As the night falls we shed a tear
Watching all our freedoms disappear
And we said goodbye to the way things were
– Mike Ness, The Way Things Were
Looking Backwards
The United States 250th anniversary should be the party of the century. There should be Main Street parades stretching from Maine to California, fireworks lighting up the night sky with unrestrained joy, and a collective, roaring cheer for the greatest experiment in human liberty ever devised.
But let’s be real. If you tune out the fabricated hype and look around your own community, does it feel like a celebration? Or does it feel a little more like a wake?
For many Americans this milestone doesn’t feel like a triumphant birthday party. It feels like a long, bittersweet goodbye to a past that was genuinely great. An era of care-free innocence, rugged self-reliance, and broad freedom that has been steadily chipped away, piece by piece, by the creeping hand of big government, digital surveillance, suffocating regulation, and crushing taxes.
Instead of looking forward to the next 250 years with the fierce optimism of our ancestors, many Americans are looking backward, grieving the loss of a country we thought we knew.
To understand exactly what we are losing, we must remember where we came from. America didn’t just appear out of thin air in 1776. It wasn’t a random accident of history.
America, as it was conceived, was the crowning achievement of Western civilization. A magnificent cultural lineage that stretched back through the cobblestone streets of Enlightenment Europe, the legal codes of the Roman Republic, and the philosophical academies of ancient Greece.
Our Founders weren’t just politicians. They were deep-thinking heirs to this grand tradition. They took the absolute best concepts of human history – individual liberty, the rule of law, private property, and the revolutionary idea that our rights come from God, not a king – and made them the cornerstones of a new nation.
That inheritance paid massive dividends for many generations. It created a society where a regular person could dream up an idea, work their tail off, and build a prosperous life without having to beg a bureaucrat for permission. It fostered a culture of care-free innocence, where kids played outside until the streetlights came on, neighbors trusted neighbors, and the government was a distant entity that largely left you alone to live your life.
That was the inheritance our parents, grandparents, and ancestors fought, bled, and died to hand down to us. It was a culture of confidence, gratitude, and expression of what human beings could achieve when they were truly free.
Malicious Humility
So, what happened? How did we get from the world’s beacon of freedom to a nation wracked by anxiety and division on its 250th birthday?
It started when our institutions – our schools, our universities, our media, our governments, and our corporate boardrooms – were taken over by a strange, toxic philosophy. A new gospel has spread through the American bloodstream over the last few decades. It’s not a message of hope or progress, but rather an improper, uncivilized humility.
This malicious humility is completely indistinguishable from self-hatred. It’s a humility that humiliates. It’s a deliberate movement – call it wokeism, if you will – designed to blind Westerners to their own magnificent traditions and to rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their historical offenses.
In San Diego, for instance, County leaders have turned what was supposed to be a 4th of July celebration into a cornucopia of DEI pishposh, including Tribal Invocation, the Black national anthem, and two hours of community-story segments focused on local tribal, Latino, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, LGBT, and Black and African communities. Bill Wells, the mayor of San Diego County’s El Cajon remarked:
“Independence Day, especially this one, is about celebrating and honoring America. What the county of San Diego has created ignores this in favor of grievance and a sense that our country is not great or worthy of pride. That’s just offensive, especially in light of the fact that they’re using taxpayer money to do so.”
Look, no country is perfect. America has real flaws in its past, and honest history requires us to face them. But there’s a massive, dangerous difference between learning from past mistakes and weaponizing them to destroy a society’s soul.
The effect – if not the explicit goal – of this cultural self-flagellation is to make Americans deeply ashamed of their own civilization. It tells our children that the foundations of their country are rotten. It teaches them to view our greatest heroes not as flawed humans who achieved extraordinary things, but as monsters deserving of erasure.
When you systematically strip a people of their pride, you take away their will to build. This malicious humility, an engineered shame, destroys the culture. It impedes people from adding to our magnificent inheritance, let alone passing it on to the next generation.
After all, why would anyone fight to preserve a house they’ve been told is fundamentally evil?
Disappearing Act
While our culture was being hollowed out from the inside, our practical freedoms were being choked out from the top down.
Think about how much the daily fabric of American life has changed. The care-free innocence of yesteryear has been replaced by a hyper-regulated, risk-averse surveillance state. We are taxed when we earn, taxed when we spend, taxed when we invest, and taxed when we die.
Want to start a small business? Prepare to wade through a mountain of red tape, compliance costs, and licensing fees that favor giant corporations and crush the little guy. Want to build something on your own land? Better check with three different federal agencies and a local zoning board first.
We have traded the wild, beautiful freedom of the American frontier for the illusion of safety provided by an overreaching nanny state. Every time a crisis arises, real or fabricated, the government grows a little bigger, the tax burden gets a little heavier, and the average citizen’s circle of autonomy shrinks a little smaller.
By the time we hit July 4, 2026, the rugged individualism that defined the first two centuries of this nation feels like a relic of a bygone era. We’ve become a society of compliance, paperwork, and anxiety.
If this trend feels tragic, it’s because it illustrates a sad, universal truth about all civilizations throughout human history. They are incredibly fragile.
Ancient Rome didn’t collapse in a single day. The Athenian democracy didn’t vanish overnight. Civilizations fall apart when the people living inside them forget who they are. They crumble when the core values that built the house are treated as old-fashioned, irrelevant, or offensive.
Great societies aren’t maintained by default. They are living, breathing ecosystems that require constant nourishment, gratitude, and defense. When central planners, bloated bureaucracies, and cultural iconoclasts spend decades tearing down the pillars of Western tradition, the entire structure starts to crumble.
Saying Goodbye to the Way Things Were
This 250th anniversary carries a heavy, undeniable burden. It’s about something far deeper than expensive gas, excessive taxes, or the toxic, polarized chaos of contemporary politics. It’s the painful, quiet realization that the very spirit of America – that unapologetic, freedom-loving, and relentlessly optimistic soul of the nation – has been systematically dismantled before our eyes.
So, how exactly do we mark such a monumental milestone?
We can still light the sparklers. We can still grill burgers in the backyard, gather with our neighbors, and deeply appreciate the beautiful pockets of this country that stubbornly hold fast to the old ways.
But as we celebrate, we must also allow ourselves to remember. This Independence Day brings with it a deep sense of nostalgia and sadness. It feels like a time to say goodbye to the America of yesteryear. A place where freedom was held, patriotism felt natural, and the horizon of the future always looked infinitely bright.
Yet, remember, a goodbye to the past does not mean a total surrender of our future.
The radical concepts handed down to us from ancient Greece, classical Rome, the Enlightenment, and the American Founders remain the truest, most exceptional blueprints ever conceived for human flourishing. They worked then, and they could work again. The malicious humility and institutional shame being pushed upon us today only win if we choose to buy into the drivel.
As we watch the fireworks illuminate the night sky this year, let them serve as two things. A beautiful, bittersweet eulogy for the incredible country we were blessed to grow up in, and a quiet, stubborn reminder of exactly what true liberty looks like.
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Sincerely,
MN Gordon
for Economic Prism
