By Chris Stirewalt | July 3, 2026
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By Chris Stirewalt
Thursday, July 2
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AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough
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It is my devoted prayer that the last thing you, gentle readers, are interested in today is the crummy politics of the moment.
In the four months between today and Nov. 3, we will have plenty of time to do the work given us to do: sort out what is likely to happen, why that is so and what it tells us about what’s to come. I love politics and am endlessly fascinated by what its practice tells us about our country. As the youth would say: I’m here for it.
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But this is the federal observance of Independence Day, the beginning of a long weekend intended to allow Americans to revel in our inheritance as a free people with a government built for the purpose of ensuring those inalienable rights ratified by the Continental Congress on — as former President John Adams would want you to know — July 2, 1776.
The story of politics in 2026 is about how different warring factions in our society think and feel about that inheritance. Ours is a period of political unrest for many reasons — technological change, cultural ferment, demographic swings and economic restructuring among them — but the debate at the center of it all reaches all the way back to Philadelphia 250 years ago.
A progressive might tell you that a tax revolt by a bunch of wealthy slave owners wasn’t so much a hinge point of history, but more like a turn in the course of societal evolution. Advances in science, literacy and enlightened thinking were going to wipe away the idea of royal rule by divine right eventually. Former President Jefferson might even have agreed, believing as he did in an arc of history bending toward progress. If you believe the same thing, then perhaps you think it’s cool that America got there first and has been around to prod progress along the way for these 2 1/2 centuries, but maybe the Revolution wasn’t essential. This is a vision former President Obama laid out in his speeches about the nature of American exceptionalism.
But if you go farther down that line of thinking, to, say, democratic socialism, you might conclude that the oligarchic nature of the American founding actually inhibited human progress. Because wealthy, white, male elites claimed the mantle of freedom even as they systematically oppressed and killed enslaved Indigenous peoples and Africans and their descendants, a false version of liberty was promulgated and used to restrain the true power of the people who are, even today, denied the freedom to fashion a government that will meet their material and cultural needs. Thomas Paine might be the intellectual godfather of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Discontentment with the work of the founders is hardly only a province of the modern American left, though. A resurgent nationalism on the right admires the courage and tenacity of the founders to break away from Britain and establish a new nation, but it has its complaints about the principles on which that nation was founded. Leaders like Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) have argued that the universality of the principles laid out in Philadelphia and enshrined in the Constitution have been abused and are unfit for a nation so culturally diverse and increasingly atheistic. They would take encouragement from the fiery denunciations of federal power by Patrick Henry and in the writings of Robert Yates.
While this way of thinking points initially at a kind of libertarianism in which the federal government is the enemy of the sacred rights of every American, it may lead to a next conclusion that because those abuses have gone on so long, it is necessary to turn the power of that government on the institutions of the left that have been succored by the, in their minds, anachronistic, self-defeating liberalism of the founders’ ideas.
This weekend, Americans have the chance to celebrate the bounty of our liberty. But maybe we might also take the time to consider a couple of questions about the founding that run through our current debates.
Was it worth it? And was it necessary?
America’s amazing success and the extraordinary degree of freedom we enjoy today could be sufficient answers to the first one. Even for every mistake and wicked deed by our leaders from 1776 to today, we might tote up the ledger and say that we’ve got it pretty good — probably better than any people in history — and conclude that independence was worthwhile. It was, in other words, a smart, if risky, play.
But on the necessity of the Revolution, we have to think more about what the founders did next. The really bold move wasn’t starting what was, in effect, a civil war between British subjects. That could be just a cynical play for wealth and power. But in hanging the entirety of the effort on the idea, as ancient as Socrates, that each person can and must think for themselves. The founding replaced the divine right of kings with the idea of divine rights given to the individual.
In that way of thinking, human history was thrown off its axis in July 1776 and kept there by the dedication, sacrifice and extraordinary providence in the years and centuries to come. In this vision, America is both great and good, with its greatness coming from its goodness, and not the other way around. The establishment of the then still very much incomplete equality of all people before the law — equality based on the fact that we are equal in the eyes of our creator — was the real revolution of 1776. The sad end of so many similar efforts before and after speak not only to the remarkable circumstances and good luck of the moment for America, but of the power of that idea.
