Donald Trump was made for America 250. The looks, the flair, the beguiling mix of arrogance and fun — the 47th president is his country in flabby flesh and bone. In his own clumsy way, Trump seems to grasp this too, nestling into the festivities like a hot dog in a bun. Liberal columnists might be right about its crassness, but cage fighting on the White House lawn feels as suited to this birthday as Johnny Cash and Kojak were to the bicentennial in 1976. “We’ve never reached so high,” as Trump proclaimed last month. “This is our heritage.” America’s heritage, perhaps, but what of Trump’s own?

We know, by now, of his Scottish mother. Yet even after a decade as ringmaster of the national circus, the President’s other side, his German side, is far less familiar. Unlike Joe Biden with his Irishness, Trump rarely mentions it. Though his paternal grandfather came to America from the Rhineland, his family long denied the Teutonic connection. Its most famous manifestation remains essentially negative, when liberal comedians revived the family surname to mockingly call him “Drumpf”. Still, while Trump might seem the most American of men, he, like his country today, couldn’t exist without its German ancestry, with the community so deeply rooted in the republic’s soul that the two are now inseparable.

Germans have been coming to the New World since before the US existed. Across the 17th century, as Europe tumbled into sectarian slaughter, thousands headed west; Mennonites and Amish gasping for free religious air. It’s later, though, that German America truly took root. In the 40 years from 1850, some five million Germans made the Atlantic crossing, and almost as soon as they arrived set about transforming their New World home. As one German-American activist pointedly claimed in 1874, his countrymen’s presence heralded the “improvement” of national life.

This confidence was partly economic. Unlike the Irish or Italians — destitute, illiterate, condemned to years in rat-hole tenements — German Americans were generally richer and more educated. Most were farmers, dodging the East Coast slums and traveling west with the republic, founding towns like Oldenburg, Indiana, and Dutzow, Missouri, and Germantowns almost everywhere. Like many of their countrymen, my wife’s family chose the rich soil of Wisconsin, but an ethnic map of the nation today shows a German plurality stretching across a dozen states and 1,000 heartland counties, an unbroken chain from Philadelphia to Oregon.

Their spread was largely welcomed. Linguistically, culturally and ethnically closer to their Anglo compatriots than the classic Ellis Islander, they were accepted far more readily. As early as 1858, Abraham Lincoln reassured Chicago Germans that they were “like the blood of the blood of the Founders”. To be sure, tensions existed. Prim WASP clergymen, sober in more ways than one, dreaded the rise of “lager bier”. Yet compared with the Irish (“foreign barbarians”), let alone the Chinese (“degraded and inferior”), German Americans were generally accepted into what Victorian Social Darwinists blithely called the “Anglo-Teutonic” race.

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It’s tempting, here, to talk of “assimilation” — but that isn’t quite right. German Americans were doubtless accepted faster than other settlers. Ironically, though, and especially given their wealth, numbers and vast geographic reach, that helped them shape habits without anyone really noticing. At Trump’s cage fight, after all, punters were offered that “All-American” staple: hot dogs. Like the hamburger, however, frankfurters first arrived in the cookbooks of German migrants.

It wasn’t just their food that morphed the mainstream. Almost uniquely among migrants, German Americans developed their own architectural vernacular, and Milwaukee would be their Florence. Wisconsin’s biggest city, around one-in-three residents were German natives in 1860. They came — why else? — to brew. Ice from the Milwaukee River kept their lager cool, while docks on Lake Michigan made it easy to export. Brands like Pabst and Miller rapidly turned Milwaukee into “Brew City” and its streetscape into the most Teutonic in America. Even now, after years of deindustrialization, Milwaukee’s churches look German, and its downtown offices too, and the mansions sigh for Saxony. The city hall, finished in 1895, might have lumbered to the Midwest from Hamburg, its square squat tower, complete with beer-stein sculptures, primed for a post-binge brawl.

This urban landscape has become America’s too. The gables, the timbering, the sharp roofs and curved arches — you can find them on main streets everywhere, not just in Fredericksburg, Texas, or Over-the-Rhine, Ohio, but in regions that received far smaller German flows. Then there’s how these places feel. Take Von Trier, a historic beer hall not far from Milwaukee city hall. As you enter, you’ll hear the growl of conversation, and the numbing clunk of glasses. Waitresses bustle past, carrying beer jugs and half-eaten plates of pretzels. The atmosphere is homely, convivial, a place to drink but also eat and talk, distinct from both brandy-soaked colonial taverns and the modern English pub. No, Von Trier is impeccably Teutonic — just like almost every bar in America.

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This boldness was matched elsewhere. If some Italians rejected the strictures of mainstream America — the mafia was called cosa nostra (“our thing”) precisely to obscure it — Germans instead shaped New World morals to their taste. “May German diligence, steadfastness, and loyalty continue to be the hallmarks of the German element in the United States”, said one pamphlet from 1899, “and imprint themselves ever more indelibly upon the American national character!”

Indeed, probably the most enduring German contribution is how they balanced work and play. Until the mid-19th century, Anglo-America largely followed the Puritan Sabbath, with its devotion to family and faith. Germans, whether Catholic or Lutheran, were more relaxed. They built bandstands and picnic grounds everywhere they went, and Milwaukee became known as the “German Athens” for its proliferation of social clubs. Gambling was also popular. My in-laws have spent hours trying to teach me Sheepshead, a bewildering Bavarian card game now played wherever Wisconsinites meet. Taken together, anyway, the German Sonntagsspaziergang (“Sunday outing”) soon became an American staple — and this helped inform what the good life truly meant. To quote James Truslow Adams, the historian who in 1931 coined the phrase “American Dream”, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”. That fullness would hardly have been possible without the distinctly German, distinctly American, waltz between toil and joy.

Trump himself was surely shaped by these ideas. Whatever his actual business acumen, he’s clearly proud of his success, once crowing that he’d “never lost” in life. A lifetime of dealmaking was never for the glory of God: but for pleasures of the flesh. Those private jets and endless rounds of golf are at bottom aspirational, with the President promising his voters that “you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money”. It hasn’t quite turned out that way — but in his blend of labor, leisure and over-weaning pride, Trump is as German American as an Independence Day hot dog.

That raises an obvious question: if even the commander-in-chief was forged by German America, why is he indifferent to his background? There’s an equally obvious answer: two world wars and a torrent of anti-German feeling. Things were particularly hysterical when America fought the Kaiser from 1917. Germans were spat at in the street and their dachshunds pelted with rocks. Books were banned, plays pulled, and sauerkraut rechristened “liberty cabbage”. The Second World War saw less trouble, but German Americans were nonetheless prodded into quiet. Schools closed and presses shuttered and several Germantowns changed their names. Surnames also changed, from Müller to Miller, Schmidt to Smith. Drumpf to Trump, too, with Donald’s landlord father pretending he was Swedish to avoid awkwardness with Jewish tenants.

If this implies the end of German America was merely a function of 20th-century disasters, I’d suggest a more subtle dynamic. Closeness to the Anglo, after all, is what gave the Germans strength. But when the moment came, that same closeness ensured assimilation was both rapid and near total — far more total than groups that struggled. According to the 2020 census, some 45 million citizens claim German heritage, among white Americans second only to English. Where, though, is German America today? Where is its Rocky, its Seinfeld, even its Big Fat Greek Wedding? Where are its songs, its stories? Where, come to that, are its politicians? Forget Biden’s plastic Irishness: Barack Obama has half-seriously adopted the Emerald Isle too, while everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders exploits their ethnic backgrounds for political ends. Not so Trump, who echoed the Swedish story as late as 2016, and whose German-American Day comments feel like an afterthought, focusing more on defense spending than any ancestral affection.

Yet to borrow Wren’s epitaph, if you seek German America, simply look around you. In fundamental ways, the modern United States was made by red-faced Rhenish farmers and hard-nosed Saxon brewers. And whatever the undoubted achievements of other migrant groups, in movies, music or sport, their self-conscious othering means their mores are less likely to spread. Think again of food. Unlike the trusty hot dog, bagels, gyros and pizza retain a vaguely hyphenated air, something true of some Americans themselves. Reacting, perhaps, to a legacy of WASP stereotyping, Larry David still plays up his neurosis, while Martin Scorsese makes mob flicks five decades from his first. The point of these clichés isn’t their veracity — but that they guarantee a certain distance from the American mainstream, limiting their ability to shape the deeper, embedded culture.

