“This is not who we are.” Beautiful words, praiseworthy aspiration. In 2016, during the second presidential debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton put a stake in the ground. After recalling Trump’s attacks on ‘women, immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, and so many others,’ Clinton essentially challenged the nation to be better than that. ‘This is not who we are. I want to send the message. ... America is already great. But we are great because we are good, and we will respect each other.’
It’s a beautiful, even powerful sentiment, often used in families, companies, scout troops, social groups, houses of faith, changemaker organizations, and even nations. By virtue of our membership, we ask of ourselves and of each other that we live up to a higher standard of conduct than what might be considered ‘baseline,’ the bare minimum. It’s the idea that when our adversaries behave poorly, we can affect change by showing up with more integrity, honesty, and respect. ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Because when we indulge our impulse to hit back with a similar disregard for norms of civility, empathy, and basic decency, we become the thing we are trying to change.
The problem, however, with Clinton’s evocation of that laudable sentiment, is that it isn’t true, as we all learned on Nov. 8, 2016, and again in November of 2024. Well, it is not true, and also true. It’s true that for 250 years, we have drawn on the words of our Founding Fathers to relentlessly seek to make ‘a more perfect union’ of America. Their words, like other voices of modernity, have been and continue to serve as guiding lights. How can we make ‘We, the People’ include all of us? How can we expand ‘All men are created equal’ to include women and every other group that was excluded at our founding? How can we make real the promise of our Pledge of Allegiance, ‘with justice and liberty for all,’ to ensure that everyone is afforded fair, equal treatment under the law and essential freedoms?
But lest we forget, those same Founding Fathers, who gave us such inspiring, lofty core principles, inspired by the Enlightenment and the idea that every human deserves dignity and a fair shake in life (opportunity), were all white men who didn’t see women as their equals (or equally deserving of opportunity or legal protection), and many of whom literally owned, exploited, and raped other human beings with impunity on the notion of their own white supremacy. They casually dismissed whole swaths of humanity as ‘savages’ and pillaged their lands and their bodies. An attitude that survives to this day, like when former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) said the quiet part out loud, into a microphone. White supremacy was not incidental in our founding, it was built into it, and we did not rid ourselves of it with the defeat of the Confederacy. In 2017, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminded us that more than 140 years after our founding, into the early 20th century, there were scholars at the most prestigious Ivy League universities who were still promoting white supremacy as ‘nature’ and ‘science,’ arguing that ‘the least-qualified white man is better than the most-qualified black man.’ That thinking survived into the late 20th century, and now, into the early 21st century.
So Donald Trump was right. He is cut from the cloth of white European immigrants who imagined that their whiteness would automatically (and ‘rightly’) elevate them above others here, above the indigenous peoples who have been here for over 20,000 years, above the black and brown communities that have been here for centuries. He represents a culture that has insistently resented the progress of the 20th century, from a woman’s right to bodily autonomy in the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and reaching back as far as FDR’s New Deal and its protections for working and senior Americans, and even to the 19th Amendment of 1920 that gave women the right to vote. Just listen to the long list of right-wing, ‘Christian’ Nationalist voices calling for women to submit their vote to their husbands and fathers, in 2026. Trump was right that a large part of our society resented that progress, saw it as a loss of status, and attributed its very real struggles to that progress. It was easier to blame groups who didn’t look like them than the corporate bosses who were actually exploiting them and getting them hooked on opioids. These are folks who have convinced themselves that rights are a zero-sum game, that another person’s success can only have come at the cost of someone else’s injury. Pete Hegseth cannot imagine that the black, brown, and female leaders he is purging from the US military got their position by anything other than an unfair advantage from Affirmative Action and DEI programs. It doesn’t occur to him that they actually earned those positions through decades of service and excellence, proven over and over again, on their own merits. When Charlie Kirk saw a black pilot, he assumed that they were unqualified, that they had gotten the job of flying hundreds of passengers on the sole qualification of their race. That every pilot would have had to earn that position through their education, training, expertise, and experience didn’t cross his mind.
The last time a majority of white voters voted for a Democrat for president was in 1964, 62 years and 15 presidential elections ago, just as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were coming into being. Before that election in 1964, the Democratic party had been led by overt racists like Strom Thurmond. From the moment a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law, the Democratic party has lost the white vote, in every election since.
And so, Secretary Clinton was wrong; this IS who we are. The America that was founded with the original sin of slavery and that carries the legacy of white supremacy that pervades our politics to this day is very real, and is currently in power, and seeking to make that power permanent, by any democratic or anti-democratic means necessary. That America has loudly proclaimed that the ‘existential threat’ to the white, Christian nation they imagine they’ve inherited is so profound, they would gladly sacrifice democracy in order to save that America. They see themselves as the only rightful heirs of the republic, and as its guardians, the only ones who are qualified to decide who is actually American and who is less American. Hence their attack on birthright citizenship, which was codified in the 14th Amendment of 1868 in response to slavery, and is therefore part of our Constitution.
