America at 250: The Story That Made a Nation
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the celebrations have unfolded in a surprisingly subdued atmosphere. An occasion that might once have united the nation and captured international attention has instead been overshadowed by everyday controversies and deep political polarization. Media coverage has focused more on the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument than on America’s history or the ideas that shaped the nation. That, in itself, says something about how contemporary America relates to the narrative that once made the nation possible.
From the Pilgrim Fathers to Universal Rights
When Americans celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, they commemorate neither the outbreak of the American Revolution nor the international recognition of independence. Instead, they celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776—a document whose ideas became the central foundation of the narrative that legitimized the independence of the United States of America.
Many nations are founded upon stories of common ancestry, language, or ethnicity. The American story, by contrast, has from the very beginning been a story about freedom. Its roots reach back to the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritan settlers who left Europe during the seventeenth century to establish a society where they could live according to their faith. In their own understanding, their journey resembled the Exodus from Egypt. The Old World represented religious and political oppression; the New World became the Promised Land.
From this experience emerged the vision of America as a “city upon a hill”—a society that, through its example, would show the world a better path. Originally, this was a Protestant narrative about a chosen people and a special mission. With the Declaration of Independence, however, that narrative was reformulated in universal terms.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, he did more than justify the independence of the thirteen colonies. He translated what had originally been a religious narrative into the language of Enlightenment philosophy and natural law. Freedom was no longer the privilege of a particular people but a right belonging to all humanity. This marked the beginning of one of the most successful processes of universalization in history.
Freedom Takes Institutional Form
Over the centuries that followed, the American story gradually expanded. It first became a story capable of embracing an ever broader range of groups within the United States itself. Catholics, Jews, and later people from widely different cultural backgrounds could identify with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ideals of individual liberty without sharing the Pilgrim Fathers’ Protestant founding myth. For many immigrant communities, loyalty to the Constitution became more important than participation in the original story. This may partly explain how Catholics—long viewed with suspicion by many Protestants—have come to occupy some of the nation’s highest offices, not least as Justices of the United States Supreme Court.
At the same time, the Constitution gave the story an institutional form. The American republic was founded not only on a belief in liberty but also on a profound distrust of power. The separation of powers, the rule of law, and constitutional restraints all rested on the conviction that no individual and no institution should be entrusted with unlimited authority. Liberty was to be protected not by virtuous leaders but by institutions capable of checking one another. Underlying this distrust of power was the belief that liberty already belongs to the individual and that the primary task of the state is to protect it, rather than to create or perfect it through political projects.
The Declaration of Independence made it possible to reconcile traditions that had often stood in tension with one another. For religious Americans, liberty could be understood as a God-given right and meant, above all, the freedom to live according to one’s conscience and one’s faith. For liberals, the same liberty could be justified through natural law, reason, or individual rights. For those who sought land, opportunity, or a new life on the North American continent, liberty often meant the chance to begin again and shape one’s own future. Part of the Declaration’s enduring strength lay in its ability to allow different groups to recognize their own ideals within the same story. Yet this was not merely a matter of ambiguity. Beneath these different interpretations lay a shared understanding of liberty as the individual’s right to shape his or her own life.
Over the centuries, this story of freedom continued to expand. It became not only a national story but also one that, throughout much of the Western world, could unite conservatives and liberals, believers and secularists, advocates of the free market and supporters of the welfare state in opposition to authoritarian regimes. During the Cold War, it thus became a central element of the West’s shared self-understanding.
When America Became the Story of the Free World
During the twentieth century, the American story expanded far beyond the borders of the United States. Following the defeat of Nazism and Fascism, liberty, human rights, and democracy became central elements of the West’s shared self-understanding. With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many of the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence acquired global significance. After the Second World War, countries such as West Germany also sought to emulate the American model of constitutional patriotism, building their democratic identity around constitutional principles rather than ethnicity or historical myths.
If the Pilgrim Fathers dreamed of a “city upon a hill,” it was only after 1945 that much of the world came to regard the United States not merely as an example to follow but as the principal guarantor of the liberal international order. America’s global leadership could be legitimized by the belief that American ideals of liberty also embodied universal human values. Despite important differences among conservatives, liberals, and social democrats, there was broad agreement on the importance of individual rights, the rule of law, and the superiority of democracy over communist and other authoritarian systems.
When the Dissolution of the Soviet Union finally brought the Cold War to an end, the American story appeared to reach the height of its success. Liberal democracy, the market economy, and human rights came to be seen by many as the natural destination of political development. Markets became increasingly global. Democracy spread. Many assumed that ever more societies would gradually be integrated into the same liberal international order.
The Crisis of the American Story
Yet just as the American story appeared to have become truly universal, its legitimizing power began to weaken. The Iraq War undermined confidence in the idea that democracy could be exported through military intervention. During the 1990s, many had come to regard liberal democracy as the natural endpoint of history. After the invasion of Iraq, it no longer seemed self-evident that American power could accelerate this development. For many, both within and outside the United States, the war appeared to demonstrate how universal ideals could be invoked to justify geopolitical ambitions and other interests not necessarily connected to liberty or democracy. As the invasion gave way to prolonged violence, instability, and disappointing results, confidence in the idea that democracy could be spread through American power diminished.