This matters, not least in appreciating the contours of American life over recent decades. The relative cultural silence of heartland America — those flyover counties where Germans most gathered — doesn’t preclude power. Trump’s rise since 2016 certainly suggests as much, even before you recall that the country will down the equivalent of 22 Reflecting Pools of (mostly) “lager beer” this 4 July. The same principles also offer lessons for the future. It’s tempting, particularly on the Right, to see the spread of new music or food as outriders of more thoroughgoing shifts in American life. But using German America and its European cousins as a guide suggests this link is far from straightforward. It’s certainly true that 21st-century immigration will sway the national experience. Yet just as The Godfather didn’t fundamentally alter the tenor of the American Dream, it’s unlikely that Yemeni coffee or Hispanic rap will either.

The opposite, in a sense, is true as well. Think again to those early German settlers. The Amish still live much like their bearded forebears, planting and praying in the Pennsylvania soil. Yet if they, almost uniquely among German Americans, preserve their tongue and customs, centuries in the New World have left few indelible traces. In other words, and as the mass of German migrants belatedly learned, the ultimate mark of influence is to be drowned in the American tide.

If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy, the reason we became the most powerful country in history, the reason we defeated fascism and communism and remade much of the world in our capitalist image, is that we’re somehow special. 

For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style “reason” as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation.

A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land. 

The long arc of Western history that led to the birth of the United States did not “begin” at any particular moment, but the collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly a major inflection point. The new kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords on the wreckage of the Empire were less sophisticated than the society they had replaced. They lacked the bureaucracy necessary to tax their subjects as effectively as the Romans had, and without that revenue, they could not raise standing armies. Instead, they relied on volunteer soldiers, and compensated them with the spoils of war and pillage. This included plundered treasure as well as, more importantly, land.

Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism. The power of a medieval king was measured by the military might of the volunteer soldiers pledged to him — otherwise known as his vassals. These men tended to be experienced warriors who could fight on horseback and who could conscript peasants who lived on their land, by force or by payment, to serve as foot soldiers. Generally, the more land a vassal held, the larger his annual revenue and the greater his army. He agreed to wage war on behalf of a more powerful magnate in exchange for the right to rule over a share of the newly conquered lands that military victory would bring. With that new wealth and power, he could, in turn, attract less powerful vassals into his own service.

But this compensation scheme created an intractable problem for the king, who, in the early Middle Ages, was merely the most powerful warlord in a given region at a given moment. The more land he distributed to his vassals, the stronger and more independent they became. Thus, every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief the king granted to them increased the threat they posed to his hegemony.

The remedy only made the problem worse. The king could secure his throne against the predatory ambitions of his rivals only by waging new wars and conquering new lands to distribute to his vassals as fiefs. It was a vicious cycle: staying ahead of one’s opponents in the short term meant increasing the threat they posed in the long term. On top of that, vassals waged their own wars to amass their own retinues of lesser vassals, and were also constantly trying to build their own military dynasties. Political competition created the conditions for endless war.

The militarized politics of feudal Europe produced an intricate vertical social structure: a long chain of vassals and liege lords connected the lowliest peasant to God. At the same time, however, the competition between warlords created a countervailing ideological force: republicanism.

The core region of feudal Europe was the area that was conquered by Charlemagne in the ninth century, stretching from the south of present-day Italy to the Baltic Sea, and from Bohemia to the Pyrenees. In the early days, aspiring conquerors swarmed to this relatively populated landmass, whose large peasant class could be easily forced into serving in infantries. But eventually, the core became overheated. The power of the incumbent lords became too strong to contest, and competition shifted to the more sparsely populated and up-for-grabs lands of the east and the north.

To effectively exploit these peripheral domains, their new rulers had to encourage settlement — and not just by agricultural laborers. Centuries of military competition in Europe had steadily generated new technologies: plane and chainmail armor, long bows, stone castles and siege weaponry like trebuchets. Artisans were needed to manufacture these products, and they in turn required trading centers. In this way, towns became indispensable to the long-term security of any throne.

Sometimes rulers transferred populations to their territories by sheer force, but more often, they were compelled to offer attractive terms to prospective immigrants. Colonists were granted enhanced property rights and civil autonomy. In the 12th century, the charter of Dublin allowed its residents to administer their own local affairs and judge their own legal cases. They were allowed to form guilds and to build as they wished within the city’s boundaries. Legal innovations spread like mushrooms: a charter in a town in today’s Germany would become a template for the founding of a new one in today’s Poland. A transnational legal network began to emerge, bestowing certain rights and privileges upon urban inhabitants, who became known as “burgesses”, or “the bourgeoisie”.

As the kingdoms of the old Carolingian lands spread to the farthest northern and eastern reaches of the continent, new riverine and overland trade routes emerged, criss-crossing Europe. Trade produced wealth, which kings could tax. These new sources of revenue, along with the development of bureaucracy, began to resolve the problem of the conflicting political interests between lords and vassals. Now, instead of exchanging land for military service, monarchs could pay mercenaries to fight their wars, and even raise standing armies. The Hundred Years’ War of the late Middle Ages was fought largely by mercenaries. But at the end of the war, Charles VII created the first European standing army since the Roman Empire by bringing France’s private military companies, which were typically contracted by feuding lords, into the direct service of the king. The move ignited a brief civil war with much of the aristocracy, as the crown was consolidating at their expense.

Over time, to use Max Weber’s terminology, the crown began to monopolize the use of legitimate violence. Royal domains were internally pacified, and warfare became a matter of conflicts between great kingdoms. Something resembling the modern nation-state became dimly perceptible. 

Pacification was good for trade, and the chartered townships prospered. The republican-minded burgesses flourished with them. But the old feudal class structures didn’t simply evaporate. Warrior knights slowly transformed into domesticated aristocrats orbiting the king’s court. These aristocrats continued to control the land, even while fulfilling no obvious social purpose. Stripped of their military function, they became a parasitical remnant of a social order that no longer existed. Peasants, laborers and lesser aristocrats found themselves socially immobile.

The stage was set for class conflict. The newly consolidated political power of the crown, at its apotheosis in the age of Absolutism, began to chafe against the burgesses with their democratic values.

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But for the discontented burgesses, farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. 

Take, for example, those who would come to be known as the Scots-Irish, though they thought of themselves simply as Irish. Their ancestors, largely Presbyterian, had been transplants from Scotland to Ulster, recruited by Queen Elizabeth I as English-aligned colonists meant to displace the native-born Catholic Irish. Conditions were dismal in Scotland, and the land much better in Ireland, so they came in droves. But once there, they found themselves under the thumbs of absentee English landlords, who leveraged the improvements the new tenants had made to their lands to double and triple the rents they charged them. Feudalism had long since passed, but the laboring classes were still being squeezed by the nobles. 

In the 18th century, the Scots-Irish fled Ulster as readily as their grandparents had once fled Scotland, this time to the east coast of the United States. After landing in Philadelphia, they beat a hasty path into the back country, where they chiseled crude farms out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians. Once the nation was unified following the War of Independence, the Scots-Irish pioneers, for better and for worse, became the tip of the spear of American expansionism. 

The conquest of western North America entailed a different kind of warfare than their distant European ancestors had waged in the Middle Ages. The Americans faced fierce resistance from an indigenous population skilled in warfare, but not of the sort that medieval conquerors had encountered in Europe. Indian tribes had not constructed stone castles nor built trebuchets. The Americans could take their land without fielding armies in the tens of thousands, and without reordering their society to produce a warrior class and a servile population that could be conscripted as cannon fodder. The settlers who marched west of the Appalachians to conquer Indian lands largely did the fighting themselves, with the US Army playing only an ancillary role. They furnished their own weapons, and put their own lives at risk. They believed not in oaths of loyalty but in liberty, independence, and natural rights. It was a form of conquest and colonization that was entirely compatible with the old republican values of the European bourgeoisie.

