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In Independence Eve Speech, Trump Warns of Communism Then Promotes One-Party Rule
"If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years," the president said.
Jul 04, 2026
President Donald Trump spent his address to the United States the night before its 250th birthday fearmongering about the "communist menace" and suggesting that his Republican Party should govern the nation for a century.
"America will never be a communist country," he said from Mount Rushmore, South Dakota Friday night. "We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years."
His remarks clearly implied a false link between communism and the Democratic Party and promoted a bill that critics say will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to participate in elections. The SAVE America Act claims to address the documented non-problem of noncitizen voting by requiring voters to show documents such as passports and birth certificates, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain, especially for low-income voters. Such requirements would also impose added burdens on rural voters and married women who have changed their names.
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media that with his remarks, Trump was "clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills."
Trump clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills. https://t.co/vKOytLxdm0
— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) July 4, 2026
"What message could be more unifying on the nation’s 250th birthday weekend than touting one-party rule?" writer Michael Freeman posted on social media.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11) wrote: "The thing about Trump is he tells us what he wants & what he intends to do. He wants to end democracy. Freeze MAGA in power forever. Have zero accountability to the people. Just seize power & keep it. We are so close to true authoritarianism. We must use every ounce of power & leverage we have to stop them."
Before arguing for 100 years of Republican rule, Trump continued the exaggerated anti-communist rhetoric he has employed in the weeks since progressive and Democratic-Socialist candidates won a series of Democratic primary victories.
"There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success," Trump said on Friday. "These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11."
In fact, the Democratic Socialists who won primary elections in New York City last month ran on a platform of affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger unions, and an end to US military support for Israel's genocide in Gaza, policies backed by large numbers of ordinary Americans.
Trump doubled down on an opposition between communism and US values and also linked his anti-communist to his anti-immigrant stance, threatening to send communists into "exile."
"You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both," Trump said in a quote later posted from the White House X account.
Apparently, you can be a rapist and an alleged pedophile and become President. https://t.co/aYAMCJQOPO
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) July 4, 2026
"This July 4th, the Trump regime is pushing a new Red Scare. This is an actual White House post. The regime is pretending that communism is a serious threat to America," Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staffer on the January 6 Committee, responded on social media.
MeidasNews editor in chief Ron Filipkowski argued that Trump was leaning on anti-communism to divert attention from his own disastrous policies.
"Trump fucks up the economy with his tariffs, raises gas prices for every American with his foolish war, piles on to the national debt with his budget & wasteful spending on vanity projects, covers up Epstein, makes billions for himself, then starts yelling about communism to distract," he wrote on social media.
Journalist Mark Chadbourn agreed, writing on social media that the speech reflected Trump's "new strategy."
"Now he’s failed completely abroad, he’s looking to the Enemy Within to create new Hate Figures to unite his wavering followers," Chadbourn said. "Can’t stop Iran’s threat so let’s have a 2026 Red Scare to turn neighbour against neighbour. A new HUAC on the way? Very dangerous."
Trump's July 3 remarks contrasted with those of New York Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier that day, who uplifted the country's immigrant heritage, decried greed and racial supremacy, and argued that “time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”
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Why Would President Trump Want to Celebrate the Declaration of Independence?
President Trump has long seemed fascinated by notions of “central casting.” Well, Donald Trump seems a more natural fit for the role of King George III than that of a framer of the Declaration of Independence.
Jul 04, 2026
For months President Donald Trump has been funneling money and interest toward the semi-private Freedom 250, and away from America 250, the congressionally created nonpartisan commission that has spent years preparing for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026. As a result, staggering sums of money have been contributed to Freedom 250, much of it by private companies that do business with the government or are in heavily regulated industries. It’s unsurprising that large corporations might want to seek favor from the Trump administration by opening their checkbooks, and it’s unsurprising that President Trump would welcome these checks with minimal transparency.
What is surprising is that President Trump would be keen to celebrate the Declaration of Independence at all. This document expresses the people’s desire to be free from the rule of a king, a hunger for the rule of law, and respect for an independent judiciary. Nothing could be less Trumpy.
