Every Fourth of July, Americans are told to celebrate freedom. We fire up the barbecue, wave the flag, and watch fireworks explode overhead while politicians tell us that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.
I bought that myth as a child. As a grown man who understands history, I just can’t do that anymore.
Not because I reject the democratic aspirations that animated the American Revolution, but because I take them too seriously.
Let’s start by telling the truth. The Revolution was a real break from monarchy. Rejecting the divine right of kings was an extraordinary step forward in human history. People across the world drew inspiration from the idea that ordinary folks could overthrow a king and govern themselves.
But that’s only part of the story.
The United States was also founded as a colonial project. Its wealth depended on stolen Indigenous land, the attempted genocide of Native peoples, and the enslavement of Africans.
The Revolution didn’t end those injustices. It protected them. It transferred power from one ruling elite in London to another ruling elite in America. Capitalism in this country didn’t simply coexist with conquest and slavery—it was built through them.
That’s what makes the Fourth of July so complicated.
We are taught to revere George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as apostles of liberty while politely overlooking the fact that they enslaved other human beings. Meanwhile, Thomas Paine—who challenged monarchy, hereditary privilege, and concentrated wealth more directly than almost anyone of his generation—has never occupied the same sacred place in our national mythology. It’s easier to celebrate founders who defended property than radicals who questioned power.
Yet the Declaration of Independence also proclaimed that “All men are created equal.” Those words were breathtakingly hypocritical in 1776, but they also became a weapon in the hands of abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, and the Civil Rights Movement.
History is messy like that. Sometimes people write truths they are unwilling to live by, and future generations make them keep their promises.
No one understood that contradiction better than Frederick Douglass. In What to the Slave Is Your Fourth of July?, he declared, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
He exposed the moral bankruptcy of celebrating freedom in a nation built on bondage. Douglass also reminded us that:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Every meaningful expansion of democracy in American history has come because organized people confronted organized power.
That’s a lesson we desperately need today.
Donald Trump didn’t create authoritarianism in America. He didn’t invent white supremacy, capitalism, corporate rule, or the politics of exclusion. He inherited traditions woven into the very fabric of this country from its founding.
Trump is not an historical accident. He is the latest expression of a system rooted in settler colonialism, racial hierarchy, capitalism, and empire.
That same system projects military power through hundreds of bases across the globe, uses economic sanctions to punish entire populations, threatens war with Iran, and bankrolls Israel’s devastating assault on the Palestinian people. Empire abroad and exploitation at home are not separate problems. They are the same system wearing different uniforms.
So what do we do?
We stop pretending that elections alone will save us. We organize.
We build worker cooperatives that put working people in charge of their labor. We create community land trusts that remove land from speculation. We expand mutual aid, public banking, unions, and democratic institutions rooted in solidarity instead of profit. We build dual power—creating the new society in the shell of the old while organizing to transform the political and economic structures that keep ordinary people powerless.
That’s what I mean by a Second American Revolution.
Not replacing one elite with another, but replacing empire with democracy. Not reforming capitalism, but moving beyond it. Not simply defending the republic that was created in 1776, but finally fulfilling the promise that every person deserves dignity, freedom, and a meaningful voice in shaping the society we all share.
My Momma taught me “There’s enough for everyone if we share.”
The older I get, the more I realize she wasn’t just teaching me how to be a decent person. She was describing an entirely different way of organizing society.
So if we commemorate the Fourth of July at all, let’s commemorate it as an unfinished revolution. Let’s reject the mythology without abandoning the dream. Let’s tell the truth about where we’ve been, so we can honestly decide where we’re going.
The future won’t be built by fireworks.
It will be built by ordinary people who have the courage to organize together.
David Cobb is the host of the popular podcast Redneck Gone Green, dubbed a “people’s lawyer”, David has spent his career litigating corporate polluters and civil rights violators. He was the Green Party Presidential nominee In 2004, In 2010 he co-founded Move To Amend, In 2016 he served as the Campaign Manager for Jill Stein’s presidential campaign. Currently he serves as the Co-Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network and the People’s Network for Land Liberation, a consortium which seeks to de-commodify the land to reestablish a right relationship with the earth and all of our relatives and relations.
Celebrating freedom means calling out the empire’s fantasies and Trump’s noise for what they are — hollow PR stunts trying to wallpaper over reality.
You’re confusing value and prices, about which Marx had little interest. And who “debunked” the LTV? Not Marxists; it was bourgeois economists in the 1870, who rationalized capitalist exploitation via theories of economic utility. If they had been around in the feudal period, working as the lapdogs of the feudal ruling class, they would have rationalized that system of exploitation, as well.