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The great thing about the Declaration of Independence is that Thomas Jefferson was writer enough to provide terrific phrases for all occasions, all the way down through posterity. For example, we reach our country’s birthday for the second time under the presidency* of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. So you start surfing those thunderous words and, eventually, you come to these.

…and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

“Thim was the days,” as Mr. Dooley once said.

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A long train of abuses and usurpations is the ride we’re all on at the moment, and have been ever since a year ago last January. There is grifting in first class, thievery in the club car, and incompetence back in coach. The engineer is half-mad, and the brakeman forgot to get on the train at all.

OK, we can push the metaphor off over the horizon if we’re not careful, but those guys in Philadelphia long ago were rebelling against a lack of control—over their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honors, and, in John Hancock’s case, over all that good smuggling that made him so rich. They were trying to reassert that control, and, in that, the Declaration was the first instruction manual. The Constitution was the second one, and the permanent one. Self-government was neither big nor small. It was under control or it was not. It had rules, or it did not. Famously, Mr. Madison wrote that, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” That’s pretty damn cold right there.

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We control ourselves through the way we control our government. That was the deal struck in Philadelphia. Twice, actually. We are obligated to keep the collective Id in its box, and we are certainly not supposed to allow the collective Id to run our government for us. It doesn’t matter how fully someone is the living expression of the national Id. It doesn’t matter how fluently someone expresses our anger. The anger, unchecked, is the problem. Had every American citizen been a Lincoln, every Trump rally would still have been a mob. We’re supposed to recognize that simple truth and make sure nothing bad comes of it. Like, say, this, from The Washington Post:

“A ghost town,” Alex called it, as he made his way toward the one-room post office at the center of the park, but what bothered him more than the rows of darkened trailers was imagining what might be happening inside. He had heard about the 27-year-old who mysteriously stopped eating or speaking in the days after his sister was detained in the raid, eventually dying in the hospital a week later. He knew about the 23-year-old who had become suicidal after his girlfriend’s family decided to flee for Mexico, hanging a noose outside of his trailer until a relative took him to a hospital.

This little boy is as American as the president*’s children are. (For that matter, he is exactly as American as the president*’s wife is.) When we lose control of self-government, when we take our hands off the wheel, or, worse, hand the wheel over to the embodiment of our worst impulses, Alex is one of the victims when the crash comes.

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This is a good year to celebrate the Fourth, because we have a very clear view of that for which the day stands, and a clear view of all we have to lose, if we don’t somehow get our hands on the controls again. On July 4, 1869, addressing a reunion of the Army of the Potomac, Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—who, six years earlier, on a Fourth of July weekend, helped ensure that the promises of 1776 were still capable of being fulfilled—told his audience that:

…For men are so constituted that what they but imperfectly understand they still make up their most violent judgment upon and works in which they had no hand seem easily achieved and of little worth…

The present and profane government of the United States cannot last forever. (It may only seem that way.) But the damage can last a long time, and whether the damage lasts a long time depends completely on whether the people of the country can reassert the controls over their self-government that its designers have handed down to us in the original instruction manuals. The current train of abuses and usurpations is long indeed, but it’s also right there in the open, and we have been told what to do about it.

Poor Casey was always all right,

He stuck to his post both day and night;

They loved to hear the whistle of old Number Three

As he came into Memphis on the old K.C.

Headaches and heartaches and all kinds of pain

Are not apart from a railroad train;

Tales that are earnest, noble and gran'

Belong to the life of a railroad man.

Happy Fourth of July. Stick to your posts, day and night. Train’s a’coming.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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