While the Declaration announces liberation from the tyranny of monarchy, Trump seems fairly obsessed with framing himself as a king. Examples abound. In lauding his own efforts to kill a congestion pricing plan in Manhattan, Trump ended his social media post with the self-congratulatory, “LONG LIVE THE KING.” In response to historic nationwide peaceful protests, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dumping excrement upon American demonstrators. During a recent official British state visit, the White House posted a picture of King Charles with President Trump, captioned “TWO KINGS.” And Trump’s fondness for monarchical trappings is no secret globally. For instance, while wearing a gold tie that reflected “President Trump’s taste for gold,” South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented Trump with a golden crown that was a replica of an ancient artifact, and Trump responded by saying, “I’d like to wear it right now.”
Notably, the Declaration’s first grievance against King George III of Great Britain was his refusal to “Assent to Laws,” conveying the belief that no one—not even a nation’s highest leader—is above the law. Yet President Trump seems offended by such a notion, and he contests it regularly. Trump implies that the law does not apply to him when he posts messages like “[h]e who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who declared himself emperor of France in the 1800s. And Trump has proclaimed that Article II of the Constitution grants him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” a statement that not only misreads Article II, but ignores the way presidential power operates with, and is checked by, Article I congressional power and Article III judicial power.
Thankfully, we need not look to President Trump for inspiration on how to mark the Declaration’s 250th anniversary.
Numerous high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Solicitor General John Sauer, have declined to commit to obeying court orders and the administration’s track record reflects this defiance: In just the first six months of the administration, courts in more than 12 cases determined that the administration violated court orders. More recently, a study cited hundreds of instances of administration non-compliance with court orders. The situation has become so dire that many judges have lost confidence in this administration’s representations and are reducing the deference customarily given to federal government lawyers.
Finally, further down in the Declaration’s list of grievances against King George III is that “[h]e has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” Today, this could describe Trump’s aspirations. He has railed against judges—even those whom he appointed in his first presidential term—when they dare to rule against his administration’s policies. Trump is infuriated when judges honor their oaths of office and follow the facts and the law regardless of where this leads them. After immigration-related rulings halted Trump administration policies, US District Judge James Boasberg found himself the target of President Trump’s call for Congress to remove him from the bench. Trump railed about Boasberg on social media, calling the judge a “troublemaker and agitator,” and suggested that many other judges should be impeached as well.
Trump’s harsh rhetoric even prompted a rare statement from Chief Justice John Roberts, who explained that “[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” And it’s not just lower court judges who find themselves targeted by Trump’s invective. After the Supreme Court struck down his administration’s tariff scheme by a 6-3 margin, Trump criticized the court and justices in strikingly personal terms, saying, “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court,” and in reference to Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you wanna know the truth, the two of them.”
President Trump has long seemed fascinated by notions of “central casting.” Well, Donald Trump seems a more natural fit for the role of King George III than that of a framer of the Declaration of Independence.
Thankfully, we need not look to President Trump for inspiration on how to mark the Declaration’s 250th anniversary. Inspiration can be found in the broad array of Americans who gathered nationwide to protest autocracy in peaceful No Kings demonstrations; the March 28, 2026 No Kings mobilizations drew an estimated 8 million participants in over 3,000 sites, arguably the largest single-day of protests in United States history.
We can be inspired by the bravery of Minnesotans killed while protesting the mistreatment of immigrant community members, and Minnesotan community-based efforts to help neighbors too frightened to leave their homes in the face of brutal abuses by immigration enforcement officers, ones that call to mind the Declaration’s complaint that King George had “sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” And who isn’t inspired by countless Americans who joined interfaith vigils to protest the inhumane and lawless detention of people at facilities like Florida’s infamous “Alligator Alcatraz”?
These members of the American family, true patriots, honor a Declaration that ends with the promise to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” They understand that embedded within our Declaration of Independence lies a Declaration of Interdependence. Now that’s something to celebrate.
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Progressive Patriotism for America’s 250th Birthday
Progressive believe that the core claims of this nation—fairness, equality, freedom, and justice—are their own. And they are right.
Jul 04, 2026
July 4 is the big occasion for Americans to express patriotism, none more so than this year, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. But the ways we do so are as diverse as the country. People and groups from right to left celebrate in conflicting ways and with conflicting views—from “love it or leave it” to “love it and fix it.”
This year as a time when democracy itself is under serious threat, progressives are seeking ways to claim their patriotism and recapture the flag.
“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” wrote Zohran Mamdani last July 4 before he had been elected mayor of New York City. “I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”
Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking, rejecting blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism. Democratic movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—sought to overturn the established order while claiming to fulfill America’s promise. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.
Even the founders would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state.
As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”.
