Dear Weekend Jolter,
If you’re reading this, we’ve made it to 250. Happy anniversary, America. It’s a big one.
Even if you’re not staying up past 10:30 p.m., or whenever President Trump stops talking, to catch the fireworks (I, for one, plan to tough it out), there are plenty of ways to mark the milestone.
Corinne Cowan, part of our current class of interns, has been revisiting The Federalist Papers, showing once again that NR interns are built different. As for me, Michael Auslin’s new history of the Declaration, National Treasure, is this week’s reading material.
Contrary to expectations, it is not the book adaptation of a Nic Cage movie. The account is filled with information that can make a person very annoying at Fourth of July barbecues: Actually, the real date on which independence was decided was July 2; actually, the Declaration probably was not signed until later that summer; actually, the famous parchment on display in Washington isn’t the originally adopted document.
Auslin’s telling, more importantly, adds to scholarship emphasizing just how untested and risky the American revolutionary project was. And how, by their assiduous and farseeing work, the Founders and Framers held it together.
Wordsmithing played no small part: The original Declaration draft described as “sacred & undeniable” what was later termed “self-evident,” perhaps the most mercilessly effective edit in American history. (Conversely, the decision to remove Jefferson’s original condemnation of the slave trade — deferring any attempt to reconcile the cause of liberty with the industry of bondage — might be considered the most costly.) The document’s preamble, asserting rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” not only expressed the aspirations in that moment of a new nation, of men, risking all for independence: “It was a statement for all time,” Auslin writes.
It so happens that the author, in an adaptation from his book, penned an essay for NRO on the patriot who saved the Declaration of Independence and other documents from the depredations of British forces during the War of 1812. Have a look. There’s plenty more to peruse on NRO in the spirit of America this weekend.
I’ve arranged here a sampling:
Dan McLaughlin’s piece on Ben Franklin and that on the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, the South’s “first major taste of the Revolutionary War.”
NR’s editorial marking the Semiquincentennial.
John Puri’s wonderful posts (with lots of photos) from his road trippin’ across the country.
The entirety of the “America at 250” issue of the magazine.
Brian Allen’s many America 250–themed museum and art and history pieces.
Michael Brendan Dougherty on the irresistible allure of the United States.
Skyler Safriet on the historical circumstances of the major anniversaries from 1776 until now.
Andrew Stuttaford’s ode to Route 66 and Jennifer Tiedemann’s to that most American of tourist traps, South of the Border.
Daniel J. Flynn on what the signers of the Declaration sacrificed.
Josh Holdenried on the model George Washington provides.
Timothy Harper’s series on constitutional order (with more to come).
Allen C. Guelzo on American heritage.
In summary: Happy Fourth, everyone.
(And before we move on to the rest of the week’s highlights, a reminder that we’re running a “Defending America” webathon. If you can contribute to our operation and our work before the fundraiser ends this weekend, please do. As a special promotion, anyone who gives $250 or more will receive a free copy of Rick Brookhiser’s new book on Lafayette.)
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A win for Mamdani, a loss for NYC: Mamdani’s Disastrous Rent Freeze
On the Court’s decision on citizenship: Birthright Citizenship After Barbara
On the Court’s dueling rulings earlier this week: If the Fed Is Not Executive, What Is It?
Why Justice Amy Coney Barrett does not deserve all the abuse: Injustice Toward Barrett
ARTICLES
Peter Yared: Chinese AI’s Sputnik Moment
Marian L. Tupy: The Great Relearning Begins Anew
Dan McLaughlin: Supreme Court Allows States to Protect Girls’ Sports from Male Athletes
Dan McLaughlin: Chief Justice Roberts Tries to Save the Fed from Democracy and the Constitution
Brittany Bernstein: If the Supreme Court Is in the Tank for Trump, It Sure Has a Weird Way of Showing It
John Yoo: No, the Declaration of Independence Did Not Reject Executive Power
Lauren Veldhuizen: Daughters of the American Revolution Leaders Undermine Push to Ban Trans-Identifying Men
Joshua S. Treviño: Cracks Begin to Show in the Mexican Regime
Noah Rothman: How Much More Evidence Do We Need?
Rebeccah Heinrichs: An Opening for Trump to Secure Peace in Ukraine
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Ukraine Has Been Liberated (from Us)
Jeffrey Blehar: California Is Still Doomed
Kaitlyn Kiepert: This Christian Group Is Taking a Page Out of the ‘Pride’ Playbook
Jack Fowler: Daniel Oliver, R.I.P.
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Where else would Brian Allen go but Monticello for this week’s column? Indeed: A Visit to Jefferson’s Monticello as the Declaration of Independence Turns 250
Armond White reviews In the Hand of Dante: Schnabel’s Not-So-Divine Comedy
PREPARE FOR FIREWORKS IN THE EXCERPTS
NR’s editorial sticks up for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is unjustly under fire from the online mob:
With the conclusion of the 2025–26 Supreme Court term and Donald Trump’s defeat on birthright citizenship, we have been treated to another round of abuse from right-leaning commentators directed toward Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The immediate trigger of their ire is Barrett’s joining the Trump v. Barbara majority (along with Chief Justice John Roberts and, on the outcome, Justice Brett Kavanaugh) striking down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Barrett critics also cite her majority opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee, which allowed states to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day for up to five days later, as well as her vote (along with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch) to strike down Trump’s “emergency” global tariffs and her rulings against Trump in a few of last summer’s torrent of emergency decisions on deportations.