After the West had been settled, the bourgeois ideology continued to prosper. Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state. 

Those conditions, however, have vanished. In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous. 

At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional. There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to “freedom” to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last. 

Over recent years, few writers have been quoted as incessantly as Hannah Arendt. Or rather misquoted — for though Donald Trump’s first presidential win catapulted Arendt’s 1951 book on totalitarianism back into the bestseller list, her fans have largely wallowed in anachronism. Avoiding her most arresting insights, they have instead reimagined Arendt as a kind of Resistance liberal, offering warnings of what happens when “politics as usual” is shamefully disrupted.

“Once again,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her new introduction to the re-publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2024, “we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize.” Which makes Arendt’s own response to America’s 200th anniversary so useful now, as Trump’s cage-filled 250th celebrations reach their climax. For the truth is that the philosopher’s own example actually proves she was far more thoughtful about her present than her contemporary followers are of theirs — even if her own hunt for usable versions of American patriotism ended up fomenting its own mistakes.

The most critical Arendt ever got of the United States was in a public lecture in Boston, 50 years ago, to mark the 200th birthday of her adopted land the year before it was celebrated. It wasn’t, she reflected, an anniversary that inspired much confidence in the future. Nor was the problem one disastrous politician, even one as nefarious as Richard Nixon. It was, rather, where capitalism and empire were taking the country, as Arendt looked out at “an increasing disarray in the very foundations of our political life”.

In Southeast Asia, America had gone down to ignominious defeat. The attempt to prop up South Vietnam after the “peace” in 1973 had only led to more war, and the emergency airlift of anyone who could make it out from the roof of the United States embassy in 1975. (Arendt gave special attention to the now almost forgotten “Operation Babylift”, which spirited thousands of orphans out of Saigon before the city fell.)

At home, Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came with soul-searching about how executive mendacity and secrecy undermined trust in government. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers publication had revealed — Arendt suggested — that the agonizing loss in Vietnam wasn’t half as bad as the fact that it took so long for Americans to register the truth about the war, since modern “public relations”, and not just age-old concealment and lying, had obscured their failures.

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Instead of celebrating anniversaries simplemindedly, Arendt concluded, it was time to confront how badly the American experiment had gone awry. The crimes, mistakes, and sins of the immediate past were like chickens coming home to roost, in the phrase made famous by Malcolm X and which Arendt chose as the title of her speech when it was published in the New York Review of Books.

Arendt claimed that returning to their beginnings could inspire Americans in crisis to overcome their blunders in the mid-20th century. The deeper past of the American founding, she suggested, offered a chance of transcending them. Let us, she admonished, not “forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings 200 years ago”. In this, she channeled the spirit of her earlier classic On Revolution, which had presented the American Founding as a modern reprise of austere Roman republicanism. She disdained what many people, then and now, take to the beating heart of the American project: whether law, liberalism, or rights. Rather, Arendt thought, America had once exemplified political action for the sake of collective freedom, a value she worried was dying in the modern world.

Amid the celebrants of her day, Arendt certainly refused to look away from the anxiety and depression that the following two centuries had produced. Yet she, too, was stumbling — not so much because of her misunderstandings of the 1770s, as because she confused the stakes of the Seventies. Five decades on from Arendt’s speech, America ended up in the age of Trump — as a direct consequence of the forces unleashed in her day. But she didn’t see them coming.

In her piece, for instance, Arendt mourned “the erosion of American power” following the Vietnam fiasco. But when she mounted the Boston lectern to celebrate the Founding, she didn’t imagine that the Democrats and Republicans alike would move to renew America’s global power over subsequent decades: including its military muscle. For the Democrats especially, the catastrophic defeat of peace candidate George McGovern in 1972 cast the die. From Mogadishu to Kabul, other failed wars, and countless casualties, invariably followed.

The militarism of an American hegemon rehabilitated in the 50 years since Vietnam, alongside the greater damage it wrought around the world, left too many disaffected voters, displeased by the ignominy of their country’s record. It also left an opening for Trump to run twice as a peace candidate — even if he finally and unceremoniously betrayed that promise. All this is a reminder that, as great a theorist of the imperial origins of totalitarianism as she was, Arendt never did glimpse the possibility that America itself had been, or could indeed become, an empire.

Arendt had other ideological blind spots too. Her political theory had always resonated with the ideal of participatory democracy in things like the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto propounded by student activists. Yet she always preferred to recognize the political action stemming from the deep past of the American Revolution, or Greece and Rome before it, and perhaps in some evanescent modern situations like the French resistance or the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

In her lecture, Arendt raised doubts about her American modernity and its consumerist economy, its mendacious ad-men and image-managers. They were, she said, exactly what made the American Founding indispensable, because it demonstrated public-mindedness beyond private gain or pleasure.

Unfortunately, though, Arendt’s failure to anticipate a renaissance for war was matched by a misrecognition of economic transformation. She did not anticipate that the economic instabilities of the Seventies were giving rise to the neoliberalism of the era since. She acknowledged the economic events, inflation most notably, that defined her decade when the 250th ceremonies were held across the country. Yet in her flawed belief that failed wars are fueled by inflation — a consequence, perhaps, of her German background — she missed the deeper geopolitical reasons for her age’s economic malaise. Both the first oil shock and Nixon’s decision to float the dollar transformed America’s long-term fortunes, even as the neoliberal response to Seventies-era inflation soon redefined the national economy.

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Even more than the return of American militarism, meanwhile, the economic choices beginning in the Seventies produced the most damaging aspects of our own time. It was the American carnage of neoliberalism, after all, that permitted Trump to run against his own party and then the Democrats for betraying the people in the name of “elites”. (Never mind that practically Trump’s only legislative accomplishment is a gargantuan tax cut he gifted to the rich in his first term and renewed in his second.) Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

“We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other,” Arendt wrote, in one striking moment of clarity. “The dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people have stumbled over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut up the past.” When she asserted that people can confusingly stumble into a future so starkly different from the past that it makes their own confusion unintelligible, she was right not least about herself.

Indeed, beyond prompting skepticism of the restoration of American “normalcy” that Resistance liberals today so confidently counsel, Arendt’s greatest value is less about the dangers of prophecy — even if it’s striking that she was hardly the Cassandra of her own age. Rather, she reminds us how easy it is to miss what’s happening under our noses, and pretending that our past, even when we celebrate it, is where the cure for the rot can be found.

In the summer of 1776, just a few weeks after the Thirteen Colonies had declared their independence, George Washington was in New York, preparing for the first and biggest fight of the Revolutionary War. His army was about to face more than 30,000 British troops — the largest enemy fleet ever to reach American shores. He inspected fortifications, monitored British movements on Staten Island, and rallied his men. But, on 19 August, as New York braced itself for battle, Washington put aside his military maps and turned his attention to Mount Vernon, his plantation in Virginia.

That evening, he wrote a long letter to his estate manager, instructing him to design a new garden filled with trees and shrubs from the American forest. With the chaos of cannons and blood looming, the commander-in-chief thought of soaring white pines and tulip trees, alabaster dogwood and stately red cedars. Only American native species should be used, he insisted. As the young nation faced its first military confrontation in the name of liberty, Washington decided that Mount Vernon was to be an American garden where English trees were not allowed to claw their roots in the soil. It was Washington’s horticultural declaration of independence.

This week, the United States celebrates its 250th birthday. There will be flyovers, airshows, historical re-enactments, military parades, concerts, exhibitions and street parties. The Founding Fathers will be quoted, misinterpreted and used for political gain — as they have been for decades. Yet amid the celebrations, there is a very important aspect of these men, in particular the first four presidents, that has largely been forgotten: their love for the natural world.

As Washington’s letter so vividly implies, he grasped the importance of nature for the country’s identity and future. Certainly not everything the Founders did was great — not least given their fields and gardens were tended and cultivated by enslaved workers — but if American conservatives wish to invoke their writings and legacy, they might benefit from taking a broader view of their beliefs.