Donald Trump consciously and cynically has been re-enacting the long tradition of patriotism as jingoism, nationalism, flag waving, and “America first” sloganeering. What seems new is his systematic drive to debase major symbols of national identity—such as the White House, the reflecting pool, and Arlington Cemetery—while wrecking the entire national plan to celebrate America at 250.
Although they disagreed on many issues, the founders were adamant that they didn’t want the country to be run by an all-powerful king. Yet here we are 250 year later, governed by a president publicly claiming such power, with a Supreme Court majority acting as his enablers,
Of course, many of the founders were skeptical of a robust democracy. They created institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, that were never intended to completely reflect the voice of the people.
Even the founders, however, would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state, exploiting the opportunities provided by the Constitution’s elitist features.
The Gallup poll regularly asks Americans what the founders would think of America today. This year, only 19% think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased with how the country has turned out. Over three quarters (77%) now say the founders would be disappointed. This compares with 42% in 2001.
Americans’ disappointment with the country is obviously tied to Trump’s performance and his low favorability ratings in the polls. We expect our nation’s leaders, especially our president, to express a deep loyalty to a vision bigger than one person. But Trump has no overarching vision. Besides grabbing power and wealth for himself, his major commitment appears to white nationalism—turning America into a country for the uber rich and white people only. In contrast to the patriotism expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Trump wants, to rid the nation of immigrants of color, whom, in his eugenicist view, he thinks “pollute” the country with bad genes.
Trump and his coterie have systematically acted to undermine the spirit and letter of the Constitution. One of America’s core beliefs since its founding has been that elections should determine who becomes president and that it is important to ensure the orderly transfer of power. But insurrectionists at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—urged on by and loyal to Trump— attempted to stop that process, while. carrying American flags. Many of these were convicted and sentenced for insurrectionary crimes. Trump’s blanket pardon and embrace of the convicted was an announcement of his autocratic hopes and plans.
As the 250th anniversary approaches, Trump is intensifying his campaign to end the right to vote—the fundamental idea of the American Revolution. Abetted by the Supreme Court majority’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act (a key victory of the 1960s), and building on the ongoing GOP campaign to maintain power as they lose their capacity to win the national popular vote, Trump is trying to undermine states’ control over the electoral process.
He’s used his powers to eviscerate other cherished rights, including free speech, a free press, and freedom of assembly and dissent. He has used the tools of government—including the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS—to unleash his revenge on protesters, the media, immigrants, Democrats, and all others he considers his opponents.
Right wingers have always wrapped themselves in the flag under the guise of being the true patriots. ‘”Americanism” campaigns in the early 20th century were designed to undermine the labor movement and limit immigration. Congressional and state legislative “Unamerican Activities” committees collaborated with the FBI beginning in the 1930s, to build blacklists against leftwing activists and artists,
Even American Nazis sought to be seen as patriots. On Feb. 20, 1939, 20,000 of them filled Madison Square Garden for a "Pro-America Rally." They erected a massive 30-foot banner of George Washington (it was timed to celebrate his birthday) surrounded by American flags and swastika banners.
Trump’s own MAGA rallies feel like modern-day versions of that Nazi event. He fetishizes the American flag and other patriotic symbols, even while displaying a shallow, ahistorical, and bizarre understanding of what they meant.
Once, at a campaign rally in Tampa, as his cult followers chanted, “Build that wall,” Trump interrupted his speech to give a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him.
“We want to make sure that anyone who seeks to join our country, shares our values and has the capacity to love our people,” Trump said at a rally at the Kennedy Center in 2017.
“We all salute the same great American flag,” Trump said in his 2017 inauguration address—a line he has repeated in many speeches since then.
To Trump and his followers, the flag is synonymous with “America First.” It was a slogan used to unite isolationists and Nazi sympathizers against involvement in the European war in 1939. For Trump, it means reporting undocumented immigrants and caging their children in detention centers, restricting visitors from Muslim countries, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and other international agreements, and engaging in friendships with like-minded dictators.
Trump’s faux patriotism and its clownish griftiness has been providing a wide space for coalitions of resistance. The “No Kings” protests and the slogan itself help provide a very fitting frame for revitalizing a progressive, democratic, populist patriotism. Many participants waved American flags.
America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance.