At the same time, the financial crisis of 2008 damaged confidence in the economic model that had long been presented as universally successful. While millions of people lost jobs, homes, and savings, banks and financial institutions were rescued with public funds. For many Americans, the crisis became a sign that the system no longer served ordinary citizens. Internationally, it weakened the image of the United States as an economic model.
At the same time, China emerged as a major economic power without democratizing according to Western expectations. As a result, the belief that economic development would automatically lead to liberal democracy lost much of its credibility. The American model no longer appeared to represent the inevitable direction of history. It was not only American policy that came under scrutiny. The broader story of the universal triumph of liberty and liberal democracy itself began to lose its unquestioned authority.
When the Story Turned Inward
For much of the twentieth century, the American story of freedom had served as a common language even for its critics. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, did not reject the Declaration of Independence; it appealed to it. Martin Luther King Jr. demanded that the United States live up to its own ideals. The conflicts concerned how those ideals should be realized, not whether the ideals themselves were legitimate.
Perhaps the strength of the American story lay precisely in its ability to unite several different kinds of narratives. It connected the Pilgrim Fathers’ exodus from the Old World with the Revolution’s struggle against colonial rule and with the vision of an unfinished project of freedom. Like the biblical story of Exodus, it was simultaneously a story of origins, liberation, and a promised future. As a result, generation after generation could interpret its own aspirations through the same narrative. When Martin Luther King compared himself to Moses and the Civil Rights Movement to the Israelites’ journey toward the Promised Land, he was not challenging the American story. He was laying claim to it.
In recent decades, however, criticism of America’s grand narrative gradually changed. For many academics, activists, and public intellectuals, American history came to be seen less as a story of the expansion of freedom and more as a story of colonialism, racism, slavery, patriarchal power structures, and imperialism. Where earlier generations had often criticized the United States for failing to live up to its ideals, an increasing number began to question the legitimizing function of those ideals themselves.
This shift became particularly visible through identity-based perspectives and movements such as Black Lives Matter and intersectional feminism. At the same time, parts of the political left grew increasingly skeptical of Western universalism, American exceptionalism, and the notion that the United States represented a distinctive tradition of freedom worth defending or promoting. For some, the American story no longer appeared to be an unfinished project of liberation but rather a narrative that had itself helped legitimize historical systems of power rooted in white, male dominance.
Within the American left, there was a growing desire to include groups that had long been regarded as marginalized or disadvantaged. The universal American story increasingly made room for narratives that had previously received little attention. In this sense, the process of universalization continued, but no longer with the nation as its self-evident point of departure.
At the same time, a growing number on the political right came to believe that the universal project had become detached from the American people and had sacrificed national interests in the name of globalization. Here, too, the story began to change. Instead of presenting American ideals of freedom as universally valid, increasing emphasis was placed on national distinctiveness, sovereignty, and historical continuity.
As the American story lost its unquestioned legitimacy, no single alternative narrative emerged. Instead, multiple competing narratives arose. Criticism from the left and reactions from the right gradually reinforced one another. The result was that the narrative which had long served as a common point of reference increasingly became itself an object of political conflict.
The phenomenon of Trump should be understood against this backdrop. Trump did not create the crisis of the American story, but he became its clearest political expression. Whereas previous generations of American leaders often portrayed the United States as the bearer of universal values, Trump emphasizes national sovereignty, borders, national interests, and “America First.”
In part, this represents a return to something more particularistic. The story that over two centuries had moved from a Protestant settler society toward ever greater universalism now appears to be turning back toward the nation and toward the vision of a restored national greatness—Make America Great Again. Whereas the older American story emphasized the universal expansion of freedom, Trumpism is rooted more firmly in a narrative of restoration, in which the nation is understood to have lost something valuable that must now be recovered.
Earlier generations could disagree about politics while still sharing a common story about the legitimacy of the nation. Today, the story itself has increasingly become a matter of dispute. What were once political conflicts within a shared narrative have gradually evolved into conflicts between competing narratives about the nation’s identity.
Does America Still Share a Common Story?
Perhaps this is precisely what makes America’s 250th anniversary so significant. The question is not only what the Declaration of Independence meant in 1776. It is also whether the story—or stories—that grew out of it can still provide meaning for America itself.
Over the course of two and a half centuries, the American story of freedom gradually expanded: from a religious community to a nation, from a nation to the Free World, and from the Free World to a claim of universal validity. Today, that trajectory appears, at least in part, to have gone into reverse.
The most important question on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary is therefore not whether the United States remains the world’s most powerful nation, but whether Americans can still unite around the story that once made the nation’s greatness possible. If that story loses its unifying power, the institutions built upon it may gradually lose their legitimacy as well.