Editorials

Editorial: Independence Day 2025

On July 4, 1986, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation: “All through our history, our presidents and leaders have spoken of national unity and warned us that the real obstacle to moving forward the boundaries of freedom, and the only permanent danger to the hope that is America, comes from within. It’s easy enough to dismiss this as a kind of familiar exhortation. Yet the truth is that even two of our greatest Founding Fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, once learned this lesson late in life.”

Mr. Reagan noted that after an American government was formed, “something called partisan politics began to get in the way. After a bitter and divisive campaign, Jefferson defeated Adams for the presidency in 1800. And the night before Jefferson’s inauguration, Adams slipped away to Boston, disappointed, brokenhearted and bitter.”

But they reconnected through an extraordinary correspondence, not just about the issues of the day, but more importantly about, as Mr. Reagan said, “gardening, horseback riding, even sneezing as a cure for hiccups. But other subjects as well: the loss of loved ones, the mystery of grief and sorrow, the importance of religion and, of course, the last thoughts — the final hopes of two old men … for the country they had helped to found and loved so deeply.”

They made their way back to each other as people, not as political rivals. “It was their last gift to us, this lesson in brotherhood, in tolerance for each other,” Mr. Reagan said.

We should never forget that parting gift they gave us, and remember how partisan politics built a wall of anger and recrimination.

They came back to each other by seeing once again the humanity within each other — from sneezing and hiccups, to Mr. Reagan’s eloquent phrase, “the mystery of grief and sorrow.”

We try to, and often do, live up to the elevated sentiments immortalized in Jefferson’s Declaration. But not always. The belief in those self-evident truths makes America great, but we’re not perfect and neither is our nation. A commitment has to be made by every generation to, in Mr. Reagan’s words, keep moving the boundaries of freedom forward.

This includes being free to have equal justice under law, such as habeas corpus, and that law enforcement officers identify themselves when detaining people. Masked ICE agents offering no identification while handcuffing individuals and throwing them in unmarked vans is an outrage — imagine the Founding Fathers’ reaction to this. They knew what it was like to live in fear of powers-that-be who had no regard for legal due process.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has written: “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” To sanctify the patriots of ’76 is not only foolish, but dangerous.

Many of them held fellow human beings in slavery, which is, as President Obama named it, “America’s original sin.”

But the genius of the Founders was, as Mr. Kennedy said, to create a template to enshrine American rights in the future.

Happy Independence Day from all of us at Times Review.