“We ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Bruce Springsteen, who for well over half a century has chronicled the unsteady progress of the American experiment, refers to our history as “an ongoing blessed, sacred argument about what course the country should take.” This argument is not merely a reflection on the positioning of Democrats and Republicans: It’s a more fundamental disputation about what this republic stands for. And it informs the essays that make up our special issue marking the 250th anniversary of an American journey that The Nation has chronicled since 1865.

From the very founding of the United States in the sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1776, the argument has raged between those who embrace Thomas Paine’s expansive promise that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again” and those who have sought to make this country a soft reflection of the monarchy—and the oligarchy—against which its revolutionary combatants revolted.

It is the cruel fate of our republic, in this 250th-anniversary year of its Declaration of Independence, that the White House is occupied by a modern-day King George III, Donald Trump, who makes no secret of his lust for the gilded trappings of royalty and monarchical abuses of power. Springsteen speaks for so many of us when he says, “The America that I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that’s been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration.”

With no sense of irony, Trump and his cabal have endeavored to obscure the actual history of the United States: whitewashing our heritage to deny not just the soul-crushing wrongs of an enslaving, segregating, discriminating, and oligarchical past, but also to deny the inspired achievements of generation upon generation of radicals who strove to make real the promise that we all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This issue of The Nation rejects the false narratives of reactionary presidents, senators, and justices. These essays on the past, present, and future of our country examine the awful choices made by compromised and self-serving leaders. Yet they also lift up the redemptive civil-rights, economic-justice, environmental, and peace movements that have countered the royalists and the racists with a politics that pursues a more perfect union. In the spirit of these struggles, we join the sacred argument, seeking nothing less than to elevate the call to action, carried forward from Paine to Frederick Douglass, from Sojourner Truth to Fannie Lou Hamer, and from Woody Guthrie to Bruce Springsteen when he asks “all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”