What To Celebrate

The Fourth of July this year will be a celebratory one, being the first major holiday when the region, and much of the country, can truly begin to think about the pandemic as a lingering concern but, with state and regional vaccination rates at a comfortable level, not an active one. People will take advantage of the summer weather to safely gather together outside, without fear of COVID-19. Southampton Village’s parade will return on July 5, offering some welcome normalcy and a burst of well-earned pride and patriotism.

In reality, though, this should be a solemn Independence Day, coming so soon after January 6, 2021, which is, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” At least it should, because this country was again under attack, this time from inside its own borders.

And while it didn’t mark the start of a war, January 6 could well mark the beginning of the end of American democracy. If that’s not a cause worth fighting for, July 4 is just another date on the calendar, a day for grilling and fireworks, and not much else.

Drain away, if you can, the politics. This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat, though the cracks form roughly along those lines. At the heart of the matter, January 6 was about an attempted new American revolution, an insurrection, this one built on a lie and rooted in our worst inclinations. Had it succeeded, it would have subverted the democratic process and installed a dictator. It failed to do that — but that violent day laid the groundwork for future assaults on the foundations of democracy.

The former vice president, Mike Pence, was an unlikely hero, merely because he did his duty despite a violent mob that was literally chasing him down in the Capitol hallways, calling for his head. This week, speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Mr. Pence tried to burnish his image: “I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

That was, in fact, the goal of the mob at the Capitol that day, and of the sitting president at the time: to ignore the ballots and use coercion, and even brute force, to have one man, Mike Pence, seat a loser in the Oval Office for a second term.

It was shocking but not surprising: The groundwork had been laid in 2016, when that president pulled an inside straight and — legitimately — won the presidency through the Electoral College tally, even while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. But it wasn’t enough: He immediately began a sustained assault on the credibility of the American voting system, driven solely by his ego to justify the results of an election that he won. Is it a surprise that the intensity was increased when he actually lost in 2020?

That January 6 assault continues, more quietly, today in statehouses all over the United States. Election laws are being rewritten to provide clearer paths for future coup attempts, and election rules are being changed, under the guise of increasing “election integrity,” to disenfranchise a new generation of voters. January 6 is still happening.

Americans should be proud on July 4. But of what? The unique American experiment and its fundamentals, which should not be subject to partisan disagreement. These are principles, after all, that Americans of all stripes have fought and died for.

We all believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. We should all agree that every eligible voter should be able to cast a ballot. We all want election security (paper ballots being essential to that), but we don’t want any legitimate voter to find it a struggle to go to the polls. Anything we can do to make it easier to vote, within reason, is pro-democracy. And the opposite is true as well: Discouraged voters are a blow to American democracy.

This Independence Day, there will be gatherings of people for joyous times. For a moment, though, every American should set aside a moment to think about the reality of the times we live in, to talk about it, to decide what we’re really celebrating on July 4. And what we’re willing to do to make sure that date remains a day when we celebrate what we have, and not what we need to get back.