Happy Birthday, you weird little toddler
If you think about our history, it is no wonder that the United States is so erratic.
Collectively, our ancestors began their American stories in a handful of roles:
Those who came here to conquer.
Those who came here to profit.
Those who came here to escape.
Those who were brought here against their will.
Those who were already here and were wiped out to make room for the rest.
So we are all carrying generational markers of cruelty, extraction, trauma, and one hell of a survival instinct. Or some combination thereof.
Let's add in that the origin stories (and grudges) predate our shared society. From all over the world. All religions, races, creeds, tribes, and whatever other way we organize ourselves.
Then we got thrown together into a legal arrangement that traces its roots back to European for-profit exploration, collided headfirst with Enlightenment political theory, and somehow ended up functioning like three LLCs in a trench coat.
We inherited conquest logic, exile logic, scarcity logic, survival logic, domination logic, and mythmaking all competing inside one national story. The chaos isn't random. It's inherited. It's baked into the systems, incentives, and values that shape how we behave every day.
On top of that, we're only 250 years old.
Which I know we're all getting excited about, but in the grand scheme of human civilization that's basically toddler status. Sure, we know how to walk and talk, but we can't regulate our emotions for shit.
I don't say any of this to dismiss America, even if my tone occasionally suggests otherwise. I say it because it leads me to a different conclusion.
America isn't just a country. It's an experiment in autonomy. An experiment in the power of choice over what nature or nurture or circumstance might find inevitable.
Every generation has wrestled with the same impossible question: How much should other people get a say in how you live your life? Where is the line between individual freedom and the common good? What actually belongs to you?
Strip away the slogans, the parties, and the issues of the day, and that's the argument we've been having since 1776.
It's easy to shit on the United States. For every firework in the sky tonight, there's an example of injustice, cruelty, corruption, incompetence, or general debauchery that makes a person wonder whether the red, white, and blue is worth celebrating.
Sometimes it isn't. But buried underneath all of that mess is one of the more remarkable acts of political self-restraint that has shaped Western democracy.
The people who wrote the Constitution didn't have to give away power.
They could have created another monarchy. They could have made themselves a permanent ruling class. They could have built a government where only they — or people just like them — got a say, forever.
Instead, they chose something different.
They deliberately limited their own authority and built a Constitution that assumed future generations would know things they didn't. They left us a system that could be argued with, amended, challenged, and improved because they understood that no group of human beings — including themselves — would always get it right.
Was it enough? Obviously not.
Enslaved people were denied their humanity. Indigenous nations were displaced and destroyed. Women were left out. The list of failures is long and devastating.
But here's the thing: Progress wasn't inevitable.
George Washington didn't have to walk away from power. He could have stayed. Plenty of people wanted him to. History is full of leaders who decided they were simply too important to leave. He left anyway. That choice mattered.
The end of slavery wasn't inevitable either. (I say from my home in Richmond, Virginia.)
It required a catastrophic collision over the future of the Union, the economics of enslavement, and who counted as fully human under the Constitution. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Lincoln made extraordinary choices to preserve the Union, including exercising powers that limited democracy greatly and flatly stating that if he could keep the Union without freeing a single slave, he would.
The contradictions were real.
And then came Reconstruction. For a brief shining moment, America tried to build a democracy that looked more like the promises it had written down. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't complete. But it was one of the boldest expansions of political inclusion the country had ever attempted.
Then we chose to stop.
We abandoned Reconstruction. We accepted segregation. We tolerated terror. We chose reconciliation between white Americans over justice and equal citizenship for Black Americans. We spent generations shrinking the very circle we had begun to expand.
That's the pattern.
The American experiment has never failed because it tried to include too many people. It has stumbled every time we've decided the circle’s grown too big.
That's why this experiment is never finished.
Not because history demands a particular outcome. But because every generation gets another choice.
We can widen the circle or we can shrink it.
We can treat freedom as something we share or as something we hoard.
We can practice self-restraint and let enough be enough — or we can convince ourselves that people who look, act, or live like us deserve more power than everyone else.
Democracy doesn't survive because institutions magically protect it. It survives because ordinary people choose, over and over again, to honor the idea that no one gets the final word.
The story of America has never been that we got it right. It's that we left ourselves the ability — and the responsibility — to keep trying.
That's a country worth criticizing. It's also one worth fighting for.
Happy Birthday, you weird little toddler.