Saturday is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: This is a very weird year to be celebrating American democracy. And it’s not just because of the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, the sad state fair, or the war on algae over at the Reflecting Pool.

We’ve been fighting off a no-holds-barred attempt to consolidate MAGA power and remake the federal government toward Trump’s authoritarian ends. We’re going to spend the remainder of this year fighting off a campaign to sabotage free and fair elections. It’s never a good sign for the state of your democracy when “No Kings!” becomes a relevant demand instead of a funny historical reference. So the birthday party was always going to feel a little dissonant this year.

But I think part of what’s so strange is that it forces us to reexamine a core assumption that so many of us absorb without realizing it — that American history moves in one direction. Forward. Toward more justice, more rights, more inclusion. Sure, we know that our history is one of struggle, but the struggle always ends with progress. The idea that things could go seriously backward, that we could lose ground we thought was permanent — well, that’s not very American, is it?

It’s not how we are taught to think about our country or our history. And yet here we are.

Of course, the reality was never so clean or neat. At no point in the past was American history so linear. Every expansion of rights in this country’s history was met with a backlash — sometimes violent, sometimes slow and legal, sometimes both. Sometimes the backlash won — witness the brief advances under Reconstruction that were swiftly extinguished by violent white retaliation and the generations forced to live under the terror and extraction of Jim Crow.

What we’re living through right now is the oldest pattern in American history. There has never been a guarantee of progress — there have only been the people who are willing to put their lives on the line to fight for it.

In other words, history hasn’t ended, and we’re writing the next chapter. We choose how to make sense of what came before and how to make sense of the moment we’re living in. We lean into the legacies of every struggle that came before us, knowing that at every stage, for every movement from the abolitionists to the suffragettes to civil rights, victory was uncertain and at times seemed near-impossible. But they fought on anyway because the fight — for a better country and a better future for everyone who lives here — was worth it.

That, if you ask me, is a better measure of patriotism than the world’s biggest fireworks display, a military flyover, or sharing an absurd AI image of a gaudy eagle statue hanging outside the White House.

If you’re feeling conflicted about the weekend’s celebrations, I understand. But the truth is this: This isn’t the Trump 250th. This is America’s 250th. And to me, that means a celebration of and recommitment to a founding ethos that we’ll never bow down to a king or accept tyranny against our neighbors. A recommitment to the ideals of justice and liberty for all — however long it takes us to get there.

That’s the legacy that we honor this weekend. And it’s the aspiration that we honor as we fight to move our country forward, toward a real democracy, this Saturday, the day after that and the day after that.

On Substack: Indivisible