A Year Long Celebration of America’s Birthday
This will help you enter 2026 with a better understanding of just how vital our Declaration of Independence and our founding principles still are.
As we begin to wrap up 2025 with Christmas presents and New Year’s Eve parties, it is naturally time to think ahead to 2026.
Of course, this is the year we will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This was the founding of America as a country endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Walter Isaacson’s remarkable new book, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” captures how important 1776 was – and how vital the Declaration was in defining the rights of free people. Anyone who doubts that the American decision to rebel and define rights as coming from God rather than kings, emperors, or powerful or rich people should spend an afternoon with Isaacson’s remarkable work.
When I did a Newt’s World podcast episode with Isaacson, he kept returning to the theme that 2026 could be the year in which patriotism and our shared history could bind us together, reduce the depth of partisan hostility, and help America move on as a unified nation. It could return us to the work of developing a better future for all based on its extraordinary past.
The first step in this process of reconciliation and renewal is to recognize that we should celebrate our national birthday every day for a year – not just on the Fourth of July.
Some of the time should be spent focused on the Founding Fathers and the remarkable epic of a free people defeating the British – the greatest empire of its time. The heroism and wisdom of the Founding generation is an extraordinary saga worth communicating to every American of every age.
It is especially important to learn about the origins of America and the principles which led the Founding Fathers to stake their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on an eight-year struggle for freedom. Because, the nature of America is slowly starting to slip away through a combination of two unrelated but equally dangerous patterns.
We tend to forget that while our normal dialogue is focused on geographic immigrants – people who have come from beyond our borders – there is a second and even larger group of temporal immigrants. Temporal immigrants are children. They were born in America but that does not mean they know anything about America.
If we fail to teach immigrants – and all children – about the core values and history of America, why would we expect them to know about the remarkable principles which have made America unique and prosperous? Learning about these principles, the people who developed and defended them, and how they still help us will take more than a single Fourth of July picnic, parade, and fireworks display.
As Isaacson pointed out, we should spend all of 2026 renewing our understanding of American Exceptionalism, visiting the places where America was invented and improved, and understanding what binds us together as patriots – not partisans.
Our 250th anniversary will be a good time to remember President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
A year spent seeking to understand how we came together, endured difficulties, and struggled to continuously improve would be a good year. It might lead to a much calmer, positive, and optimistic America in 2027.
So, we should spend the entire year on three large questions:
First, how did we become America and what are the lessons to be learned from the founding period?
Second, what did we have to live through and achieve to remain America? We should be celebrating the 250th anniversary – and the great journey over two and a half centuries which has made us the freest, most prosperous, and most powerful nation in history.
Third, with the momentum these principles and historic efforts created, can we achieve a Golden Age in which technology and entrepreneurship create new opportunities and solve old problems on a scale none of us could have imagined?
Learning from and thinking about these questions can reassert our God given rights, rebuild our sense of mutual patriotism, and led to a dialogue about creating a better future for all Americans (and hopefully all of humanity).
A great way to start would be reading Isaacson’s “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” over the holidays. This will help you enter 2026 with a better understanding of just how vital our Declaration of Independence and our founding principles still are.
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