President Barack Obama said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”
President Joe Biden said that “we’re all part of a chain of patriots” who fought for democracy, freedom, fair play, peace, security, and opportunity. Patriots, he explained, seek “the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come; the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given talent can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”
In the Sixties, as hundreds of thousands of American youth were radicalized by the senseless Vietnam war, resistance included acts of defiance of patriotic symbols and rhetoric. Flag burnings would sometimes combine with the burning of draft cards. But other radicals took a different stance. In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the rather moribund Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”
"It was as a Socialist, and because I was a Socialist, that I fell in love with America,” wrote Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, in his 1973 book, Fragments of a Century. “In saying that, I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a Socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”
Harrington was identifying with the many radicals and progressive reformers who proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America promised democratic fulfillment—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech, and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and people of color, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.
It is largely underrecognized that some of the most important and popular ways all Americans experience and express patriotism were the creation of radical writers and artists. What they created continues to inspire.
Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist who lived from 1855 to 1931, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to express his outrage at the Gilded Age’s widening economic divide. He had been ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist, and for his work among the It was the Gilded Age, an era marked by major political, economic, and social conflicts. Progressive reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers were joining forces in the so-called Populist movement to rein in the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Socialists and other leftist radicals were gaining new converts.
In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and the argument that it was spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups across the country were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—who were cast as polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance not to the American but to the Confederate flag.
Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two bestselling socialistic books, Looking Backward and Equality, believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped that the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he argued was undermining the nation.
When composing the Pledge, Bellamy had initially intended to use the phrase “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” but concluded that the radical rhetoric of the French Revolution wouldn’t sit well with many Americans. So he coined the phrase, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” to express his more egalitarian vision of America, and a secular patriotism aimed at helping unite a divided nation.
In 1891, Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000, hired Bellamy to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ so-called discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools.
Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.
Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age.
In 1923, over the objections of the aging Bellamy, the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the opening, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” Ostensibly, it was revised to make sure that immigrant children—who might have thought that “my flag” referred to their native countries—knew that they were pledging allegiance to the American flag.
In 1954, at the height of the Cold War—when many political leaders believed that the nation was threatened by godless communism—the Knights of Columbus led a successful campaign to lobby Congress to add the words “under God.”
A year after Bellamy composed the pledge, Kathryn Lee Bates wrote the poem “America the Beautiful,” which was later set to music by Samuel Ward, the organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey
Like Bellamy, Bates was a Christian socialist. A well-respected poet and professor of English at Wellesley College, Bates (1859-1929) was also a lesbian who lived with Katharine Coman, an economics professor. They belonged to progressive circles in the Boston area that supported labor unions, advocated for immigrants, and fought for women’s suffrage. She was an ardent foe of American imperialism.
“America the Beautiful” was initially published in 1895 to commemorate the Fourth of July. The poem is usually heard as an unalloyed paean to American virtue. But a close reading of her words makes it clear that she had something more in mind. She wrote:
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free!
Bates hoped that a progressive movement could overcome the Gilded Age’s greed. And when sung by Ray Charles and other African American artists, listeners can’t help but be inspired by the song’s plea for brotherhood – or, as the left calls it, solidarity.
Lazarus, author of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, was a Jewish poet of considerable reputation in her day, who was a strong supporter of Henry George and his “socialistic” single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the Earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American Dream.
In the Depression years and during World War II, the fusion of populist, egalitarian, and anti-racist values with patriotic expression reached full flower. The rise of fascism was countered in the US with efforts to build a center-left coalition in critical support of the New Deal and a parallel cultural upsurge.
Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1936, contrasted the nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African-Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers, and immigrants:
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath
But opportunity is real, and life is free
Equality is in the air we breathe.
It’s a poem that encapsulates the anger and the hope integral to the American experience.
In 1939, composer Earl Robinson teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write “Ballad for Americans,” which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This 11-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the “nobody who’s everybody” and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.
Broadcasts and recordings of “Ballad for Americans,” (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, “Ballad for Americans” has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV. This might be the year to revive and revise it.
Earl Robinson wrote the melody for another important patriotic song of the World War 2 era -- “The House I Live In.” The lyric was written by Lewis Allen, the pen-name of a New York teacher, activist and poet named Abel Meeropol, who had, a few years earlier, written the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit” for Billie Holiday.
The song was the centerpiece of an Oscar winning short film starring Frank Sinatra. In the film, Sinatra uses the song to instruct a group of kids who were bullying a Jewish classmate. Sinatra made the song a hit in 1945. Other versions were recorded by Robeson and by Josh White. Sinatra kept it in his repertoire for his whole career, even though he publicly associated with the Republican right (abandoning his earlier left-wing sympathies). Sinatra performed the song as the finale to a nationally broadcast celebration of the Statue of Liberty centenary, addressing it to Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the platform with him. Only a few watching were aware of the song’s origins.
