America at 250

At its best, America is a remarkable country, its diversity of thought, heritage, and land unmatched. But on the nation’s 250th birthday, it’s clear we’re not living up to our potential, and never fully have. This is a country founded on a promise of equality while it enslaved people and drove Native nations off their land, and 250 years later inequality still pits communities against each other over frivolous differences while the people who determine our future extract rents from politicians they own, escaping accountability entirely. Patriotism has been manufactured and sold back to us instead of grown from love of a country that owes everyone an equal shot, and believing we can be better is treated like an insult.

Over the past week I drove 1500 miles around the west, time to sit with an election loss and remember why I ran in the first place.

In Denver, I spent an afternoon knocking doors alongside a few visitors from out of state, for a first-time candidate who beat a member of congress who’d held the seat for thirty years. We were in neighborhoods that have spent years breathing bad air from industrial pollution, the ones that don’t get glossy mailers or candidate forums. People showed up anyway, because someone had finally asked what they needed instead of just asking for their vote. That’s the campaign we need everywhere, built by neighbors talking to neighbors instead of consultants running numbers.

The divide I kept running into on that drive wasn’t really about cities versus small towns. It was about which places power pays attention to, and that line cuts through both. It runs through the Denver neighborhoods we canvassed that never got a mailer, and through reservation land still waiting on a water settlement promised generations ago, a broken promise going back to the original theft of that land. It runs through the mountain ranges that burned this year, made worse by a politics too tangled in money to act, while the people making those decisions never have to breathe the smoke.

None of that changes without organized people building something bigger than any one campaign, and that has to start with money. As long as our elections are funded by the people who profit from the status quo, we’ll keep electing officials who protect it. I watched this up close in my own race, where AI industry money flooded the primary trying to keep things as they were. That isn’t democracy. It’s the people who already have power, buying more of it. That same system funds wars abroad long after anyone can explain what they accomplish, an empire serving capital instead of people. Public financing and real limits on campaign money aren’t radical ideas, just what it would take to give everything else a real chance.

Once you get the money out, what’s left looks like what people have wanted for a long time: healthcare as a right, not something you negotiate for during a medical emergency. Public ownership of the water, the grid, and transit we depend on, instead of handing them to private equity and calling it progress. Housing treated like shelter, not an investment vehicle. Workers with real power in their own workplaces. None of this is new. It’s the same tradition that built rural electrification, the labor movement, and the parts of this country that work for people.

None of this gets fixed without confronting who controls the story. There’s a pattern whenever anyone criticizes the people at the top: the criticism becomes the story, with more sympathy for the man being criticized than for the people paying the price for how he got that rich. That’s not an accident. A handful of people own most of what gets covered, deciding whether the story is a watershed getting poisoned or a war overseas that becomes background noise once it stops being new. We won’t build anything real in a media environment more comfortable defending power than naming what it costs the rest of us.

This is where patriotism comes back into it. Real patriotism isn’t a flag pin or a fireworks show paid for by a defense contractor, love of country reduced to a costume for the cameras. It isn’t underwriting a genocide in Gaza while we can’t manage to house or feed people already here. Real patriotism is looking honestly at the gap between what we promised each other 250 years ago and where we actually are, a promise made while denying that same equality to enslaved people and Native nations, and closing that gap means taking care of our own and choosing peace over endless intervention abroad. The organizers in Denver, the firefighters risking their lives on public land, the neighbors who show up for each other when things run dry, they’re the patriots, not the people selling the flag back to us at a markup.

What this country needs is what showed up in Denver: a working class movement that doesn’t wait for permission from the party or the people who fund it. A political system captured by donors and a national politics drifting toward authoritarianism don’t get pushed back by playing it safe. They get pushed back by organizing, precinct by precinct and workplace by workplace, building candidates who reject corporate money from the start. We don’t need to keep asking donors for permission. We need to build the alternative ourselves.

Support our efforts to organize

250 years in, this country still doesn’t work for everyone. Getting past that means a movement bigger than any race or election cycle, where working people hold power instead of handing it to whoever can afford to buy it. It means following through on what we promised each other, not just on the anniversary but every day after. That’s when patriotism stops being performance and starts being earned, a country that finally reflects the diversity it was built on instead of one that’s spent two and a half centuries protecting a select few at everyone else’s expense.