The Founding Fathers’ vegetable plots, ornamental plants, landscapes and forests played a crucial role in America’s struggle for national identity. Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton became symbols of America’s economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens. Even political language drew on the natural world: with the Tree of Liberty the most potent example. Indeed, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all agreed that agriculture should be the foundation of the new republic. In 1787, Jefferson wrote that “our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural”, while Washington dreamed of an agrarian society where “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook”. Madison thought agriculture the “surest basis of our national happiness, dignity and independence”, quipping that they were “worshippers of Ceres”, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

These were not abstract ideas; the Founders eagerly experimented with crop rotation, soil improvement and new farming methods. Jefferson famously designed the mold board of a plow and with the help of his enslaved workers grew 125 different varieties of fruit trees and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, constantly testing new varieties. “The greatest service which can be rendered any country,” he wrote, “is to add an useful plant to its culture.” And today it is almost unimaginable that Washington refused a third presidential term because he wished to return to his fields and gardens. Most Americans expected him to remain in office for life. Instead, he demurred, longing for Mount Vernon’s fields and gardens. Washington was also the first to collect farm dung in a specifically designed building. They were all, in fact, obsessed with manure. Adams experimented extensively, mixing dung with mud, lime and seaweed — and when he was the American minister in London, he even visited a manure heap on the outskirts of the city. While other diplomats rushed powdered and bejeweled through the corridors of St James’s Palace, Adams carefully poked through the stinking pile and clearly didn’t mind the muck on his hands. He noted its ingredients, and triumphantly concluded that it was “not equal to mine”.

To modern readers, this might seem an odd obsession. But it was key to a larger political vision. While agriculture provided the livelihood for most Americans, the Founding Fathers also believed that independent farmers with small self-sufficient farms would be the guardians of liberty. Seemingly mundane tasks such as collecting manure, planting seeds, plowing and improving soils were therefore political acts and elemental parts of nation-building. The more prosperous farmers there were, Madison argued, “the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself”.

But there was a geopolitical element to their obsession with nature, too — reaching beyond their shores and freighted with the idea of national identity. Jefferson, in particular, was motivated by this as he took umbrage against what was known as the “degeneracy theory”. Most famously advanced by the French naturalist Comte du Buffon, this theory posited that the New World was inferior to the Old World: American plants, animals and even people were believed to be smaller, weaker and less vigorous than their European counterparts.

They all “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky & unprolific land”, Buffon claimed. As these theories spread, the natural world of the United States became a metaphor for its political and cultural significance — or insignificance — depending on your viewpoint. Jefferson, naturally, was irked. And if size was Buffon’s measure of superiority, then Jefferson reasoned he only needed to prove that everything was larger and stronger in the New World. He immersed himself in natural history books, collected measurements of American wildlife, and asked correspondents across the country to provide data on the largest specimens they could find.

As part of his campaign to debunk the idea of American degeneracy, he arrived in Paris, in 1784, bearing an “uncommonly large panther skin” in his luggage. He likewise boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer “could walk under the belly of our moose” and eventually arranged for an enormous moose from Vermont to be shipped across the Atlantic to prove his point. America’s flora and fauna were enlisted in a patriotic campaign to demonstrate the strength of the republic. Later, as president, Jefferson even briefly kept two live grizzly bears on the grounds of the White House. Under the banner of “the-bigger-the-better”, Jefferson used the size of animals and trees to prove his point — perhaps the one measure of greatness that President Trump would agree with. Yet where Jefferson sought grandeur in forests, wildlife and landscapes, Trump prefers monumental architecture, gold leaf and spectacle.

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Following the end of the War of Independence, in 1783, the former colonies had to mature from being a war alliance to being a united nation. The Constitution bound them together politically and legally, but nature provided a transcendent feeling of nationhood, a shared sense of belonging. What previous generations had regarded as a hostile wilderness gradually became an object of national pride. The vast forests, expansive rivers and dramatic mountains became expressions of a singularly American character. The continent’s scale suggested strength and possibility; its wildness was the embodiment of a nation that had freed itself from the shackles of tyranny. Landscape had a political value. And in 1791, Jefferson asked the artist John Trumbull to paint Virginia’s Natural Bridge, so that he could present “to the world this singular landscape, which otherwise some bungling European will misrepresent”.

The return of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from their expedition across the continent to the Pacific coast in 1806 reinforced these ideas. Primeval forests, vast plains, spectacular waterfalls — all became symbols of national greatness. Americans were convinced that the Rockies were more commanding than the Alps and that the Potomac rivaled the Rhine. John Adams dismissed the Thames as “but a rivulet” compared with the majestic Hudson, while Abigail Adams believed that nature possessed “greater magnificence and sublimity in America than in any part of Europe”.

Besides, America’s landscapes were untainted by centuries of monarchy and despotism. Where Europe’s antiquity became associated with tyranny and corruption, the American wilderness represented freedom and renewal. Why should they admire “the temples which Roman robbers have reared”, wrote the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman, when America’s nature was untouched by the blood of tyrants?  This connection between patriotism and nature remains visible in America’s national mythology. The nation’s hearts are filled with pride as they sing the songs of their beloved landscapes. As “America the Beautiful” describes it: the “amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!” Or “From the mountains, to the prairies, / To the oceans, white with foam”, in “God Bless America”.

It is ironic, then, that the Trump administration, a fervent advocate of bigger-is-better politics, is introducing environmental policies which include major rollbacks of federal regulations, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and proposed draconian cuts to the National Park Service. While Republicans frequently refer to the Founders in defense of limited government or gun control, they rarely acknowledge that one of them is also the forgotten father of American environmentalism: James Madison. In 1818, Madison delivered a widely published speech to the Albemarle Agricultural Society, which places him at the vanguard of American forest and soil conservation. In this speech, Madison warned about the destructive effect of deforestation and large-scale tobacco cultivation on the environment, challenging the assumption that nature “can be made subservient to the use of man”. At Montpelier, his plantation in Virginia, he even protected a part of the woodlands: the first American politician to preserve a forest.

Though Madison’s speech is largely forgotten today, it deserves recognition as one of the founding documents of the United States. It offers a reminder, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, that the Founders’ vision extended beyond political institutions and the Constitution. They believed that the republic depended not only on laws and liberty — but also on healthy soils, productive farms, thriving forests, and a respect for the natural world. Jefferson held this deeply, expressing it in a letter to Madison in 1789. “The earth,” he wrote, “belongs in usufruct to the living”. No generation possesses the right to exhaust or permanently diminish what it has inherited, and each receives the Earth from its predecessors and holds it in trust for those who follow. “The dead have neither powers nor rights over it”, Jefferson explained, “the earth belongs to each of these generations, during its course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. generation receives it clear of the debts and incumberances [sic] of the 1st. the 3d of the 2d. and so on.” It is an idea that resonates as strongly today as it did at the founding of the republic, whatever the sitting president might claim.

Next month, Americans mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire. Although the present US Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and first implemented in 1789, during the anniversary celebrations this summer we can expect to hear widespread encomia to the genius of the Constitution as well as of the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s preamble to the declaration.

Don’t believe it. While it was a milestone for its era, the US Constitution is deeply flawed. The most successful contemporary democracies have learned from America’s mistakes in designing their own, more recent national constitutions. Pious American patriots sometimes say that “the Founders built better than they knew.” In reality, the Founders botched the job.

Consider two current controversies, over President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build an official ballroom; and the Supreme Court’s involvement in partisan congressional redistricting in Virginia. In a country with a well-written constitution, neither would be a subject of controversy, because lines of authority would be well-delineated and unambiguous.

Can a president of the United States, a temporary occupant of the executive mansion, command upon a whim that much of it be demolished and rebuilt, on the basis of a design he alone has approved, with private, rather than public, funding? Surely, this is the kind of technical question that a well-written constitution would clarify. Congress authorized and funded the last extensive renovation of the White House under President Harry Truman, and under laws passed by Congress, major renovations are supposed to be reviewed and authorized in advance by the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, and other agencies.

But Trump ordered the demolition of much of the White House before he sought approval from the NCPC, which he obtained only later, after a federal judge intervened to block construction and after he had stacked the commission with loyal appointees. The attempt of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress to belatedly fund the ongoing destruction has run afoul of parliamentary rules that govern what can be included in a funding bill under the procedure of budget reconciliation.