Composer Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “A Lincoln Portrait,” both written in 1942, are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events. Copland was a member of a radical composers’ group as well as a gay man.
Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie, a radical, was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin’s popular “God Bless America,” which he thought failed to recognize that it was the “people” to whom America belonged.
The song reflects Guthrie’s belief that patriotism and support for the underdog were interconnected. He celebrated America’s natural beauty and bounty, but criticized the country for its failure to share its riches. This is revealed in the song’s last and least-known verse, which Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed at Obama’s pre-inaugural concert in 2009 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with Obama in the audience:
One bright sunny morning;
In the shadow of the steeple;
By the relief office;
I saw my people.
As they stood hungry;
I stood there wondering;
If this land was made for you and me.
You can find Spanish and Native American versions of the song. Guthrie would have approved. Both he and Seeger, who were part of Communist circles, helped popularize socially conscious music reflecting the country’s diversity. They are now viewed as American icons.
During the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the government’s policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King famously quoted the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” 11 times. That 19th century song seems politically neutral, but it was a defiantly anti-monarchy anthem, written as a kind of parody of “God Save the King.” An abolitionist version soon followed its initial release. Marian Anderson, the great African American contralto, sang the song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 because the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at its Constitution Hall due to her race.
Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, “The Power and the Glory,” that coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. The words to the chorus echo the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement:
Here is a land full of power and glory;
Beauty that words cannot recall;
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom;
Her glory shall rest on us all.
One of its stanzas updated Guthrie’s combination of outrage and patriotism:
Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor;
Only as free as the padlocked prison door;
Only as strong as our love for this land;
Only as tall as we stand.
This song later became part of the repertoire of the U.S. Army band.
In recent decades, Springsteen has closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From “Born in the USA” to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), to his anthem about the 9/11 tragedy (“Empty Sky”), to his album Wrecking Ball (including its opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own”), Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals. In January, Springsteen wrote “Streets of Minneapolis,” which describe how "a city aflame fought fire and ice 'neath an occupier's boots," which Springsteen calls "King Trump's private army." He wrote it in response to the second deadly shooting by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and dedicated it to the people of that city. At the opening of Obama’s new presidential center in Chicago, Springsteen sang his song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which includes lines adopted from Guthrie’s song, “This Train is Bound for Glory.” The train – a metaphor for America -- carries “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” and “fools and kings.”
America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance. Americans are upset by the unbridled selfishness and political influence-peddling demonstrated by banks, oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, and other large corporations. They are angry at the growing power of American-based global firms who show no loyalty to their country, outsource jobs to low-wage countries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the environment.
During the ICE raids in Minnesota a group called “Singing Resistance” emerged to encourage singing during protests. Troubadours of multiple generations sang new and classic songs of protest on stage and via You Tube.
One fascinating moment happened at this year’s Super Bowl when Coco Jones sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” For 100 years that song has been the African American national anthem. It lyrics include these lines:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.
To have it performed at the Super Bowl, alongside the “Star Spangled Banner,” may have been an affront to right-wingers, , but it was an inspiring moment for many other Americans. Cong. James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) has sponsored a bill to make “Life Every Voice” the national hymn.
Throughout American history, progressive movements had won major victories and also experienced setbacks. When those setbacks occur, it is understandable that people sometimes lose hope, and even give up the fight. But our history also teaches us that we can’t give up, because we must keep the struggle alive for a new generation.
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America at 250 Should Not Put Citizenship Behind a Paywall
I have walked into hundreds of naturalization ceremonies with immigrants. I have always walked out with Americans.
Jul 04, 2026
A democracy that makes citizenship harder to reach should not pretend it is merely managing paperwork. It is deciding who gets full political voice.
I have attended naturalization ceremonies for more than three decades. I have watched courtrooms fill with nurses, engineers, truck drivers, scientists, caregivers, parents holding young children, and older immigrants who waited years to hear one sentence that would change their lives.
Before administering the Oath of Allegiance, judges often remind new citizens that American citizenship is about more than receiving a certificate or passport. It is about responsibility — to vote, serve on juries, obey the law, participate in civic life, defend the Constitution, and leave America stronger than they found it.
That reminder captures something we too often forget. Citizenship is not just a collection of rights. It is freedom joined to duty, opportunity joined to service, and belonging joined to responsibility.
