AUTHOR’S NOTE: I haven’t written anything for this newsletter in a month, since I’ve been busy studying for the bar exam. I take the test at the end of the month, so hopefully that will free up some headspace to do more writing.

That said, I do have a piece out in The American Prospect today on the prediction markets industry’s legal fight with state gambling regulators. Kalshi, along with a bunch of cryptocurrency companies (there’s a LOT of overlap between prediction markets and crypto) has been hiring up ex-Biden administration lawyers and politicos. Most prominent of these is Elizabeth Prelogar, the former Solicitor General of the United States, who just filed an amicus brief on behalf of a Kalshi lobbying group. As I go into in the piece, conspicuously, the only group of Biden alums who aren’t getting jobs with prediction markets and crypto are the ex-financial regulators…the one group of people who actually understand their legal issues at a deep level.

I’ve written for the Prospect a lot, so I’m biased in saying this, but it is a genuinely fantastic magazine — one of the few that takes both policy and politics seriously, and maintains healthy skepticism about power without falling into pure cynicism. Journalistic outlets of all sorts have been in financial crisis for decades now, a subject I plan to return to on this newsletter. This has hit small- to mid-size publishers especially hard. If you read and like my piece, please check out the Prospect’s other coverage, and consider donating if you can.

Anyways, on to the post…

On July 4th, 1776, the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress adopted the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, purporting to sever their colonies’ ties to the English monarchy. This year marked the 250th anniversary of that decision, which Americans hail as the moment our nation was born. Yet most historians agree that the delegates did not actually sign the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. They did so on August 2nd, more than a month later. The signing itself is generally considered the act that committed the colonies to rebellion. Thus, as a matter of historical fact, to say that America was born on July 4th, 1776 is wrong.

On neither July 4th nor August 2nd did the Second Continental Congress establish any new form of government to replace their cast-off sovereign. That did not come until the Articles of Confederation were ratified on March 1, 1781. Within the same decade, the Articles were replaced by the Constitution of the United States, hailed today as the binding fabric of the nation. The original language of that document was written at the Constitutional Convention, which adjourned on September 17, 1787. New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution on June 21, 1788, and it entered effect on March 4, 1789. Rhode Island, the last of the 13 original colonies, ratified the Constitution on May 29th, 1790.The Bill of Rights, which many consider indispensable to the character of the Constitution, was ratified on December 15, 1791.

A core principle of United States governance is that each state is equal in dignity under the shared union. Yet we hail the cessation of the 13 original colonies as the origin of a new nation. Doing so necessarily ascends those states’ particular character and interests as deterministic of authentic Americanness. I was born in Connecticut, one of the original states, and now live in Oregon, one of the later admits. Yet Oregon is just as fully American as Connecticut. How then can we say that the American nation had been “born” until Oregon joined, or any other state for that matter? Hawai'i is the state most recently added to the union, on August 21, 1959. If we take the principle of equal dignity between the states seriously, then isn’t that when the country we know today was born?

American mythology treats the signing of the Declaration of Independence – which, again, did not happen on the Fourth of July – as the moment when our Founding Fathers decisively rejected rule by the British crown. But many colonists still understood themselves as British citizens at the time of the Revolution. Others had seen themselves as a wholly separate people decades before any war of independence. In 1776, the vast majority of the population were legally ineligible for full belonging in either nation, by virtue of their births. Non-landowning white men were ineligible to vote, and women, children, Black Americans, and indigenous peoples were all, to varying degrees, considered property.

The Declaration’s famous second paragraph owes much to Enlightenment social contract theory, which argues that it is legitimate for a society to inhibit and bind individuals to its rules when they knowingly consent to be bound. Yet the men who chose to secede in 1776 were, and purported to represent, only the smallest handful of the human beings inhabiting this land at that time. By the Declaration’s own ideas, how can it possibly represent the birth of a shared American nation? If individual choice is a bedrock American value, why should we celebrate an act that so few meaningfully chose?

The most famous alternative history of the American nation dates its birth to 1619, the year enslaved Africans first arrived from the other side of the Atlantic. Other excellent histories have told the story of this land through the eyes of the multivarious peoples who inhabited it before intercontinental travel – that is, for the overwhelming majority of human history.

Certainly the events of July 4th, 1776 are of great historical significance. But to peg them as the origin of the shared cultural, legal, political, and societal project that inhabitants of this part of the world engage in today – whether we want to or not – is a normative claim, not an empirical one. One can fairly say that on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, something important shifted. But that is true of too many other days and events to count. Indeed, one can argue that it is true of literally every moment that came before this one, right now.

