How can you possibly celebrate July 4, the sneerers ask bitterly, when it took more than a century to realize the promises made in the Declaration of Independence? How can America be great if it sanctioned slavery and then segregation for such a long time? How can we be “number one” when these charts I have show us lagging behind by the metrics I prefer?

There is, of course, nothing to be gained by ignoring these questions — or, for that matter, by downplaying the many historical blots that have sullied the American escutcheon. Our celebration of Yorktown is nothing if we do not rejoice also at Gettysburg and at Selma; our anger at Jefferson’s “long train of abuses and usurpations” is rendered hollow without a concomitant outrage at the debasements of Jim Crow; our passion for the first ten amendments is incomplete unless accompanied by reverence for the thirteenth and the nineteenth. But, over the long term at least, the cavillers’ criticisms are ultimately empty. That American liberty was initially restricted in its application tells us nothing about the value of that liberty itself, nor does it serve to diminish the role that the founders’ presumptions played as North Stars to which the downtrodden might appeal. Writing two years before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln cast the central contentions of the American founding as no less than a “stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” What the fifty-six delegates who assembled in Philadelphia had achieved, he remarked, transcended the immediate and roamed virtuously into the divine. “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln proposed, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” For perhaps the only time in the history of the world, Plato’s philosopher kings had come down from the mountain and done what they were supposed to do. Abroad, their words would be an inspiration to rebels as diverse as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Marquis de Lafayette, Lajos Kossuth, and Emily Pankhurst. At home they formed the basis of a new culture: “France was a land, England was a people,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter.”