But those are questions every American has to answer for themself. It would be un-American to think otherwise …
With that in mind, we offer you today a smorgasbord of some of the best writing and speeches about the founding. I hope you’ll sample what’s on offer in hopes that you will find a richer, deeper appreciation of the gifts of both independence and liberty.
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Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audience.
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Programming alert: Watch “The Hill Sunday” with Chris Stirewalt — A special Independence Day weekend edition, including a debate on the American Revolution with professors Cornel West and Robert P. George, a dispatch from the biggest small-town Fourth of July celebration in the nation and a slice of history from Bennett Rea of "Cookin’ with Congress." Be sure to catch us on NewsNation at 10 a.m. EDT / 9 a.m. CDT or your local CW station.
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Holy croakano! We welcome your feedback, so please email us with your tips, corrections, reactions & amplifications: WholeHogPolitics@TheHill.com.
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If you’d like to be considered for publication, please include your name and hometown. If you don’t want your comments to be publicized, please specify.
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U.S. POPULATION
1776: ~4.05 million
1826: 11.83 million
1876: 45.61 million
1926: 113.37 million
1976: 221.17 million
2026: 342.62 million
(Census Bureau)
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LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR U.S. CITIZENS
1776: 34.8 Years
1826: 34.8 Years
1876: 35.1 Years
1926: 57.9 Years
1976: 72.8 Years
2026: 79.5 Years
(United Nations)
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U.S. GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT, PER CAPITA (IN 2011 DOLLARS)
1776: $2,419
1826: $2,198
1876: $5,050
1926: $11,648
1976: $27,058
2026: $94,430
(International Monetary Fund)
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A great culinary experience
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The New York Times: “America’s food history is short, compared with the ancient cuisines of the world. Some of its greatest hits were imported, and not everyone loves its outsize influence on the rest of the globe. But one thing is clear: 250 years of eating, cooking and innovating have produced a distinct and abundant culinary culture. With help from several food historians and writers, we’ve developed a decade-by-decade tour of the most important dishes, books, movements and inventions that have shaped the national diet. ...Hunger is an unexpected enemy during the Revolutionary War, when more than twice as many soldiers die of malnourishment than fall in combat. But the troops persevere with the help of a simple Native American recipe of corn and water cooked over a fire. … Americans are still cooking a lot like Brits when Amelia Simmons publishes ‘American Cookery,’ the first cookbook written by an American, for Americans. It marks a break from the Old World expressed through food. Although she includes plenty of British dishes, the book introduces recipes for what will become Thanksgiving staples: pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, which Simmons pairs with turkey.”
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Second Treatise on Government (1690): John Locke: “Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society. What I have said here, concerning the legislative in general, holds true also concerning the supreme executor, who having a double trust put in him, both to have a part in the legislative, and the supreme execution of the law, acts against both, when he goes about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of the society. He acts also contrary to his trust, when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes; or openly preengages the electors, and prescribes to their choice, such, whom he has, by sollicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise, won to his designs; and employs them to bring in such, who have promised before-hand what to vote, and what to enact.”
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Letter to the mayor of Washington (1826): Former President Jefferson: “The kind invitation I received from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself. … I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally, with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us, on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission and the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. … The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others—for ourselves let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
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‘What to the slave is the Fourth of July?’ (1852): Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: 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. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. … God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o'er! When from their galling chains set free, The oppress'd shall vilely bend the knee, And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom's reign, To man his plundered rights again Restore. God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow!”
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Speech at Lewiston, Ill. (1858): Former President Lincoln: “Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Declaration of American Independence.”
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Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States: (1876): Susan B. Anthony: “And now, at the close of a hundred years, as the hour-hand of the great clock that marks the centuries points to 1876, we declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself — to all the opportunities and advantages life affords for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations — that woman was made for man — her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will. We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.”
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Address at the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926): Former President Coolidge: “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection. It is little wonder that people at home and abroad consider Independence Hall as hallowed ground and revere the Liberty Bell as a sacred relic. That pile of bricks and mortar, that mass of metal, might appear to the uninstructed as only the outgrown meeting place and the shattered bell of a former time, useless now because of more modern conveniences, but to those who know they have become consecrated by the use which men have made of them. They have long been identified with a great cause. They are the framework of a spiritual event. The world looks upon them, because of their associations of one hundred and fifty years ago, as it looks upon the Holy Land because of what took place there nineteen hundred years ago. Through use for a righteous purpose they have become sanctified.”
