Things About America Today The Founders Would Be Proud Of

It's not just our technology and wealth

Hey everyone, happy Good News Sunday. I hope you got to see some good fireworks with friends and family last night and are enjoying the holiday weekend.

This week, I want to talk about something that’s hard to miss: everybody is down on America right now. Left, right, center, you can hardly open your phone without someone telling you this country is finished and rotten. I get why people feel that way. But this weekend of all weekends, I want to talk about how far we’ve come.

Here’s the thing, doomsayers: America was never handed to us as a finished product. The founders gave us something both brilliant and broken. Every generation since has had the same job: take it as we got it, leave it a little more free, a little more fair, a little more just than we found it.

So picture taking the founding fathers and dropping them into the modern day United States. Here are some things I think would leave them amazed.

Let’s start with the fact that, well, the nation has survived.

Thirteen shaky, squabbling colonies, given almost no chance of staying together, became the longest-running constitutional republic on Earth. The oldest Constitution still in use anywhere in the world, 250 years later.

They’d be damn proud.

We’ve literally doubled the lifespan of humans. A baby born in 1776 had a real chance of not reaching 40. Disease was rampant and there was almost nothing anyone could do. We wiped smallpox and polio off the face of the earth. George Washington was bled to death by his own doctors because they thought it was helping. Modern-day Washington would probably appreciate antibiotics and not having pints of his blood removed.

The fastest thing alive isn’t a horse anymore, by the way. We have cars, planes, electricity in general. Just think about their faces if they saw a neon sign or a plane or an electric toothbrush. Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm just to prove lightning was electricity. Tell him that within two centuries we’d light entire cities at the flip of a switch, that I could see and speak to my family face to face from the other side of the planet, that the whole sum of human knowledge would fit in your pocket. He would lose his mind, probably get emotional, and be proud of us as a country for achieving such feats as a result of his pen on a paper 250 years ago.

We’ve even been to the moon, something the founding fathers could only dream of when they rode their horses around and looked up at it. If you want a single image of what this country is capable of when it decides it wants to do something big, look no further than that.

I want to also acknowledge our founders weren’t perfect by any measure—they wrote that all men are created equal but owned slaves and didn’t include any civil rights protections in the Constitution. They also didn’t establish a national right to voting with only men being able to do so until the early 1900s. But they’re a reflection of the imperfection of this country. As glorified as the founding fathers are, Americans after them have been able to correct those mistakes and take the reigns in further developing this country’s culture and greatness.

But here is the part I find most remarkable of all — and the part that gets lost when everyone is busy being cynical. Every one of those corrections happened because Americans decided it had to. Not because the Constitution fixed itself. Not because kings granted rights from on high.

Because people marched, organized, argued, bled, and refused to accept the version of America they inherited as the final one. Women who had no say in their own government demanded the vote and won it. Black Americans who were told the promise of equality did not apply to them built a movement that changed the law and changed the country.

And each time, what drove them was the same stubborn idea that sits at the heart of this whole American experiment: that we are not a nation defined by where we came from, or what we look like, or who our parents were. We are a nation defined by what we believe — about freedom, about fairness, about the dignity of every person. That is what makes America genuinely exceptional. And on the evidence of 250 years, it is what has always pushed us forward. Not perfectly. Never as fast as it should have. But forward.

This may all seem cliché but I genuinely feel like people forget how far we’ve come. Our tense political landscape today is a small blip in 250 years of achievement, strife, success, courage and bravery. Don’t let our newfound polarization erase any of that.

We’ve gotten past hard times before. The evidence is there that we can do it again (and again).

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday. Happy Fourth.

— Adam