What’s with the Allergy to Patriotism?

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

The left's various efforts to prevent the rest of us from celebrating America’s 250th illustrate a lack of tolerance and humility.

 

The California Coastal Commission, more a collection of Almira Gulch impersonators than John Muir types, rejected a permit application for a Fourth of July fireworks display over Long Beach.

 

New York City Mayor Mamdani issued an emergency order that allowed his underlings to deny a permit for a public celebration with a Times Square ball drop on the eve of Independence Day.

 

Schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and points beyond have canceled stops on the Department of Education’s “National History Rocks Tour.” Activists, including teachers, decried the America 250 events as a politicization of education. A spokeswoman for the department responded, “Engaging young students with fun games and questions like ‘When was our nation founded?’ and ‘Who primarily wrote the Declaration of Independence?’ isn’t indoctrination — it’s sparking excitement about the story of freedom and democracy.”

 

America, surely, does not celebrate its Semiquincentennial in the full-throated and near-unanimous way that it did its Bicentennial. We do not watch Barney Miller, wear polyester, or sing along to “Let Your Love Flow” the way we did in 1976, either. But the decline in patriotism to such a degree as to make reflexive anti-Americanism de rigueur in certain professions and enclaves is disturbing.

 

Last weekend, the Philadelphia Society, which naturally met in Tampa, celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by essentially holding a rolling debate about it.

 

Speaker Robert Alt, president of the Buckeye Institute, acknowledged “genuine disagreement” on the right on this and so many other questions. Rather than the cancellations and pulled permits one sees from the left, Alt called for “vigorous debate” with a mere “modicum of civility” to encompass such rhetorical extravagances as “standing on chairs.”

 

The society’s members (full disclosure: I am one) and guests witnessed quite a “vigorous debate” on “The Declaration of Independence at 250: The American Revolution Then and Now.” Panelists and the audience disagreed on such questions as whether the American Revolution overturned an order or restored one, whether free and independent or united states went to war against the British, and whether the declaration established an independent nation or something more ambitious based not on ethnicity or religion but on core principles of citizenship.

 

Clemson University Professor Brad Thompson described the United States as a “creedal nation” founded upon philosophical ideas. Another speaker countered by describing the Declaration of Independence as setting up “a legal, not creedal” nation and its famous second paragraph as “bubbly, aspirational statements.”

 

Michael Lucchese, a Law & Liberty associate editor, drew a distinction, and said he believes the Founders did too, “between a lawful revolution in favor of the old moral order and an unlawful revolution in favor of ideological speculation.” He explained that the Founders “saw their republican revolution as a restoration of civilizational continuity, not a rupture.” Others presented the American Revolution as, well, revolutionary.

 

Colleen Sheehan of Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership described Revolutionary-era Americans as “one people acting together under natural right.” The emphasis for others involved not the “United Colonies” referenced in the declaration but the “Free and Independent States.”

 

Like most good conversations, the weekend did not settle an argument but started many. Nobody tried to pull the microphone cord from the socket (what fun would that be?). Instead, the right-of-center intellectuals dared to discuss, disagree, and debate — three concepts feared by all those muting the conversation that naturally accompanies the nation’s birthday — and in doing so expressed agreement, implicitly at least, on one unifying theme of the American Founding: freedom.

 

Conversation, not cancellation, seems suited to the spirit of the Founding. The title of the conference’s last panel asked, “Can we keep the republic?” — a question the onslaught against free inquiry also raises.

 

“The only antidote to dictatorship is classical liberalism,” Duke University Professor Michael Munger, the incoming president of the Philadelphia Society, noted at the conference’s end. Munger pointed out that a free society requires two virtues: “tolerance” and “humility.”

 

People who stamp out freedom predictably don’t celebrate it. The various efforts to prevent the rest of us from celebrating it illustrate a lack of tolerance and humility and the wisdom of Munger’s observation of what a free society requires.