Chang is the co-founder and CEO of GenUnity, a civic wellbeing nonprofit. Reid, a rising senior at Yale majoring in history, is a special assistant to the CEO.
The Fourth of July was painful for many Americans. The first half of 2022 brought the war in Ukraine; mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and across the country; and most recently the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. In the midst of these upheavals, feelings of celebration felt out of touch with this somber moment in our nation’s story.
At the same time, this week provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the legacy of July Fourth as the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a visionary statement of not only what the United States of America can become but how we can build our more perfect union.
Our Declaration of Independence sets out a revolutionary vision: equality as the bedrock of freedom. In pronouncing independence, the founders justified their revolutionary action with universal principles of human equality. Not only that we are all created equal, but each of us is the best judge of our own happiness. And, as a result, it is only through the practice of understanding each others’ lived experiences and engaging as equal co-owners in the design of a system of self-governance that we can build a society free from oppression and tyranny.
A community for everyone has to be built by everyone. Recently, however, this foundational principle feels evermore distant due to extreme attacks on voting rights, rampant gerrymandering and the everyday exclusions of those who may not share our views – whether in schools, social settings or the workplace.
Fortunately, as the Declaration lays out, we have the power to change this through the practice of everyday democracy:
- Take your passion for an issue and seek out those across your community who are experiencing or addressing it.
- Reflect carefully on whose perspectives you haven’t heard and ask yourself whether your understanding of someone else’s perspective is rooted in proximity to their lived experience.
- Build diverse relationships rooted in compassion for each others’ shared humanity.
- Act strategically to drive change with the best of what you know today, while welcoming continuous feedback and the opportunity to learn from those most proximate to the issues
With each rep, you’ll strengthen your democratic muscle, deepen feelings of agency, purpose and resilience, and spark positive change in your community.
Admittedly, in the context of our hyper-polarization and the fierce urgency of now, the practice of everyday democracy can feel like placing a feather on the scales of justice. The hard truth is this is what democracy demands. Democracy asks us to be vulnerably honest about our differences, to extend compassion in conflict, and to believe that the honest effort of millions working together to build a better society will actually result in one. There is no escape from this uncomfortable truth.
Yet in the face of these seemingly insurmountable odds, we find faith in an equally powerful truth – that we have no choice but to try.
We can do what we must because we must do what we can. In choosing to practice everyday democracy, we persist and invite our fellow Americans to join a lifelong project to uphold our inextricable ideals of equality and freedom.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.