If 50 years ago historian Jesse Lemisch could speak of “schlock” as “the Bicentennial’s most pervasive manifestation and perhaps its most enduring heritage”^[1], today we have moved to an era of slop. The patriotic kitsch of a laboriously planned 200th centennial was unbearable to the critically minded American citizen enough that it inspired among New Left activists a “People’s Centennial” that would offer a counter-narrative to the mainstream celebration; today it seems hard to muster up a meaningful response beyond sounding off the usual leftist platitudes we’ve repeated for so long on social media. With the MAGA regime at the helm of the Empire, today's displays seem less and less like a conscious ruling class attempt to unite a divided nation than a pathetic display of an Empire flailing about without direction, grasping at whatever historical symbology it can without any care for its meaning.

From the perspective of humanity as a whole, the American Revolution was an event driven by what seem today rather parochial concerns. Yet this revolution proclaimed itself, albeit hypocritically, as carrying the banner of universal humanity and giving rise to a republic that today holds the world under its dominion, however precarious this hold may currently be. One cannot help but think of another state, also formed by a group of settlers who declared independence from their British patrons to form a new republic that would go on to commit genocide and seek expansion: the state of Israel. Today, the left finds reclaiming the 4th of July difficult for this very reason; we have become more historically aware, more sensitive to the realities of what this country was built upon, and have even gone as far as in some quarters to say the American Revolution was in fact a counter-revolution if anything, even denying its role as a necessary moment in the birth of bourgeois society.

Yet if the left finds it difficult to reclaim the American Revolution, we should not lose sight of the fact that this debate is also happening on the right. If the modern left finds a poison pill in the Declaration of Independence in its call for further expansion into indigenous lands, sections of the modern right itself find a poison pill in the call that “All men are created equal”. Hence we see rightist author Scott M Greer pushing back against claims that “it was a libtarded ‘Masonic’ plot against proper order”. This is not to imply there has been a complete rejection of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in today's right; we still see the Patriot Front fascists marching in the streets of DC today. Yet for a tech right that only has disdain for democracy, best represented by the likes of Curtis Yarvin, the ideals of the Declaration of Independence are inherently tainted by an Enlightenment egalitarianism that inherently leads to the mob rule of communism.

Hence, it seems that no one really believes in this American Project anymore, at least anyone seriously ideological. Sure, Zohran Mamdani gives us the usual Obama-liberal style spiel that America is not some fixed idea but a promise with never-ending potential, the kind of sincere millennial optimism that feels aesthetically symptomatic of conciliation with the system. But who is seriously moved by this? What is this ‘America’ that is so full of potential? For the MAGA right, increasingly, the American people must be understood in racial terms, where “true Americans” are those “heritage Americans” with proper European ancestry. Liberals answer with the classic argument that America is an idea. What is this idea? At the end of the day, the only real “idea” that holds together the American people as some kind of nation is its Constitution - to be an American is to live under its authority. Hence, the Constitution carries a sacred status, a marker of national identity itself, and it even becomes easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the American Constitution for some. So while the American project seems to have lost hold over any ideologues capable of carrying it forward, its trappings still ritualistically hold us in their snare.

After all, the Constitution seems like the only force that can protect us from the MAGA ethnocrats, who seek to forge a vision of the American project that returns it to the Herrenvolk Republic roots of settlerism and slaveocracy. Like an American Likud, they seek an “Iron Wall” to enclose the nation around a certain ethnic majority while also seeking to expand its domain in the name of a “Greater America”. The Civil Rights Movement and the Amendments of Reconstruction, genuine advances won in the class struggle on this soil, are to be reversed. MAGA comes off as a movement that wants to destroy everything that is actually noble and salvageable in American history, instead leaving only AI-produced nationalist slideshows of DHS purges of “undesirable” elements to stand for the image of the nation.

Yet we cannot fall back on the archaic mythologies, documents, and legal systems that ultimately got us here in the first place. We must be bold enough to call for an end to this Constitution, but we must be clear that it will also be an end to the America we know today, not only the institutional form of the U.S. federal system but also the current mythos and identity that inform it. Out of this decaying Empire, which more and more appears to be stagnating into a death drive, something new must be created. A New America that is merely one nation among the many of the world, assimilating into a global community of equals, ruled by a truly democratic community of labor, that in its foundation addresses the national aspirations of the oppressed peoples within the current borders of the US and strives for a world without exploitation and oppression.

Yes, the American people, as they currently exist, are not ready for this. Our own socialist movement, the force capable of leading such a venture, is still nascent, struggling to declare its own independence. In the coming decades, however, the crisis posed by our imperial decline will force confrontations that will render the existing arrangements increasingly untenable. Fascist revanchism and racialism will attempt to restore the old hierarchies, to keep the imperial status alive and reassert racial hierarchies, reenslave women, and persecute sexual minorities. Liberals will be reactive, fall back on tired tropes of identity politics and constitutionalism, failing to offer any kind of inspiring vision for a path forward. Our response must be bold and revolutionary, not timid and defensive. Rather than hoping for left-liberal coalitions to manage decline to ward off the MAGA threat, we must advocate a complete break with existing institutions. Naming the system in all its dimensions must be the focus of agitation and propaganda.

Through an arduous struggle in the coming years, it is possible the American people may produce something more worthy of the phrase “all men are created equal” than this existing arrangement. It is also possible that we will only fall deeper into the pits, and 50 years from today, there will be a tricenential that has gone from schlock to slop to something even worse. One thing is certain: for all the praise of the dynamism and innovation of the American people, this current arrangement has gone on for 250 years too long.

1. Marc Stein, "The Bicentennial Made American History Look Ridiculous," History News Network, June 5, 2026, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/bicentennial-marc-stein. The best thing to come out of this bicentennial was probably the Grateful Dead's Franklin's Tower.

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