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Either the Constitution allows a current president to unilaterally reshape the buildings and landscape of Washington, DC, on his own authority — or it doesn’t. If Trump does have the constitutional authority to destroy a third of the White House on his own initiative, can a future President Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris demolish the Washington Monument and replace it?

Progressive Democrats as well as Right-wing Republicans make extreme claims about the location of authority under the Constitution — when it suits them. After Virginian voters, in a referendum on April 21, approved a plan by Virginia Democrats to gerrymander or rig congressional districts to lock in a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation to the US House of Representatives, the state’s high court struck down the measure as illegal because it didn’t follow proper procedures to amend the state constitution. The federal Supreme Court unanimously refused to review and possibly overturn the Virginia state supreme court’s decision.

Each of these cases illustrates a major design defect of the American federal constitution: the separation of powers, in the case of the White House ballroom; and America’s unique system of federalism, in the case of the Virginia gerrymandering case.

The Founders, bless their hearts, believed in the quaint 18th-century theory that safeguarding democracy and civil liberty required that executive, legislative, and judicial powers be allocated to different, independent, co-equal government branches. The theory was mistaken. We know it was mistaken because Britain and the other major English-speaking countries — Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — all have parliamentary systems, in which executive powers are wielded by the prime minister, a member of the legislature, with the British monarch serving as a ceremonial figurehead.

If the Founders had been right about the separation of powers, then Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be undemocratic, illiberal regimes dominated by an all-powerful legislative dictatorship. Indeed, in defiance of the theory of the American founding, most other democracies in the world today have parliamentary or hybrid systems, rather than American-style presidential systems based on the separation of powers. The Founders, though undoubtedly great practical statesmen, were wrong on this fundamental point.

To make matters worse, as the political scientist Juan Linz argued, liberty and democracy tend to be in greater danger in presidential systems, rather than in parliamentary systems. The reason is that the separately elected president can claim equal authority with the legislature, and in a constitutional deadlock, he or she is more likely to command the loyalty of the armed forces and internal security services. Conversely, the only way that a legislature in a presidential system can remove an independently elected president is impeachment.

In a parliamentary system, prime ministers can fall from power when their parliamentary party or coalition loses the majority. And between elections, they can be dumped by their fellow legislators, with a vote of no confidence or similar measure, whereupon they once again become mere ordinary members of parliament, if they do not resign from politics. Just ask Keir Starmer. This model renders impeachments of prime ministers unnecessary.

The separation of powers in presidential systems, then, is more likely to cause breakdowns of democracy than to prevent them. On Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, MAGA supporters seeking to thwart the ratification of the Electoral College results ransacked the US Capitol and forced members of Congress to flee to safety. On Jan. 8, 2023, after another Right-wing populist, Jair Bolsonaro, lost the presidency of Brazil to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, supporters of Bolsonaro broke into and damaged the Brazilian presidential palace, the legislative chambers, and the high court, in the part of the capital of Brasilia known as — what else? — the Plaza of the Three Powers.

In contrast, when the party of another right-wing Populist, Viktor Orbán, was reduced to a minority in the Hungarian parliament on April 10 of this year, Orban graciously resigned as prime minister. In Hungary’s parliamentary system, he had no alternative. He could not claim to be the sole tribune of the Hungarian people, as he had never been directly elected, only chosen by his party when it held a legislative majority.

To be sure, there have been prime ministers who have become dictators in effect, like India’s Indira Gandhi, who ruled by authoritarian methods during the 21-month emergency of 1975-1977. But in 1977, Gandhi lost her own seat in parliament in an electoral backlash only to be re-elected and serve as prime minister again from 1980 to 1984.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister from 2003 to 2014, was able to deepen his authoritarian rule only after he became president under a new Turkish constitution that converted Turkey’s parliamentary system to a presidential system.  Thanks, American Founders!

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American-style presidentialism, then, in other countries as well as the United States, encourages power grabs by chief executives, checked only by impeachments by the legislature and judicial rulings that a president might ignore (“John Marshall has made his decision,” as Andrew Jackson famously said when the high court displeased him, “now let him enforce it!”).

While the separation of powers is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen, the federal system inherited from America’s wise and enlightened Founders is simply a mess. Under the constitution of 1787, the authority of the states and their citizens is supposed to be protected from the federal government by two methods — a clear division of authority between state and federal governments, and the representation of the states as distinct corporate bodies, each with two Senators who initially were chosen by state legislatures. Since the founding, both of these parts of the American constitution have broken down.

Instead of a clear-cut allocation of different responsibilities to state and federal governments in a two-layer cake, we have something like a Streusel swirl, in which federal, state, and local authorities in particular areas are blended and intertwined. Much of the blending is the result of federal funding of state and local programs, including hybrid federal-state programs like Medicaid. The federal Department of Transportation, for example, pays in part for local bike trails and pedestrian walkways, in addition to federal interstate highways.

The reason is simple. When advocates for a policy can’t win at the level of the city council or state legislature, they often find allies in Congress to fund or mandate their favored program, federalism be damned. Interest groups on the Right as well the Left are willing to shop among levels of government until they find one that will do what they want. In the name of states’ rights, anti-abortion conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court return abortion policy to the states, and succeeded when  the Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022. Meanwhile, pressured by deep-pocketed tech investors, the Trump administration has sought a federal ban on state regulation of AI. When it comes to federalism in the United States, the working theory of both parties and all factions is that whatever level of government they and their allies control has the authority to carry out the policy they want.

The second protection for the states built into the US Constitution — the election of two senators from every state — lost its purpose long ago. Originally, US senators were elected by state legislatures, on the theory that they represented states as political entities. But the 17th Amendment in 1913 wrecked the structure by requiring that US senators, like representatives, be elected directly by citizens.

But while congressional districts that send representatives to the House are revised after every census, reflecting population growth and sometimes partisan gerrymandering, the rule that each state has two senators, regardless of its population, is part of America’s defective constitution and can’t be altered. The result is that the Senate is the most grotesquely malapportioned legislative chamber in any country in the world. A voter in Wyoming, which has around 590,000 residents, has 66 times the political influence in the Senate as California, with its 39 million residents. The genius of the American constitution!

Would foreign leaders drafting a democratic constitution today in any country think, “Let’s copy the US Constitution and create a bicameral system in which the population ratios in one branch of the legislature can be as uneven as 66 to one”? Would a constitutional convention in a newly democratic Iran or China choose a presidential system in which an independently elected president, unchecked by the legislature, could plunge the country into a foreign war or tear down or build national monuments in the national capital with private money and without legislative authorization? No, they wouldn’t. Rational founders in the 21st century would conclude that democratic stability and continuity are likely to be more secure under a parliamentary regime than in an American-style presidential system.

Madison, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and the other members of the Constitutional convention of 1787 were patriotic, brave, well-informed, thoughtful, and public-spirited. These were unquestionably great men. Unfortunately, in looking for models for self-government on a national scale, they only had the examples of ancient, medieval, and modern city-states, leagues, and the proto-parliamentary British monarchy. With the few precedents at their disposal, and given the need to compromise to hold the shaky union together, the drafters of the US Constitution did the best they could at the time. But they screwed up. It’s time that Americans admit it.

Born 100 years ago this weekend, on a kitchen table in a Brooklyn tenement, just in time for the Depression and the golden age of American comedy, Melvin Kaminsky, the son of Polish and Ukrainian Jews, inherited a powerful love for life. He was raised by a single mother who worked a 10-hour shift in New York’s garment district. (His father died when he was two.) Short, scrawny, and with a nose that someone once compared to “a small mudslide”, Brooks told Playboy that he could hang around with older boys because “they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I’d stick it in their eye. I read a little more than they did, so I could say, ‘Touch me not, leper!’ ‘Hey! Mel called me a leopard!’ ‘Schmuck! Leper!’ Words were my equalizer.”