A door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.
Unlike those of us fortunate enough to be born here, every person in that courtroom made a conscious decision.
They chose America.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, we should ask whether we still understand the power of that choice. One of America’s greatest accomplishments has not simply been welcoming immigrants. It has been making Americans.
Those are not the same thing.
The earliest naturalization laws reflected the exclusions and prejudices of their time. But America also preserved a revolutionary idea: a person born somewhere else could become fully American through allegiance to the Constitution and commitment to the Republic.
Naturalization was never just an immigration process. It was a democracy-building process.
Today, more than 9 million lawful permanent residents are already eligible to become American citizens. They are nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, factory workers, researchers, caregivers, veterans, farmworkers, small-business owners, and neighbors. They pay taxes, raise families, volunteer, worship, organize, serve, and build communities.
They have already invested in America. Now they are asking to invest even more deeply.
But at the very moment America should be inviting eligible immigrants into full civic membership, the government is moving in the opposite direction.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed raising the naturalization application fee from $760 to $1,330 for paper filings and from $710 to $1,280 for online filings — roughly a 75% to 80% increase. The proposal would also eliminate the reduced filing fee option and the availability of fee waivers for Form N-400.
That is not a small administrative adjustment. For many working families, it is the difference between applying now and postponing citizenship for years.
The real cost of naturalization is not just the government filing fee. It is lost wages, transportation, child care, English classes, document costs, legal help, and the anxiety of navigating a system that too often feels designed for the fluent, the wealthy, and the legally sophisticated.
For a nurse working double shifts, a home health aide caring for elders, a farmworker, a refugee parent, an elderly green-card holder, or a veteran’s spouse, the path to citizenship can become a gauntlet: higher fees, longer waits, more forms, more documentation, more scrutiny, and more fear that one mistake could derail everything.
A democracy should not celebrate citizenship in speeches while making it harder to obtain in practice.
The way we talk about naturalization matters.
For much of our history, becoming a citizen was understood as the successful completion of the immigrant journey. Today, the language too often sounds like it came from a risk-management manual: cost recovery, fraud prevention, compliance, security screening, background review, discretion.
Each of those concerns has its place. But when they become the only language we use, the future citizen slowly becomes a file, a cost, a risk, or a problem to manage instead of what he or she truly is: a future American.
A confident nation can protect the integrity of citizenship while still encouraging qualified immigrants to become citizens. A fearful nation raises costs, increases complexity, lengthens delays, narrows relief, expands suspicion, and then pretends the door is still open because it has not been formally locked.
But a door that only the wealthy, the fluent, the well-connected, or the legally sophisticated can navigate is not truly open.
When we make citizenship harder to reach, we do not just burden immigrants. We weaken democracy.
Every new citizen is a potential voter, juror, volunteer, parent advocate, union member, school-board participant, taxpayer, entrepreneur, caregiver, and community leader. Naturalization does not dilute the Republic. It strengthens it.
We should not reduce citizenship to a user fee. We should not treat qualified future citizens as customers purchasing a private benefit from government. Citizenship is different. It is the mechanism by which a democracy renews itself.
This does not mean abandoning standards. It means remembering the purpose of the standards. The goal is not to make citizenship feel like a privilege reserved for those who can survive an expensive bureaucratic maze. The goal is to welcome qualified immigrants into full participation in American civic life.
Congress and the administration should treat naturalization as civic infrastructure: protect fee waivers, invest in timely processing, expand language access, support community-based citizenship programs, simplify forms and procedures, and celebrate naturalization as one of the most important acts of democratic renewal this country performs.
At a time when Americans worry about democracy, it is remarkable that millions of people are still waiting for the chance to raise their hands, take the oath, and accept the responsibilities of American citizenship. We should not make that harder. We should honor it.
Over the years, I have watched refugees become election poll workers, veterans become citizens of the country they served, and parents beam with pride as they introduced themselves — for the very first time — as Americans.
I have walked into naturalization ceremonies with immigrants. I have always walked out with Americans.
As America turns 250, Congress should ask a larger question than how much a citizenship application should cost.
It should ask: What is a new American worth?
Every generation inherits the American experiment. Every generation decides whether to strengthen it or merely administer it. Our generation has a quieter but urgent responsibility: to remember that citizenship is not merely something government processes. It is something a great democracy cultivates.
I have never left a naturalization ceremony believing America had become less American.
I have only left believing America had become stronger.
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