Libs Had One Request For July 4th But They Won't Get It

By Jacob Taylor | Friday, 08 July 2022 05:15 AM
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Libs Had One Request For July 4th But They Won't Get It

Many of the nation’s liberal editorial authors seem to have determined in 2022 that the Fourth of July is not worth honoring — or is best observed by turning America’s independence into an occasional to push radical left-wing opinions.

In the Los Angeles Times, for example, a column declared: “July Fourth is a sham. Only reparations can make it real.” The column, written by Erika D. Smith, declared:

"I’m reminded of the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass who asked in 1852: “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?"

"Indeed, 170 years later, with half of Congress defending an attempted coup by a former president and his racist mob and the Supreme Court stripping women of rights and threatening to do the same to others, I wonder how any American can celebrate 'freedom' without thinking it a sham."

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Reparations, by the most basic definition, is the government admitting it did something bad and then doing something about it. And that is the most accurate form of patriotism. Love not just of country but of the people who populate it.

Smith’s selective reading of Frederick Douglass is common on the radical left. As Breitbart News noted in 2018, they sometimes miss the rest of the speech, in which Douglass said that the Fourth of July was a “sham” as long as there was still slavery and affirmed that the Declaration of Independence and the principles of the country’s founding were still redemptive:

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Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.

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Those on today’s left continue to feel differently. In the Washington Post, column Paul Waldman declared that “it’s time for us to declare our own independence, from Founding Father fetishism.”

He claims that the original founders of the country would be horrified by the judicial doctrine of originalism, which holds that the Constitution must be interpreted according to the meaning of the words at the time they were written. That reading has led to recent decisions such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973). Waldman sets up a straw man:

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This is not a request to reject the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and drafted the Constitution. We don’t have to tear down every statue of them (though frankly the statues don’t do anyone much good), or cast them only as villains in our national story.

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