That’s true of comedians in general. But it was Jewish ones who perfected the fine art of using wit — which Aristotle defined as “cultivated insolence” — as a weapon of defence. Don Rickles, Joan Rivers (born Molinsky), and Jackie Mason (Yacov Moshe Maza), also children of immigrants and contemporaries of Brooks, made their careers out of humor honed to a razor’s edge over centuries in the Diaspora. (A typical Mason joke: “Are there any Poles in the audience? No? There must be. They just don’t understand the question.”) A few years older than Rickles and Mason, Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen), “Mr I Can’t Get No Respect”, revealed the socially anxious underbelly of their aggressive routines. But Brooks, who at the age of nine told his uncle that he was headed not for the garment district but for show business, is cut from different cloth.

Brooks can be as outrageous as anyone: The Producers’ vaudeville production “Springtime for Hitler” made the film untouchable by major studios. Yet if his humour is distinctly Jewish — in Blazing Saddles, he appears as an Indian chief who speaks Yiddish — it is also as big-hearted and self-assured as the country that gave him his break. Whether it was a natural inclination to gratitude, or serving his country at the Battle of the Bulge, or rising from poverty to the silver screen by way of the Borscht Belt, Brooks came to love America, and to reflect that love in his art.

Consider Blazing Saddles. Nothing captures the American belief in gritty individualism, justice, and a fair deal for the little guy more than the Western, where the white hats give the black hats what’s coming before they ride off into the sunset. Brooks, whose writing team included the legendary comedian Richard Pryor, turns that idea into a piece of biting social commentary — one that condemns present-day racism while offering a hopeful vision of Americans’ capacity to live up to the nation’s ideals. The story’s protagonist is Bart, a black convict played by Cleavon Little. As the opening credits roll, the title song informs us that Bart “conquered fear and he conquered hate, / He turned dark night into day, / He made his blazing saddle / A torch to light the way.”

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Blazing Saddles doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, because there is none from the get-go. In one early scene, a boss taunts his chain gang of railway track-layers: “When you was slaves, you sang like birds. Come on! How ’bout a good ole n****r work song?” Backed by a chorus of black convicts, Bart sings a fine a capella version of the 1934 Cole Porter tune “I Get a Kick Out of You”, and then watches with amusement as the befuddled cowboy bosses — “Hold, it, hold it! What the hell is that shit?” — dance like imbeciles while singing “Camptown Races,” a minstrel song that parodies slave music, to show what they had in mind. Taggart, who oversees the whole operation, comes riding up fit to be tied: “What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is goin’ on here? I hired you people to get a little track laid, not to jump around like a bunch a’ Kansas City faggots!” It’s a brilliant (if unintended) reversal that foreshadows the plot as a whole — Taggart is as racist as anyone — in which bigots learn to respect, and even cherish, the objects of their former hatred.

Like Huckleberry Finn, an anti-racist book full of racial slurs, Blazing Saddles doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. In fact, it’s a retelling of Twain’s great American novel of friendship between outcasts, with Gene Wilder’s Jim (a washed-up alcoholic gunslinger) in the role of Huck, and Bart in the role of Jim. These two characters — nothing but a lousy pair of deuces, socially speaking — become fast friends when Bart, who’s been appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge by the state’s attorney general in a scheme to seize their land, is greeted with open hostility by the town’s all-white residents.

But the pair ultimately win over the townspeople, setting up a genuinely democratic drama. They lead a popular coalition of Rock Ridge settlers, and black, Irish, and Chinese track-layers, to outwit a motley band of common criminals, Klansmen, Nazis, Hell’s Angels, and (this being the year after the Yom Kippur War) Arabs on camels, paid for by the wealthy and powerful. In Blazing Saddles, a classic tale — the triumph of the wily underdog against organized injustice — turns out to be equally Jewish and American. In the end, the townspeople beg Bart to stay on as sheriff, but he and Jim head for greener pastures. They get into a chauffeured limousine and drive west, toward the setting sun. It’s a story of civic amity worthy of America’s 250th, a reminder of national aspirations that are sorely in need of renewal.

“I’m a serious human being who is a humorist,” Brooks told Playboy. “The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball… if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively.” Brooks’ signature combination of edgy humor, deep generosity, and a tragicomic sensibility shaped by wide reading — Gogol, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — was already apparent in his first film, The Producers, released in 1967. The protagonists are Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom (again Gene Wilder), an accountant, whose name is a nod to the eponymous wandering Jew of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Many people think that it was in very bad taste for Brooks to make a film full of goose-stepping, Sieg-Heiling characters in Nazi uniforms little more than 20 years after the Holocaust. Maybe so: but Brooks subtly indicates that he is by no means insensitive to Jewish suffering. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is targeted by Irish antisemites, while the Polish city of Bialystock was home to 50,000 Jews at the start of the Second World War; 800 were burned alive inside the Great Synagogue when the Germans torched it in 1941, while the rest died on the streets, in the ghetto, or at Treblinka.

These hints had to suffice, and not just because the film is a comedy: American survivors just wanted to forget the past, and began speaking publicly about their experiences in the Holocaust only in the Seventies. But in 1967, Americans were fully prepared to ridicule the Nazis; the popular television series Hogan’s Heroes had been doing just that for two years. Little wonder “Springtime for Hitler” brilliantly mocks the Third Reich by having a spaced-out acid-head perform the role of Hitler (did Brooks know that der Führer was sustained by a steady diet of opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines?) and a black hipster that of “Little Joe” Goebbels.

Brooks’ big heart is there again on full display in The Producers. Bialystock talks Bloom into participating in his con of massively overselling shares in “Springtime for Hitler” — a play so bad that he is convinced it will fail on its first night — to little old ladies he pretends to love. The scheme backfires, and both men are sent to prison. But neither the little old ladies, who attend their trial, nor Bloom, who seems to bear in himself all the anxieties of Jewish trauma have regrets. He explains that “No one ever called me Leo before… even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before, I mean with someone else… This man, this man — this is a wonderful man.”

It’s a plea for kindness and compassion that is all-too-rare in comedy today. That’s because the world in which Brooks came of age no longer exists. His generation was educated in the school of hard knocks: first the Depression, then the war, with its triumphs and horrors. And if the slump taught self-reliance, that existential fight against the Germans and Japanese taught patriotism and civic responsibility. To many veterans, it revealed what really matters in life: family, friendship, community; gratitude and kindness. Brooks’s distinctly American comedy — democratically capacious, high-spirited, goofy, magnanimous, tinged with Jewish pathos — perfectly expressed this sensibility.

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Shortly after the bicentennial, however, Americans began losing faith in their great experiment in ordered liberty. The schools stopped teaching civics; the idea of the melting-pot ceased to form young souls, and national pride declined. No longer united by common ideals and aspirations, our sense of humor has become smaller and more brittle. And with the reassertion of a wary tribalism, Brooks’s marriage of Jewish and American comedy seems but a distant memory. In Blazing Saddles, Sioux warriors attack a wagon train in which Jim (then a boy) and his family are travelling far in the rear, a wry comment on how black Americans were sent to the back of the bus in the Jim Crow south. Brooks, the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief, lets them go, marvelling “They darker than us! Woo!” The scene, which wittily presents Jews as aboriginal Americans while emphasising their solidarity with black Americans during the civil rights movement, wouldn’t work today. Some black Americans view Jews as oppressors, and few Jewish Americans still understand Yiddish. Like other Americans, Jews have increasingly embraced progressivism, which turns people into humorless scolds — especially when jokes contain offensive language. These developments have pushed Brooksian comedy to the brink of extinction.

What remains in a world without humor is absurdity, the incongruity at the heart of any joke. But absurdity in itself, shorn of the meaning our common human endeavors and shared concerns bring to it, isn’t funny. It can’t lift us up, because it isn’t going anywhere. Brooks is always going somewhere; his comedy is beloved because its honesty about who we are, and its hopeful vision of who we might be, satisfies our craving for authentic human meaning.

If the essence of MAGA could be distilled into a single evening, then last night’s UFC Freedom 250 at the White House would be it. Part military parade, part sporting spectacle and part internet fever dream, the MMA fights on the South Lawn marked both America’s 250th birthday and Donald Trump’s 80th. Here, as tens of thousands of Trump supporters descended on DC, was the clearest sign yet of red America stamping its authority in the country’s bluest enclave. Six years ago, on January 6, they had come uninvited to one of the cathedrals of American democracy. Now, they were here by invitation of the state itself.