It’s the intemperate vitriol of these attacks, and their utter lack of perspective, that appalls us. Critics brand Barrett a traitor, a DEI hire, and a left-winger who has doomed the country. They complain that she makes poor decisions because she is a woman and a mother of adopted children from Haiti. Perhaps more ominously, there is much muttering that future Republicans should fill judicial vacancies with fewer people devoted to the law and more who will be mere party apparatchiks, voting in the results-oriented fashion we traditionally associate with the liberal justices.
The abuse of Barrett by the right mirrors the extent to which she has uniquely triggered the left over the years, from questions about her religion at her first judicial confirmation hearings to fresh charges that her recent votes in favor of Trump immigration policies are some sort of betrayal of her adopted children. As usual, anything done in imitation of the activist left is apt to be mixed with toxins.
Leaving aside the indecency of some of the critics, we object on two grounds. First, the predictable, faithful rule of written law is a positive end in itself, and a pillar of the good society. If judges are to be loyal to a party or impose their own preferred ends, they may as well be elected, and most of their powers given over to the other branches. Instead, we expect them to apply as best they can the work of the people’s representatives who made the Constitution and make the laws. That this sometimes puts them at odds with the best results reflects on the lawmakers, not the courts. That this sometimes puts them at odds with political leaders and popular opinion is a relief to anyone who might someday find themselves in the crosshairs of either and will need to stand upon the guarantees of law.
Second, Barrett is an outstanding justice and a key contributor to an outstanding Court. No, we don’t always agree with her, or with the Court’s decisions since her arrival in 2020 formed the current 6–3 majority. Nor, for that matter, do we agree every single time with any of her distinguished colleagues. The Court’s cases are often hard, and its justices fallible. That’s why there are nine of them.
Joshua S. Treviño explains the brewing political crisis in Mexico:
Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that the proximate roots of the crisis now lie in the late-April indictments, by the U.S. Department of Justice, of an array of alleged Mexican narco-politicians from Morena — and the Mexican president’s refusal to detain, and still less to extradite, the accused.
The indictments, which include both a governor and a senator from Mexico’s Sinaloa state, risk pulling apart the Morena coalition which presently controls that country’s presidency, supermajorities in both houses of the national legislature, and a supermajority of state governments. That coalition is, as with all political coalitions, heterogeneous. There is an opportunist faction, which adheres to Morena simply because it is in charge and would defect to nearly any other ruling party. There is an ideological faction, sincerely dedicated to Morena’s program, a “Fourth Transformation” in Mexican history, that is meant to subordinate the entire state to the party, end independent civil society, and remake Mexico along pre-January 3 Venezuelan lines — Cuban ties and all. There is, finally, what might be described as a narco faction, which has maintained longstanding ties with a variety of cartels. In governance, this last faction has developed a narco estado, a synthesis of the state and cartel, in which the former provides public goods, rents, and protection, and the latter provides money and muscle. The narco estado is nearly everywhere across Mexico, and its existence is one reason that former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (and current Deputy Secretary of State) Christopher Landau has said that perhaps over one-third of Mexican territory is now under de facto cartel governance.
The existential problem for Morena is that the single point of intersection for all three major factions is the party’s founder and singular figure, former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is the champion and visionary for the ideological faction, whose ranks include his successor as president, Claudia Sheinbaum. He is a rallying point and validator for the opportunist faction. (Mexican politics are somewhat like the Elizabethan settlement of late-Tudor England, in that they reward common practice without strictly requiring common belief.) He is also, very plausibly, a godfather of the narco faction — and this is where the American indictments hit directly at the party’s heart. The circumstantial evidence for this is robust: not only was López Obrador openly solicitous of the Sinaloa Cartel while in office, going so far as to visit and pay respects to the mother of the loathsome El Chapo, he was also investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for financial links to that same cartel, until the investigation was terminated for political reasons by the Obama administration. (When the New York Times and ProPublica reported on this over a decade later, López Obrador responded by doxxing the reporter at his daily presidential press conference: a frequent practice of his, which compelled at least one acquaintance of the author’s to purchase a vehicle with bulletproof glass.) Most recently, the former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, who served under President Biden, has publicly stated that López Obrador was afraid of what the United States might learn from the captured cartel leader El Mayo. Whatever is there, it is something that López Obrador, and therefore the regime, dreads.
ICYMI, Marian L. Tupy wrote last weekend on the latest “Great Relearning” of which Wolfe warned:
The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.
We are living through a Great Relearning of our own.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.
A generation later, those conclusions have been forgotten. Voters in wealthy democracies, and the young above all, are electing self-described democratic socialists who promise to repeal economics by decree. In New York, a democratic socialist won the mayoralty in November on a platform of frozen rents, city-owned grocery stores, and an expropriation of someone else’s wealth. The voters in Washington, D.C., are all but certain to elect a similar candidate. The 20th-century socialists buried hecatombs of corpses. Yet it is the intellectual corpse of socialism that is being revived.
What are the lessons that the voters have forgotten? Free trade is desirable because it lets Vietnamese seamstresses and Iowa farmers prosper by doing what they do best, while protection taxes a nation’s own citizens for the privilege of buying less. Rent control is ruinous because a price pinned below the market ensures that fewer apartments are built and maintained. Public ownership of factories fails, because the managers risk no money of their own and answer to no customer free to walk away. A municipal grocery cannot serve you, because a shop that is forbidden to fail has no reason to stock what you want. Confiscatory taxes defeat themselves, because capital, unlike the wage earner, has feet. Chronic deficits and the inflation they summon are cruelest of all, for they levy a tax that no legislature ever votes on and that the poor can least afford to dodge.
CODA
Enjoy the long weekend.
Comments