Happy Birthday—and Please Grow Up, America

Max Stearns

It is customary to celebrate our nation’s birthday. I don’t deny anyone the joy of a barbeque weekend. I do question the wisdom of confusing longevity with accomplishment.

We have all seen versions of that mistake. Politicians, judges, and athletes whose legacies would have benefited from earlier departures. Actors remembered more for later disappointments than earlier triumphs. Faculty who remain too long, with their best work behind them. Age, standing alone, is not an achievement. Maturity is.

That is why I find America's approaching quarter-millennium anniversary unsettling as much as celebratory.

A nation, like a person, deserves recognition not simply because it has endured, but because it has grown. Growth requires more than survival. It requires the capacity to recognize mistakes, to learn from them, and to adapt without losing one's core identity.

When Parliamentary America appeared, I wrote about Juneteenth as the holiday that most fully captures America's continuing democratic journey:

"The true anniversary of American freedom is celebrated fifteen days earlier and commemorates events eighty-nine years later than the Fourth of July."*

I continue to believe that. The Fourth of July marks an indispensable beginning. There can be no journey, democratic or otherwise, without a first step. It would be both unfair and ahistorical to judge 1776 by standards that could only emerge through later struggle. But beginnings deserve celebration for beginning, not for arriving.

If there is one lesson the past 250 years should have taught us, it is that democratic maturity lies not in founding a nation but in creating a polity—a thriving, inclusive, robust, infighting, demanding, frustrating, but genuine society. Like a wonderfully rich, inevitably dysfunctional, often infuriating, yet ultimately defining family, the sort that after bitter acrimony defends those just argued with against others who belittle without genuine understanding, affection, and, if I may, love.

Some have suggested that American democracy truly began not with the Declaration of Independence, but with the Constitution. Fair enough. The Articles of Confederation plainly failed. But I have come to believe that the Constitution, too, has ultimately failed—not because the United States of America itself has failed, but because it has so often succeeded despite constitutional structures increasingly ill-suited to the challenges our nation was asked to confront.

I realize that sounds like a startling claim coming from someone who has spent more than three decades teaching and writing about Constitutional Law. I also realize I cannot defend it adequately in a blog post. I devoted an entire book to making this case.

Besides, my point today is narrower.

A birthday is not evidence of wisdom.

The United States has accomplished extraordinary things. It helped defeat fascism. It helped contain and ultimately outlasted Soviet communism. It put human beings on the moon. It welcomed generations of immigrants seeking better lives. Despite unimaginably tragic beginnings or results for so many ancestors, and for those already present well before most of our ancestors arrived, it ultimately and dramatically expanded the circle of those able to participate in democratic life—women, Black Americans, religious minorities, immigrants, gay and lesbian Americans, and countless others. These are genuine achievements, and I am proud to be part of a society that produced them. And, of course, for all these groups and others, there remains vital work to do.

What past achievements do not prove is political maturity.

A mature nation does not conflate past accomplishment with reflection, achievement with growth. It does not rely on patriotism to justify refusing to acknowledge serious flaws. It understands that disagreement is not democracy's greatest threat. Increasingly intolerant extremism is. And it recognizes this is not a one-size—or more to the point one-side—problem.

For years I have argued that our deepest democratic problems are structural rather than personal. We devote enormous energy to debating politicians while paying too little attention to the institutions that shape the incentives under which they operate, and thus who they are. That conversation remains, in my view, more urgent than ever. And it is nearly always avoided.

As America reaches its two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, I hope we celebrate our remarkable history without mistaking endurance for wisdom or efficacy.

When America becomes a nation more committed to self-correction than self-congratulation, more interested in reform than nostalgia, more willing to talk across its deepest disagreements than to retreat into them—then, however old I might be, I'll gladly throw a party.

* Maxwell L. Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy 69 (JHU 2024) (IPPY Silver Medalist 2025).