Trump's Fourth of July

I am among those who do not like what Trump is planning to do for the Fourth this year.  It is not merely that it is vulgar and overbearing.  It is that it goes against the spirit of the day. Independence Day  commemorates the Declaration of Independence and its principles – the principles that people have rights to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, that governments  properly exist to  respect and secure these rights,  and that when  governments become destructive to those rights, people have the right to alter or abolish them.  The holiday celebrates  the still radical notion that the inalienable rights of individual human beings put limits on the actions of governments, and that there is nothing sacred or suprahuman about the state.

Tanks, warplanes, and boasts about military power just do not belong on the Fourth. It is not that we should not honor the armed forces. We should, and there are two national holidays specifically for that – Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day. It is that Independence Day is about the rights and liberty of the people, not the power of the government or the glory of the nation state.  It is bad enough to have pronouncements from present day politicians of either major party on a day when reason and decency would suggest  that most of them should hide their faces in shame. This thing is worse.