The mission to ‘Make America Great Again’ is a crusade to reverse a century of progress and restore a white supremacist patriarchy. As Margaret Atwood has mused about her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, it was meant as a warning, ‘not an instruction manual.’ Turns out, a big part of America is glad for the instruction and bored by the warning. White Americans, whose families have been here for less than a few generations, often view and talk about black Americans, whose ancestors were involuntarily brought here some 8-27 generations ago, as ‘less American.’ And they view Native Americans, whose ancestors have been here for 500-1,500 generations, as even less qualified to call themselves Americans. (The irony that a native American would somehow be ‘less American’ than a descendant of European immigrants escapes them.) I recall an account a few years ago, about a man standing in line for coffee behind another man, who was speaking on his phone in an unfamiliar language. When the call ended, the observer suggested to the caller that, ‘This is America. Speak English.’ To which the caller responded, ‘I was speaking Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language.’
We will not progress toward a more perfect union until we reckon honestly with the ugly truths of our history, and with the harms it continues to produce in our present moment.
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
But the greatest gift the Founders gave us was the notion that no nation is perfect, is ever done evolving, improving, that the Constitution they gave us would be amended far into the future. For all their flaws and grand aspirations, it was their awareness of their own limitations and their reliance on the task that each new generation would have to build something better than what it inherited, that gives the US Constitution its genius. It is the ultimate living document.
Because, as an immigrant who gladly chose to become a citizen of the United States, I believe Secretary Clinton was also right. While we wrestle every day with the legacy and stubborn grip of racism and misogyny, we are also a nation that has fought to confront and correct that legacy.
We are the country that, despite (or because of) our struggles to become a better nation, produced historical figures like Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln and Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, thinkers and writers like Emerson, Douglass, Twain, Wright, Baldwin, Updike, Angelou, and Morrison, musicians and poets like Jelly Roll Morton and Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Jesse Welles and Earth to Eve. As the July 6, 2026, cover of TIME magazine celebrates this 250th birthday, we gave the world cinema and jazz, the blues and NASA, the Black Panthers and Tupac, the Civil RIghts, Peace, and Women’s movements, Route 66 and the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. The list goes on. (Interestingly, we are not the country that invented white supremacy. That was a gift from our European forebears. America just weaponized it.)
To mark America's Semiquincentennial, TIME is asking 250 experts to tell us about something that captures the essence of American life today.
More recently, we are the country whose economic capital, New York, just elected a democratic socialist for mayor, and three more democratic socialists as candidates for Congress. As we prepare for the 2026 midterms, I have one great hope before the election and one for after. My hope is that the leadership of the Democratic party stops scolding voters for electing the candidates they believe in and instead start listening to their voters. What centrists and progressives alike in the Democratic party are overlooking is that the Democrats who have been winning special elections since 2024 have spanned the political spectrum. Centrists and progressives have both been winning in different parts of the country. What they all have in common is the ability to communicate authentically their willingness to fight for regular folks against the Epstein class. It’s not ideology that is winning over their voters, it’s the spirit of the ‘happy warrior’ that candidates like Mamdani in New York, Ossoff in Georgia, Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Cooper in North Carolina, Spanberger in Virginia, and several others have brought to their campaigns. I also hope desperately that the Democrats never take a November victory, much less a ‘blue wave,’ for granted. They must fight for every vote by fighting for voters. The Democrats have a deep bench of compelling candidates and as long as they keep the tent open to a diversity of ideologies and lived experiences, I think they have a good chance at taking back the House of Representatives. Taking back the Senate is technically possible, but far less likely in the current round of reelection campaigns.
My hope for after the election, if the Democrats do well, is that they set aside plans to impeach Trump. First, Vance could be a greater danger. He has so little charm or integrity that I don’t think he has a realistic shot at being elected in 2028, but assuming the presidency from an impeached (and convicted and removed by the Senate) Trump would give Vance an easier path to power. Secondly, impeachment drains all attention and resources from all the other pressing issues. Instead, I hope the Democrats focus on stemming the damage of the Trump years and pursuing accountability for the off-the-charts corruption of this White House and its inner circles.
The America that is turning 250 was founded as a white supremacist patriarchy, where the levers of power and the interests it served were firmly in the hands of the few who had anointed themselves its guardians and rule-makers. The America that sees itself as an enlightened beacon of freedom and equality, the America that has attempted to become a multi-racial democracy where every citizen has equal rights and an equal voice in its governance, is only 61 years old, very young for a nation.
Eddie Glaude, Jr, professor of African American studies and religion at Princeton, recently remarked on Democracy Now!, ‘America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.… 1776, for me, is this moment of profound complexity and contradiction where you have this idea that everyday ordinary people can engage in self-governance, but it happens alongside of the horrific relationship between the trafficking of black bodies and the introduction of the modern world.’
To be American is to recognize both of these realities. The speakers at the Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony called on us last week to remember that the future is not yet written. We are neither doomed nor destined as a nation. We can choose to continue the fight for an ever more inclusive, multi-racial democracy, or we can choose cynicism, apathy, and autocracy.
It’s up to US to choose and fight for who we really are, for what we believe America can be. Happy birthday, America!
— Bart Abicht, July 4, 2026