172 years ago, Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
“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. … The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
This, the 248th Birthday of the United States of America is a sad one.The ideals, freedoms, and rights that were boldly proclaimed in the Declaration signed in the early days of July in 1776 are under full-fledged assault by one of the two major parties. Yale historian of tyranny Timothy Snyder summed it up in five words on Monday.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The speech has become famous and is often used in schools—a circumstance likely to change if those who have seized the name “Republican” continue their efforts to erase factual history.
His principal point was to ask rhetorically, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” “The freedom gained,” Douglass said to white people, “is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary.” But to those who remained enslaved, he answered that the Fourth of July is “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
Let us update Douglass’s question: “What to the ‘Republican’ today is the Fourth of July?”
Just what is it that those who still identify themselves with the political party that has seized the name “Republican” but no longer believes in a republican form of government celebrating on the Fourth of July?
Freedom? The MAGA leaders of the party oppose women’s freedom, voting rights, and the freedom of anyone who does not follow their Leader. They have made plain that they reject freedom of speech and freedom of the press. They intend to establish a particular religion—all in violation of rights established in the First Amendment.
Overturning monarchy? The rule of law? On Monday, in the aptly named case Trump v. United States, the six Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court ruled that, at least in some areas, the president is, like an absolute monarch, above the law.
The “Second American Revolution” MAGA Promises is a Counter-revolution Against the American Revolution of 1776.
“The people of this country were British subjects . . . You were under the British Crown . . . But, your fathers . . . went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to . . . To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy.”
– Frederick Douglass (July 5, 1852)
A seemingly uncontroversial point that Douglass made was that Americans had been under a monarch and to say that they were right in rejecting that form of government “is exceedingly easy.” Yet one of the major political parties has now adopted the position that the American people should be subjects of a ruler with unlimited power.
Two years short of two-and-a-half centuries ago, Americans said “no” to a king above the law. Three days before the Fourth of July in 2024, six radical Injustices said “yes” to a king above the law. In effect, they said, "George III was right. George Washington was wrong."
In their astounding decision that a president involved in anything that falls under his official powers is not subject to the law—a position that at least most of the six had explicitly rejected in their confirmation hearings—the Injustices put into practice what was symbolized by the Alito family flying the American flag upside down: the repudiation of the American form of self-government.
Flying the American flag upside down shows them not to be believers in American ideals and is therefore a more accurate reflection of their positions than flying it right-side-up.
Project 2025 is The Anti-1776 Project
Trump “re-truthed” this call for televised military tribunals of those who oppose him.
“Republicans” are openly stating their intention to overturn the ideals set forth on the Fourth of July 248 years ago. Donald Trump says he will be a dictator. He will arrest his political opponents, establish concentration camps, shut down media that do not support him, overturn elections that he loses, use violence to bring about his objectives, execute political opponents … He supports the idea of having televised military tribunals to try Liz Cheney and others who dared to oppose him.
The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” is a blueprint for creating an authoritarian government—a “how-to manual” intended to guide a new Trump administration in destroying the American Experiment in self-government and freedom. Its accurate name would be: The anti- and Ante-1776 Project. It is the most un-American plan ever devised to guide an American administration.
Those still in the “Republican” party clearly no longer believe in a republican form of government. They are the real RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”).
Flags carried by January 6th insurrectionists.
The Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried Trump flags, Confederate flags, and upside-down American flags.
The Confederacy was explicitly based on opposition to the ideals put forth in the Declaration of Independence. In his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech,” Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens proclaimed that the Declaration’s belief in human equality is “fundamentally wrong.” The Confederacy directly rejected the 1776 definition of an America based on democracy and insisted that governments do not “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
An inverted United States flag is the only American flag that belongs with a Confederate flag.
As I drive past houses I know to be those of people supporting Trump flying American flags, I am perplexed and saddened. Most of the people living in them, I assume, believe that they are patriotic Americans. They don’t realize that they are backing a totally anti-American movement.
We must awaken them before it is too late.
“There is consolation in the thought that the nation is young,” Douglass said in 1852, and as the nation grew we have moved closer to putting into practice the ideals preached in Philadelphia in 1776.
Our nation is not so young anymore, but we have it within our power to turn back the enormous threat to that that the MAGA movement—it would better be labelled MAaMA (“Make America a Monarchy Again”)—poses.
Some years ago, I saw the two decals below on the rear window of a pickup truck in Mississippi:
That makes exactly as much sense as people currently identified with the“Republican” party flying right-side-up United States flags and celebrating the Fourth of July.
{Robert S. McElvaine is Emeritus Professor of History at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, most recently The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn. He is currently at work on a new book, An Agreed-Upon Fiction: The Creation of the “Inferior” Sex – How It(Mis)Shaped History & The Present. He writes a column on Substack, Musings& Amusings of a B-List Writer. }