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Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on July 4 (1965): The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I would like to discuss some of the problems that we confront in the world today, and some of the problems that we confront in our own nation. By using as a subject, the American dream. And I choose this subject because America is essentially a dream. It is a dream of a land where men of all races, of all nationalities, and of all creeds can live together as brothers. The substance of the dream is expressed in these sublime words. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ... In the final analysis, racial discrimination must be uprooted from our society because it is morally wrong. It must be done because segregation stands against all of the noble precepts of our Judeo-Christian heritage. It must be done because segregation substitutes an I-it relationship for the I-thou relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. And so this problem must be solved, not merely because it is diplomatically expedient, but because it is morally compelling. So every person of goodwill in this nation is called upon to work passionately and unrelentingly to realize the American dream.”
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Address to the nation on Independence Day (1986): Former President Reagan: “Last night when we rededicated Miss Liberty and relit her torch, we reflected on all the millions who came here in search of the dream of freedom inaugurated in Independence Hall. We reflected, too, on their courage in coming great distances and settling in a foreign land and then passing on to their children and their children's children the hope symbolized in this statue here just behind us: the hope that is America. It is a hope that someday every people and every nation of the world will know the blessings of liberty. … My fellow Americans, it falls to us to keep faith with them and all the great Americans of our past. Believe me, if there's one impression I carry with me after the privilege of holding for years the office held by Adams and Jefferson and Lincoln, it is this: that the things that unite us — America's past of which we're so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much-loved country — these things far outweigh what little divides us. And so tonight we reaffirm that Jew and gentile, we are one nation under God; that black and white, we are one nation indivisible; that Republican and Democrat, we are all Americans. Tonight, with heart and hand, through whatever trial and travail, we pledge ourselves to each other and to the cause of human freedom, the cause that has given light to this land and hope to the world.”
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How a two-word edit from Benjamin Franklin shaped the Declaration and the republic it launched — Franklin Institute
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‘As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free’ — The Atlantic
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Lindsay Chervinsky: The ‘glorious complexity’ of the founders as a national symbol — Medium
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Robert Pondiscio: An uncomplicated anniversary is a relic of the past — Commentary
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Yuval Levin: A birthday, yes, but also the anniversary of a marriage — The Free Press
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“I am almost tempted to wish he had lost something else.”
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President of the Continental Congress John Jay remarking on his colleague, the peg-legged playboy Gouverneur Morris.
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“Men and melons are hard to swallow”
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“As in a maze he stood to gaze,/ The truth can’t be deny’d, Sir;/ He spy’d a score of kegs, or more,/ Come floating down the tide, Sir.”
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Ironist and Declaration of Independence signatory, Francis Hopkinson, poetically retells how the Continentals tricked the British with kegs secretly filled with explosive gunpowder. The British remained terrified and shot at any floating driftwood or lost barrels.
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You should email us! Write to WholeHogPolitics@TheHill.com with your tips, kudos, criticisms, insights, rediscovered words, wonderful names, recipes, and, always, good jokes.
Please include your real name — at least first and last — and hometown. Make sure to let us know in the email if you want to keep your submission private.
My colleague, that proud daughter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Camille Miner, and I will look for your emails and then share the most interesting ones and my responses here. Clickety clack!
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Mount Vernon: “Born on October 17, 1720, in the small town of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, Christopher Ludwick was introduced to baking by his father, a prosperous baker named Heinrich Ludwig. … In 1754, the ambitious baker emigrated to America in search of opportunity. He set up a shop in Philadelphia, specializing in gingerbread, and married a young widow. By the time of the American Revolution, Ludwick owned nine houses, a farm, and enjoyed his reputation as a respected, and wealthy, Pennsylvanian. … Risking everything he had earned, Ludwick jumped at the opportunity to support the American cause. He served as an elected representative for Pennsylvania in conventions from 1774 to 1776, gaining the admiration of many Founding Fathers in the process. When Thomas Mifflin stated the need for funds to raise arms for the new militia, many legislators sat silent—that is, until Ludwick stood and announced in his accented English, ‘Mr. President, I am but a poor gingerbread baker, but put my name down for two hundred pounds.’”
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Chris Stirewalt is political editor for The Hill and NewsNation, the host of "The Hill Sunday" on NewsNation and The CW, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of books on politics and the media.
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