Opinion: Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances feels eerily familiar in 2025 ...Middle East

For a lot of us, this Fourth of July feels impossible to celebrate. 

It’s always been complicated. The soaring ideals etched into America’s founding documents have too often come with a silent asterisk, a quiet caveat that “liberty and justice for all” didn’t really mean ALL. Generations of Black, Indigenous, immigrant and other marginalized Americans have carried that contradiction, living with both the broken promises and the undeniable contributions they have made to this country. 

But this year, the gap between America’s professed values and lived reality feels more like a chasm. 

Across the country, we are watching scenes that belong to an authoritarian state, not a democracy.

Masked men operating under the color of law are snatching our immigrant neighbors off the streets. Our Supreme Court ignores executive overreach and overturns rulings that protect our rights, in seeming determination to crown the president a king. California’s own National Guard is under federal control, with active-duty troops deployed to intimidate peaceful protesters.

Congress, by the narrowest margin, just authorized a spending bill that funds border detention camps, guts health care and lines the pockets of oligarchs and regime cronies. Public universities and federal agencies are being re-segregated in plain sight, while those in power flaunt their corruption with barely a shred of pretense. 

Meanwhile, the worst actors in American life wrap themselves in the star-spangled banner, setting off fireworks and declaring that this is, and always has been, the true face of the nation. 

It is tempting to let them have the holiday. But we cannot afford that luxury. 

Because July 4th was never the only founding of this country. The Constitution, limited and imperfect as it remains, was signed more than a decade after 1776. The Civil War and Reconstruction reimagined freedom through the lens of Black resistance and sacrifice. The Civil Rights Movement forced this nation to reckon, however incompletely, with the meaning of equal protection.

The story of America has been rewritten by Indigenous nations, immigrants, queer organizers and multiracial coalitions struggling not for nostalgia but for justice. 

Those battles are not relics. They are unfinished. 

And while the poetry of the Declaration of Independence may ring hollow in 2025, its list of grievances feels eerily familiar. Among the charges leveled against King George III: 

The playbook of autocracy is as old as empire itself, and the revolutionary generation, for all its contradictions, knew how to resist it. 

Being American has always, at its core, been about hating tyranny and standing together to fight it. 

This year, if the Fourth of July means anything, it is a reminder that the most patriotic act is not blind ceremony. It’s the resolve to resist those who would reign rather than govern, who would silence dissent rather than solve problems, who would dismantle democracy rather than deliver on its promises. 

The story of the United States of America is not yet finished. But the next chapter depends on what we are willing to fight for together. 

Mike Russo is vice president of policy and programs for Catalyst California, a nonprofit that advocates for racial justice. Before joining Catalyst, Russo was director of the federal office of U.S. PIRG, a nationwide federation of state-based public interest advocacy organizations. He led the organization’s work on health care, overseeing campaigns to implement the Affordable Care Act.

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