For those who weren’t offered a ringside seat alongside Trump and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief executive, Dana White, there was always the Ellipse: a 52-acre park just south of the White House, to watch the action on giant screens. Passing vendors hawking Trump t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Suck It Up, Buttercup” and “It’s No Mistake, Snowflake”, I shuffled through concentric circles of security to enter the promised land. Moments after walking in, a nearby fan put his friend in a chokehold. The friend’s protestations about losing consciousness went unnoticed until a DEA agent was forced to intervene. “Save it for later,” he warned them.

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As I walked around the park, it felt like I had stumbled into a MAGA beauty pageant: out were the traditional red MAGA caps (although there were still a few), in were t-shirts reading “red, white and badass” and “so long, autopen Joe”. Others were decked out in Freedom 250 merch, the Trump-aligned group tasked with organizing patriotic celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. Nearly everyone I spoke to had flown in for the event, from states as far as Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona, to catch a glimpse of their favorite fighters — and favorite president.

The fights did not begin until after 8pm, leaving fans to entertain themselves for a few hours. Some queued to test their strength on a punch machine, placing bets on who would land the biggest score. Others climbed into a makeshift ring for photographs or played commentator from behind a mock broadcast desk. But most were content to mill about near the jumbo screens, watching soldiers from different divisions wrestle each other inside the octagon until the real fights began.

It was a surreal scene, not least because the park was topped-and-tailed by two of the nation’s most recognizable landmarks. At one end stood the Washington Monument. At the other loomed the star-spangled “Claw” — a 92-foot-tall, 154-foot-wide, 600-ton spider-like structure through which the White House was just visible in the distance. Built at a reported cost of $60 million and involving seven federal agencies and more than 700 subcontractors, the Claw would serve as the home of the first live professional sporting event ever staged at the White House.

Was it a partisan political event too? No, insisted White in the weeks leading up to the event, declaring that UFC Freedom 250 would be a celebration of all things American. And what better way to mark the occasion than with fighters vomiting by the Ellipse, motorbikers backflipping in front of the White House, and a bald eagle soaring over the heads of thousands of red-blooded, fight-loving patriots?

Such scenes may not have been what John Adams and Benjamin Franklin envisioned when they signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Nor is it likely that William Howard Taft imagined his newly built Oval Office would one day serve as the staging area for a UFC walkout onto the White House South Lawn. To liberals, the event was a gaudy symptom of a late-stage idiocracy. To conservatives, it was a triumphant showing of America’s (and by extension, MAGA’s) cultural might.

Occasionally, Trump chants rippled through the crowd, with one group singing happy birthday to the President. One man, wearing a red MAGA hat and a t-shirt reading “Freedom in the front, party in the back” told me that only Trump would be able to put on an event like this. “We owe him, man,” he said. “Literally no other president would put on a show like this.” Unprompted, he proceeded to chug his beer, most of which went down his shirt, before screaming: “Trump 2028 and beyond! WOO!”

If there were any Democrats in our midst, they were certainly not forthcoming about it. This was no place for a bien-pensant liberal. After all, the event happened at the President’s direction, outside his official residence, and on his birthday. Having been met with a chorus of boos at last week’s Knicks game in New York, he was now back on friendlier ground, with the loudest cheers of the night erupting as he emerged from the White House.

As he walked out of the Oval Office alongside White, the President initially appeared rather wan. His movements were slow and his facial expression barely changed. But it soon became clear that this was an affectation: this was the emperor’s show, and it was unbecoming to display any emotion to the masses. Stepping out onto the South Portico, he stood for a moment to soak in the crowd’s adulation before saluting skyward as military planes flew above.

For all that this event was a show of Trumpian grandeur, there was also something unmistakably American about it. Loud, self-assured, and impossible to ignore, it read as a global hegemon flexing its cultural muscle, while corporate America staged its own parallel spectacle around the “Claw”: red, white and blue lights cutting into the night sky, giant Ram trucks suspended overhead, and a Meta booth promoting its new AI glasses. Never guilty of letting a good business opportunity go to waste, the Trump Organization also commemorated the event with “Freedom 250”-themed silver and gold coins featuring Trump’s face. Some of the coins cost as much as  $12,000. For better or worse, it was difficult to imagine any other country staging something quite like it.

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By James Billot

This was my first UFC event. Until now, my relationship with “extreme” sports had rarely gone further than a Christmas skate at Central Park. But I was enthralled by the world I had just entered into. Over the course of the evening, I learned that there were eight different ways to choke an opponent into submission, and 12 different ways to break their arm. “It’s all about avoiding lay and pray,” Nick Willey, a former MMA fighter who now competes as a bareknuckle boxer, advised me. “If you get grappled down to the ground, you’re in big trouble.”

The fights themselves were thrilling, with the biggest upset of the night coming shortly after midnight. American Justin Gaethje stunned Ilia Topuria in a brutal 20-minute contest that left the champion’s face looking like a half-deflated football. Gaethje entered the bout as a heavy underdog, only to overwhelm Topuria with a relentless barrage of punches and leg kicks, claiming the lightweight belt in the process. “Never fuck with a real American!” screamed a nearby fan, pumping his fist into the air in triumph.

In keeping with the other fighters, Gaethje then climbed out of the octagon to shake the hand of the President, who commended the fighter on an excellent bout. The scene had an air of a modern-day Coliseum, with the crowd’s roar subsiding into a kind of ritual hush after the violence properly dispensed. Now, Trump could proceed to his next engagement as a satisfied octogenarian, boarding a flight to Geneva to finalize America’s deal with Iran.

In some ways, UFC Freedom 250 represented the worst aspects of American culture: the snobbery of the liberals who sniped from afar, the crassness of the MAGA movement, the shameless commercialism of US business, and the infiltration of politics into all corners of everyday life. Every rational instinct told me the event was silly, ludicrous, and absurd.

But here’s my confession: I enjoyed every minute of it. Perhaps the fighting awakened something more primitive in me. Or perhaps I was simply swept up in the enthusiasm of the night. More likely though, it was the surrender of all pretense to seriousness. Looking out across the crowd — a 20-foot beer snake, fake UFC belts, a giant inflatable fighting glove, and animated debates over Hokit’s technical prowess — I realized everyone was simply having fun. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

What this looked like to the rest of the world lies in the eye of the beholder. Was it a triumph of American spectacle, or a self-inflicted blow to the country’s cultural prestige? As one fan summed it up as we left in the early hours: “Bro, sometimes the best moments in life come when you’re getting punched in the face.”

Ever since he attained the age of majority some four decades ago, Terence Hamilton, now 57, has voted in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, covering 30 counties across the western part of the state. First drawn in 1986 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district’s scope has shifted somewhat over the years. But the bottom line has been a majority-black district in a state where African Americans comprise 38% of the population.

Like many of his black neighbors, Hamilton has reliably backed the district’s incumbent US representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, who’s held his seat since 1993. But the US Supreme Court has now disrupted the pattern, holding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw majority-minority districts like Hamilton’s. In response, Mississippi Republicans have rushed to redraw the state’s electoral map in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes.

They’re doing this, of course, in the name of colorblindness.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 miles away, Ethan Chen, aged 18, is preparing to attend Georgetown University, not far from his family’s home in Bethesda, Md. It is a bittersweet transition for Chen, who had always considered Georgetown a “safety school.” His dream was to attend either Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools. But during the winter and spring, he received one rejection letter after another, despite a perfect grade-point average and equally impressive test scores.

How did this come to be, after another high-court ruling that barred colleges from discriminating against white and Asian applicants in the name of “affirmative action”? Chen, of course, will never know what exactly went into admissions officers’ decisions to reject him. What he does know is that many schools have continued to use essays and other “soft” factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name.

The college officials, too, claim to uphold colorblind justice.