Any one of these dates has a better claim than July 4th to being the moment the political entity we know as the United States of America was created. Put another way, “the United States of America born on July 4th, 1776” is a political claim, built on a string of contestable assumptions about the nature of the nation itself. 

Liberals sometimes say that their patriotism for the United States is affection not for America as it is, but America as it could be. Unfortunately, they often describe this as allegiance to the nation the Founding Fathers wanted to create, but fell short of. 

I’m on the record against that sentiment. At best, it is a form of syncretism, like those Norman Rockwell-styled paintings with Ronald Reagan and Malcolm X smiling together in nondenominational-but-vaguely-Christian heaven. The particular conflation of contemporary liberal social politics and “the will of the Founders” masks genuinely ugly truths. The Founding Fathers absolutely did not want a nation where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. There is no option for uncomplicated pride in both Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King. Achieving the future liberals want does require identifying and moving past what is holding the country back from that future right now.

Opposite this syncretic impulse is the tedious rhetorical style of some (mostly online) lefties who simply must inform anyone who cares to listen that they personally disavow all that is condemnable about American history. This ritualized distancing is for the speaker’s own psychic benefit. Seeing oneself solely in the many people America has oppressed but never, even accidentally, in the oppressors is a form of denial – emotionally understandable, but ultimately immature. Minoritized and marginalized people of all stripes have often escaped their oppression by casting hate onto someone else. The surest way to rise out of poverty, especially in this country, is to exploit someone else’s labor. To live in an imperial center means one cannot help but contribute to the harms it inflicts. We are all victimizer and victimized, all doing wrong without intending it, all trying to be good and falling short of who we could be.

The truth is that the United States of America is much like any other country: its history is problematic, tangled, and demands reparation, but cannot ever be undone. Imagining a new past that smooths out the contradictions, or endlessly retreating from one’s own responsibility to the future, both value one’s individual comfort above the health and growth of the collective. That’s The American Way, after all. But it’s a way that holds us back. There is much to celebrate within America, and much to atone for within America. It’s a place. We ought to make it a better place. We’re stuck with it.

On August 2nd, 1776, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. Almost as soon as the ink dried on their signatures, Black revolutionaries and abolitionists began tossing its second paragraph back in that Congress’ faces. To those struggling for freedom, Jefferson’s self-evident truth “that all men are created equal” took on a resonance he never intended, yet nonetheless did write. 

It took decades of struggle, culminating in a civil war, to even try to resolve that contradiction at the heart of American nationhood. The formalized, legal attempt was the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. These amendments, incomplete as they were, are rightly called the Second Founding, so fundamentally they transformed the very nature of the Constitution, the union, and American identity. To preserve that nation conceived in liberty four score and seven years ago, Lincoln and his allies made a new one that they could respect.

James Madison’s Constitution never quite decided whether it was establishing a treaty and trade federation, or establishing a whole new nation-state. The Radical Republicans dispensed with the pleasantries, affirmed that this union is binding and permanent, and made clear that its members would submit to the egalitarian values of its new national center or face the consequences. 

Madison’s Bill of Rights provided limited criminal and civil protections from the federal power to assuage suspicions about the new authority. The Republicans’ Amendments turned that Bill of Rights into the moral bedrock of American life, the basic decency afforded to anyone who lives in a state, country, or society that would dare call itself free. 

Madison’s Constitution stripped the states of the power to create money, keeping the total legal value on the continent fixed to its supply of gold and silver. The Radical Republicans won their war with money made out of literal whole cloth; federally-backed fiat currency. A Constitution established to prevent paper money became paper money’s very source. Moreover, the Republicans built the United States’ first federal regulatory apparatus, harnessing trade and industry to serve the common weal as they conceived it.

It wasn’t nearly enough. Reconstruction ended too soon, exhaustion and inflation took their toll, and both the former Confederacy and the newly-federalized northern states refused to create the multiracial democratic republic that seemed to shimmer just ahead for a few brief years. The courts, meanwhile, settled into an never-ending struggle over what to make of a Constitution that now held two founding visions in one.

But the Reconstruction Amendments, the reforms they accompanied, and the national self-conception they proscribed, could not be entirely snuffed out. I will not say that they represent the real America, because I do not think there is such a thing as one real America. I will say that the nation Reconstruction sought to create – one founded on egalitarianism, mutual respect, care across difference, and the negation of bondage – is a place I’d much rather live in. The Founding Fathers purportedly fought for freedom, by which they mostly meant the freedom to conquer, purchase, and own without royal approval. Reconstruction represented a different, more robust understanding of freedom. The freedom to remake the world, or at the very least, to try.