A New Year’s Resolution for America as it turns 250
2025 was an eventful year in America. Good things happened: We had a peaceful transition of power, violent crime rates have been falling steadily, medical advances have gotten much closer to eradicating obesity, among other positive developments. But we also witnessed a litany of awful events, particularly in the political arena: the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk (and the tribal war that ensued), redistricting wars, indiscriminate and violent immigration enforcement (which victimized American citizens, too), the expansion of executive power, Congressional inaction, the longest government shutdown in history, among other things.
Things look dire in America these days, no matter one’s ideological proclivities.
In this climate, it’s easy to become discouraged and lose sight of what America actually represents, the positive force it still is, and what it ought to be. But we should never forget what we stand for as a country—especially as we await America’s 250th anniversary. Now is a good time to reflect on what has made America the land of the free, the country that millions have historically dreamed of, and how we can push it to live up to its original promise.
We don’t just live in any country—we live in a country with deeply moral founding principles. America is a massive philosophical achievement and a novelty in human history. It was founded on an idea: freedom—i.e.: the protection of individual rights. Never before had a country been explicitly founded on this idea, and there had never been an entire constitutional architecture built around protecting these rights. This is uniquely American.
The Founding Fathers broke with centuries of political tradition that subjugated the individual to others— the king, society, the church, or some other collective. Before, your life didn’t belong to you—you were, politically, a cog in a machine that existed for the benefit of the collective. The Founders put a stop to that and recognized, in political terms, that each individual had an inalienable right to their own Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness. Americans were no longer to be politically subjugated to others. They were to live their lives as they saw fit, without government interference.
This sounds abstract, but it’s very concretely impactful and key to the freedoms we enjoy every day. From opening a business in relative freedom to marrying who we want, to being able to speak our mind and engage in debates without fearing government persecution, all these freedoms are a consequence of the respect of those individual rights the Founders fought for. This is not the norm in many other countries—look at China, where disagreeing with the government may land you in jail. Or Saudi Arabia, where women are treated as something less than human and forced to marry and subjugate to the men in their lives. Or the UK, where opinions and actions we consider obviously protected in America are getting Britons arrested. We enjoy freedoms daily that people in other countries, including Western ones, would love to have.
As the long list of negative developments I mentioned earlier shows, our rights are not always respected in America. But these violations of our rights are not a consequence of our founding principles, but of the deviation from them, as have been all the injustices in American history. It is when Americans or our government betray these principles that we stop looking like America and start resembling other countries that are much worse off—for example, by jawboning social media companies as Biden did, or by throwing a student in immigration detention for weeks for writing an oped, as Trump did.
This is one of the main reasons why it’s crucial that we always keep in mind what America stands for—individual rights—and why it’s important we preserve that core principle. It should be the standard by which we judge our politicians, our laws, and our political discourse.
We’ve been at this “American experiment” for 250 years, but this experiment won’t survive unless we push for this country to abide by its original promise, as I’ve argued in these pages before. The responsibility of keeping our beloved experiment alive is not primarily with our politicians. It is with all of us Americans. We can do this by using our constitutionally recognized rights to challenge un-American ideals in the marketplace of ideas, to protest while respecting the rights of others, to speak, to write, and support those who best defend our values, among many other things.
May 2026 be a point of inflection when we decide to honor America’s original promise and start reversing this worrisome un-American trend we’ve been in for years. This country’s future depends on Americans continuing to embrace, appreciate, and recognize what this country stands for. Recommitting to that idea may be the most important resolution we can make.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a Southern California News Group columnist. Follow her on X: @agustinavcid