My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.
Partly because of the historian Gordon Wood’s recent death at the age of 92 and partly because of America’s imminent 250th birthday, I’ve finally been reading Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. It’s a fascinating and, to my mind, convincing book—one that makes for particularly valuable reading given the dire state of the republic as it nears the 250-year mark.
To Wood, the American Revolution signaled a profound break from the aristocratic, monarchical traditions that still structured European politics and society. Enlightenment thinkers had prepared the way, and American society was already ripe in many ways for a decisive split from European monarchism, but that does not mean, as some have argued, that the revolution was a conservative one. It was, in fact, considerably more radical than even its chief ideological architects appreciated—which is why abolitionists, suffragists, and other successive liberation movements were able to keep pushing the implications of the Declaration beyond what the founding generation had intended.
But let’s stick with what the founders had intended, which was already plenty radical on its own. I was particularly struck by what Wood referred to as the founders’ cosmopolitanism:
The revolutionary generation was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history. The revolutionary leaders never intended to make a national revolution in any modern sense. They were patriots, to be sure, but they were not obsessed, as were later generations, with the unique character of America or with separating America from the course of Western civilization. As yet there was no sense that loyalty to one’s state or country was incompatible with such cosmopolitanism. David Ramsay claimed he was “a citizen of the world and therefore despise[d] national reflections.” Yet he did not believe he was being “inconsistent” in hoping that the professions would be “administered to my country by its own sons.” Joel Barlow did not think he was any less American just because he ran for election to the French National Convention in 1792–93. The truth was, said Thomas Paine in Common Sense, that Americans were the most cosmopolitan people in the world. They surmounted all local prejudices. They regarded everyone from different nations as their countryman and ignored neighborhoods, towns, and countries as “distinctions too limited for continental minds.”
Wood notes that many of the founders—including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—were Freemasons. That’s important because, as Wood writes,
[a] Mason found himself “belonging, not to one particular place only, but to places without number, and in almost every quarter of the globe; to whom, by a kind of universal language, he can make himself known—and from whom we can, if in distress, be sure to receive relief and protection.” This was the enlightened cosmopolitan dream.
To my mind, this has always been the truly exceptional thing about the United States: that it was founded on an explicitly cosmopolitan creed. Adherence to this creed, and not ethnic lineage, is what constitutes our national identity.
Or, at least, that’s what cosmopolitan small-d democrats tend to think. The ruling party says otherwise. As I write in my forthcoming book, MAGA is foundationally an anti-cosmopolitan, and therefore anti-urban, ideology. Sam Francis, one of the most important intellectual ancestors of MAGA Republicanism, inveighed against the “abstract universalism” of cosmopolitanism and “its refusal to make any distinctions or discriminations among human beings” in his essay “Message from MARs.” Vice President J.D. Vance sneered at the proposition that America is “just an idea” and replied: “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” In a speech at the 2025 National Conservatism conference, Sen. Eric Schmitt claimed that America belongs to “the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
This is Blood and Soil fascism, but it is not a European import. Vance and Schmitt are pulling from a long intellectual tradition on America’s authoritarian right. But this tradition is mistaken, and not just on ethical grounds; as Wood’s scholarship shows, it flattens out the story of the founding and elides what was truly novel, truly exceptional, in it. Which is why American blood-and-soil nationalists like Schmitt need to obfuscate the issue, as he did when he paid lip service to the ideals of the founding before asserting that they “are rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life.”
My claim is not that the framers were 21st-century progressives. But there is little doubt that they understood themselves to be universalists and opposed to all distinctions conferred by birth, even as their own position within a patriarchal slave society blinded them to the full implications of this universalism. The fact that they failed to recognize these implications does not mean they didn’t exist; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harvey Milk were among those who saw the Declaration of Independence’s full meaning even more clearly than Thomas Jefferson did. Each of them enlisted the Declaration in the liberation struggles of their own time. Closer to the present, even the late philosopher Charles Mills—one of contemporary academia’s sharpest and most eloquent critics of the latent racism in Enlightenment liberal thought—called for the left to embrace political liberalism.
If we accept the premise that the meaning of America’s creed goes further than its original authors grasped, that leads us to a couple of other conclusions. First, it suggests that the American Revolution is, in fact, unfinished; that the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, can be understood as efforts to bring this revolution to completion. Second, we can conclude that the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the founding, once unleashed on the world, are too powerful to stuff back in the box for very long.
This is going to be a dark and ignominious July 4. It is entirely possible that the next one will be even darker. But the Declaration is still there, and it will outlast Vance, Schmitt, and the rest of their ilk. They don’t have anything better to offer.