America is turning 250. And we’re throwing a yearlong celebration of the greatest country on Earth.
The greatest? Yes. The greatest.
We realize that’s not a popular thing to say these days. Americans have a way of taking this country for granted: A recent Gallup poll shows that American pride has reached a new low. And the world at large, which is wealthier and freer than it has ever been in history, thanks to American power and largesse, often resents us.
We get it.
As journalists, we spend most of our time finding problems, exposing them. It’s what the job calls for.
But if you only focus on the negatives, you get a distorted view of reality. As America hits this milestone birthday, it’s the perfect moment to step back and look closely at where we actually are—and the reality of life in America today compared to other times and places. That reality is pretty spectacular.
Could Thomas Jefferson and the men gathered in Philadelphia who wrote down the words that made our world—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—ever have imagined what their declaration of independence would bring?
The Constitution. The end of slavery—and the defeat of Hitler. Astonishing wealth and medical breakthroughs. Silicon Valley. The most powerful military in the world. The moon landing. Hollywood. The Hoover Dam. The Statue of Liberty (a gift from France). Actual liberation (a thing we gave France). Humphrey Bogart and Tom Hanks. Josephine Baker and Beyoncé Knowles. Hot dogs. Corn dogs. American Chinese food. American Italian food. The Roosevelts and the Kennedys. The Barrymores and the Fondas. Winston Churchill (his mom was from Brooklyn). The Marshall Plan and Thurgood Marshall. Star Wars. Missile defense shields. Baseball. Football. The military-industrial complex. Freedom of religion. UFO cults. Television. The internet. The pill. The Pope. The automobile, the airplane, and AI. Jazz and the blues. The polio vaccine and GLP-1s. The UFC and Dolly Parton.
The list goes on because it’s really, truly endless.
Ours is a country where you can hear 800 languages spoken in New York City, drive two hours, and end up among the Amish in Pennsylvania. We are 342 million people, from California to New York Island, gathered together as one.
Each of those 342 million will tell you that ours is not a perfect country. But we suspect most of them would agree that their lives would not be possible without it.
So for the next 12 months, we’re going to toast to our freedoms. And we’re doing it the Free Press way: by delving into all of it—the bad and the good and the great, the strange and the wonderful and the wild.
We’ll do that, first, in these pages.
For the next year, we’ll be making arguments in favor of the American experiment, and why Americans shouldn’t abandon it. We will revisit our flawed, complicated history while taking a long look at the remaining imperfections of our union. There is no better place to start than right here.
Second, in our podcasts.
Beginning right now with the constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar talking about the worlds that made America on Honestly. And on Breaking History with Eli Lake, a look at why America has always been a dangerous idea.
Third, we’ll do that with you, in real life.
Some of those will be marquee events in major cities—like Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett this September in New York; or tech pioneer Palmer Luckey in D.C. in October. Some of them will be smaller meetups, like the happy hour for Free Pressers under 30 that we’re doing this August. Details and ticket information to come in the coming days—check back here. And of course it will culminate in an epic July 4 celebration.
It’s a free country for free people. We’re celebrating it. Join us.
Via Americana!
I just love you placed UFC and Dolly into the same sentence… because they’re heavy hitters!