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These two stories — based on composite characters — illustrate the paradox of race and colorblind justice 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” The two recent Supreme Court decisions — on affirmative action and on voting rights — have clarified something profound about American public life. They reveal that two-and-a-half centuries since the Founding, we are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences and even “win” on racial terms. These ambitions pull against one another, suggesting that race will continue to indelibly stamp the American experience.

Consider the parallel nature of the two decisions. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided in 2023, the Supremes prohibited universities from explicitly using race in admissions. In Louisiana v. Callais, they sharply constrained the use of race in congressional redistricting under the VRA. On the surface, both decisions advance the same constitutional ideal of “colorblindness”: government should treat citizens without regard to race. Yet in practice, both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies.

Universities didn’t abandon the pursuit of racial diversity after the high court proscribed affirmative action. Rather, university leaders shifted emphasis toward other considerations, some of which are strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating the experience of marginalization. Formally speaking, these are race-neutral criteria. But everyone understands that they may also function as indirect means of sustaining black and Hispanic representation at selective institutions, as they appear to be doing.

Meanwhile, in the voting-rights context, a similar proxy logic holds. Red states attacking minority-majority districts increasingly invoke race-neutral partisanship, rather than race, as the guiding principle of line-drawing. Since black voters in much of the South overwhelmingly support Democrats, partisan gerrymanders often produce substantial racial consequences without having to explicitly classify voters by race.

The symmetry is striking. In both cases, non-racial instruments are being employed that have predictable racial effects. But political partisans see the cases differently. Conservatives who object to universities using race-correlated proxies to preserve minority enrollment often defend partisan districting as constitutionally neutral. Meanwhile, liberals defend “holistic” admissions criteria as part of a legitimate effort to broaden opportunity. This, even as the Left often condemns partisan gerrymanders precisely because their racial effects are foreseeable. Both sides, in other words, alternate between formal and substantive understandings of equality depending on context, thus illustrating what I call the colorblindness paradox.

This suggests that the stakes are deeper than ordinary partisan inconsistency. The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself when race remains deeply embedded in the social structure. For decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly embraced a view of the Constitution that is suspicious of racial classification. The central danger, in this account, is the government sorting citizens by race and allocating benefits and burdens on that basis. This principle — suspicion of government racecraft, even when it’s used for “positive” or non-invidious reasons — dominates the high court’s equal-protection jurisprudence. Rightly so, in my view.

But implementing that principle is another matter altogether. The difficulty here is that race in America remains highly correlated with countless other variables that public institutions may legitimately consider when allocating scarce benefits or opportunities. Educational attainment, neighborhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography, and partisan affiliation — all continue to bear the imprint of racial history. And they all are relevant when exercising the government’s discretionary powers.

As a result, banning explicit racial classification needn’t preclude racially differentiated outcomes. It merely changes the mechanisms through which those outcomes are pursued — or avoided. The colorblindness principle provides little guidance here. This is why our public arguments about colorblindness increasingly revolve around debates over the use of proxies.

Take college admissions. If a university gives special weight to applicants who overcame severe educational disadvantage, is it pursuing a morally defensible concern for human development? Or is it covertly pursuing racial “balancing”? The answer isn’t obvious, since the non-racial criteria that serve as proxies for race are themselves neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Educational disadvantages are real. Unequal access to stable schools, family resources, mentoring networks, and social capital is real. Moreover, non-racial criteria that correlate with race may genuinely identify talented students (of all races) whose capacities were developed under adverse conditions. Thus, it is legitimate for an admissions process to consider them.

But such consideration also predictably shapes the racial composition of entering classes, and it is plausible to suspect that this is precisely why some institutions are using them more heavily now than before the 2023 anti-affirmative-action ruling. If so, those institutions are violating the spirit if not the letter of the court’s holding, as Chen in our narrative learned to his chagrin.

Or consider redistricting. A legislature produces a map to maximize Republican advantage, knowing that such a map will reduce black electoral concentration. Is this merely ordinary political hardball with unfortunate racial side effects? Or is it something uglier — partisanship masquerading as a cover story for anti-black animus? Again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Political affiliation is itself a legitimate organizing principle in democratic politics. Yet in a society in which race and party remain so tightly aligned in some regions, the distinction between partisan and racial intent is hard to discern.

The difficulty here is that, while the court can forbid the explicit consideration of race, it can’t forbid the use of statistical signals that correlate with racial identity. Everything turns on the motivations of officialdom, which aren’t easy to determine.

This points toward a deeper conceptual confusion in our racial discourse, which arises from our conflating two very different ideas: racial blindness and racial indifference. A society may prohibit explicit racial classification while remaining intensely concerned with racial outcomes, embracing blindness while rejecting indifference. Indeed, that is precisely our current situation. Universities remain deeply invested in racial diversity even after affirmative action. Voting-rights advocates remain deeply invested in preserving black political representation even after the court’s retrenchment. The disappearance of explicit racial language hasn’t produced indifference to racial disparities. It has simply displaced racial management, and racial politicking, into more indirect forms. This distinction matters, because it exposes the limits of purely procedural solutions to racial inequality.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that durable inequality isn’t sustained merely by discriminatory transactions at the point of selection. It is sustained through differences in social development — differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed. Opportunity travels along the synapses of social networks. Human-capital formation depends upon family stability, educational culture, neighborhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways. These developmental processes unfold long before a university admissions office reviews an application or a legislature draws district boundaries. And racial identity figures prominently in these processes of social development in the United States.

This is why legal and administrative efforts to engineer proportional representation at the endpoint often feel unsatisfying. They attempt to correct downstream disparities via anti-white “reverse discrimination,” which the Supreme Court now decries, while leaving untouched the upstream developmental inequalities from which those disparities partly emerge.

And there is another drawback to the method. Formal neutrality can itself become morally evasive if it ignores the historical conditions that continue to shape social outcomes. A society can’t simply declare itself colorblind and thereby escape the consequences of its past. The legacy of racial exclusion remains embedded in institutions and inherited patterns of advantage and disadvantage. The Terence Hamilton in our opening narrative might be the great grandson of a slave and the son of a father who endured de jure racial apartheid. Those historical realities and their consequences don’t disappear the second a court in Washington holds them irrelevant.

Thus our predicament: the paradox of colorblindness. On the one hand, permanent racial management threatens to entrench precisely the kind of group consciousness that a liberal democracy ought to transcend. A political culture organized around endless racial accounting risks weakening common citizenship. The more every institutional disparity is interpreted through the lens of racial representation, the harder it becomes to encounter one another simply as fellow citizens. On the other hand, abstract invocations of neutrality may fail to reckon adequately with the developmental realities that shape unequal outcomes in the first place.

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America oscillates between these two poles because we seek both transcendence and remediation. We wish to become a society in which race no longer governs public life. Yet we also seek to offset the stubborn consequences of racial history. These goals aren’t fully compatible.

Indeed, the deeper paradox may be this: the more persistently racial disparities remain visible, the harder it becomes to sustain genuine colorblindness. But the more aggressively institutions organize themselves around racial outcomes, the harder it becomes to achieve a society in which race recedes in civic importance. No constitutional doctrine can fully resolve this tension, because it doesn’t arise merely from law. It arises from the unfinished social condition of the nation itself.

I supported affirmative action many years ago because I regarded it as a temporary bridge across inequalities inherited from Jim Crow. I remain sympathetic to the moral impulse behind such policies. But over time, I have grown skeptical that endless procedural adjustment at the point of selection can substitute for the harder work of social development. Nor do I believe that a healthy republic can indefinitely sustain a politics in which every important institution is expected to produce racially calibrated outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s recent interventions are therefore both understandable and welcome, but they are also incomplete. They reflect an effort to limit explicit racial administration in public life. Yet they can’t eliminate the underlying realities that make proxy politics inevitable, and inscrutable, in the first place.

For that reason, the real challenge before us isn’t simply legal. It is civic and developmental. If we want a politics in which race matters less, then we must build a society in which the capacities required for flourishing are more broadly and deeply cultivated across all communities. No amount of doctrinal refinement can spare us that obligation.

The paradoxes will remain. But 250 years after a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson penned his majestic words, perhaps we can at least begin speaking about them honestly. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is actually inconsistent with achieving colorblindness in the conduct of our public affairs.