’s 16th president described the “scourge of war” as a recompense for the sin of slavery and “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil.” Lincoln refused to equate God’s providence with the goal of military victory—“the Almighty has his own purposes”—and called the nation to “strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

At its best, this nation has pressed forward toward the common good, not merely its own greatness. In 1920, the 19th Amendment finally recognized women’s right to participate in self-governance. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States rebuilt shattered European nations, including enemies it had just defeated, after World War II. Two decades later, the nation passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, more steps in the long journey toward equality. As late as 1990, a bipartisan effort led to the passing of the Americans With Disabilities Act. 

More recently, American generosity and decency helped contain the spread of H.I.V./AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and responded to earthquakes, famines and floods overseas. That such commitments have been broken in the past two years betrays the values held by Americans at their best, but should not lead us to despair of those values themselves.  

As the United States marks this milestone, the first American pope sits on the chair of Peter. Since his election, Leo XIV has time and again called for peace and for nations to work for the common good. “No nation, no society, and no international order can call itself just and humane if it measures its success solely by power or prosperity while neglecting those who live at the margins,” Leo said in May.

Earlier this year, leaders from the National Constitution Center presented Pope Leo with the 2026 Liberty Medal at the Vatican, and the pope will offer a live video address to the center at an event on July 3 in Philadelphia. At the Vatican ceremony on April 30, he recalled the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that human rights come from our creator, saying, “May those values continue to inspire us in the United States and throughout the world, and together, hopefully, we can all work that those freedoms will indeed be a part of the lives of all people everywhere.” 

That aspiration will never be fulfilled without tireless prophetic voices that name ongoing, structural injustices. Such voices inspire their fellow citizens to act. From the abolitionists to the suffragists, from the labor organizers to the marchers at Selma, from the pro-life advocates to the defenders of immigrants’ rights, the arc of American history has bent toward justice only when ordinary people demanded it. In that spirit, Americans of goodwill must work together toward a more perfect union. 

In 1926, as the nation marked its 150th anniversary, America’s editors called the American project “unfinished work.” May this Fourth of July, both in its celebration and its contradictions, inspire all Americans to take up the still unfinished work of building a more just nation.

This article appears in July/August 2026.