Find our good
Two anniversaries, one just concluded and one approaching, should prompt some thinking about the nature and purpose of such occasions, specifically those of national scale.
This summer, the Chinese Communist Party commemorated its centennial in the style at which dictatorships specialize. Everyone from the smallest children to the highest officialdom was “invited” to applaud the successes of the past 100 years—the latest 2 percent of Chinese history. The events were uniformly grandiose and uplifting. Never was heard a discouraging word.
President Xi Jinping’s speeches and party propaganda during the centennial pounded the theme of China’s coming dominance over an economically fading and culturally decadent United States. The picture presented to the nation and the world was of a China about to resume its rightful place as the center of the world after a brief interruption by effete Western values.
Meanwhile, July 4 celebrations reminded many Americans of the imminence of our own next big anniversary, the 250th, of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.
It will be an unusually telling occasion. The way we choose to commemorate that event will define not only who we are as a society today but also who we will be, a successful world-leading society or, as Xi sees us, one en route to self-imposed decline.
Predictably, and sadly, the first calls are being heard for using the 250th as yet another occasion to dwell on America’s shortcomings. One interest group looks forward to a “new” patriotism based on “radical honesty” about the nation’s systemic betrayal of its ideals and vital principles.
Well, that would be one way. I’m sure glad I’m not on the invite list when these folks celebrate family landmarks. They must be a real blast: “Happy Anniversary, dear. Here’s a list of all the things you’ve done to disappoint, anger and betray me over the past year.” Or “Happy birthday, son. Let’s go over all your failures and unacceptable actions during your life so far.”
Imagine what even a tiny gesture of non-radical honesty would have led to during the CCP’s centennial. We can be sure there were no apologies for Mao Zedong’s murdered millions, no wreath-layings at Tiananmen Square, or protests at the gates of Uyghur concentration camps. Anyone murmuring about any of these “systemic” wrongs would risk finding himself on the receiving end of the holiday fireworks.
No one is calling for ignoring any of America’s inequities, past or present. Americans’ capacity for self-criticism is a laudable and essential part of our democratic tradition, and a major reason for the improvements we continue to make in extending freedom. The question raised here is whether a historic anniversary is the time for more of it, or whether there is not value in pausing now and then to appreciate and recognize the good in a person or a nation.
July 4, 1776, marked a huge step forward out of a world of monarchy into a new world of freedom, opportunity and self-government. It was very far from the last step, or a complete step, but undeniably it was a forward one.
We have all year, every year, to examine—I almost said “wallow in”—our shortcomings. There should still be moments when, while welcoming differing views, as always, we accentuate the positive, celebrate the goodness of our people, and the good that the nation has done in its first quarter-millennium.
A successful society for all requires constant self-examination but also a strong degree of confidence and morale. A nation with our history, whose main adversaries today are a 7th-century theocracy, an oligarchic kleptocracy and a totalitarian autocracy, has every reason, at least on a landmark birthday, to observe author Alex Haley’s maxim: “Find the good and praise it.”