America’s 250th birthday celebration feels like a child’s birthday party ruined by fighting between two soon-to-be-divorced parents. What should be a benign celebration of shared, if slightly boring, values has become a fully partisan affair.
In part, this is due to the president’s determination to make it all about himself. But the agita surrounding America 250 is not just about President Donald Trump’s garish White House UFC fight or poorly attended “Great American State Fair.” It is a reflection of a deeper division: a sense that Democratic and Republican partisans seem to have two wholly different visions of what the country is and should be. With partisan division enabling a president who aspires to kingly power, attempting to celebrate the republic’s extraordinary past can feel like willfully ignoring its parlous future.
Yet amid this gloom, I found hope for the country in an unlikely source: a death. Or, more precisely, the reaction to it.
Gordon Wood was, for most of the year, the greatest living historian of the American Revolution — remaining remarkably sharp at age 92, over a decade after his retirement from Brown University. After Wood was fatally struck by a car on June 7, his death prompted an extraordinary wave of encomia from prominent figures across the political spectrum. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mourned him, as did Wood’s former student Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI). The Federalist Society, The Atlantic, and the New Republic all published tributes. Libertarian magazine Reason sung his praises, as did the World Socialist Web Site.
How could a single historian, writing a topic as familiar (and ideologically contested) as the American revolution, have such wide appeal? After reading Wood’s 1991 masterwork The Radicalism of the American Revolution, I can confidently say the book is brilliant: meticulously researched and compellingly argued. It also performs a fascinating bit of ideological work: a prescient pre-bunking of recently fashionable ideas, on both the radical left and right, that paint America as an ethno-nationalist project.
Wood’s America is a country defined not by blood, but by ideas: a revolutionary commitment to equality that began hypocritically but gave rise to the first truly democratic society in the world’s history.
That so many on both right and left still find something to admire in this vision suggests that Wood’s vision is not some kind of anachronism of the pre-Trump consensus, but a potential wellspring of unity in the 250 years to come. And it’s a reminder that the ideas of the Revolution — the ones Wood showed to be so powerfully influential — still define more of the country today than we often appreciate.
The Revolution, according to Gordon Wood
The Radicalism of the American Revolution is, at heart, an attempt to understand the revolution as a truly transformative event.
When Wood was writing, many historians argued that the Revolution — despite its name — wasn’t all that revolutionary. There was a short war; afterward, a similar set of men ran the same set of colonies, like a company after an employee buyout. No kings lost their heads; no “Year Zero” was declared. “We have,” Wood writes, “generally described the Revolution as an unusually conservative affair.”
Wood’s book is dedicated to proving this view wrong: to show that what was declared in 1776 was not conservative small-ball, but rather “one of the greatest revolutions the world has known, a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history.”
One might think such a book is hagiography for the founding generation. But unlike the dime-a-dozen pop history biographies of America’s early leaders, The Radicalism of the American Revolution is keenly interested in the gaps, weaknesses, and limits of the founders’ perspective. In fact, Wood argues that democracy as we know it was an unintended consequence of their revolutionary actions — almost a more polite and productive version of the French Revolution eating its own.
Prior to the Revolution, Wood argues, the social structure of the American colonies was in many ways a “brittle” facsimile of the British motherland’s. Political power was exercised primarily by an aristocratic class, a landed gentry who made their living by controlling land rather than actual labor. These “gentlemen” had distinctive manners, modes of dress, and activities; their social inferiors literally showed them deference, through the use of titles and respectful bows, in everyday interactions.
“We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness,” Wood writes.
Most of the leading American Revolutionaries — like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin — were either gentlemen by birth or else managed the rare feat of ascending to that rank. But they were gentlemen of particular sorts: Enlightenment rationalists, who believed that society could be effectively remolded through the application of reason, and political republicans influenced heavily by their study of classical Greece and Rome.
Wood spends quite some time defining this republican ideology, treating it as the missing link between the aristocratic past and democratic present.
Republicanism, in his telling, rejected the essential monarchical principle that power should follow blood. It was instead a philosophy of virtue, perhaps even meritocracy: the belief that society should be organized to allow its best educated, most selfless and disinterested members to rule for the benefit of the whole. No (white male) person was intrinsically better in moral terms, but some people were better suited for political power by dint of character and training.
This is how the American Revolution’s elite could at once reject the basic monarchical principles of social hierarchy — to pen the radical words of the Declaration of Independence — while simultaneously restricting the franchise in early America to white men with substantial property holdings. Only such men, in the republican imagination, were capable of making the kinds of disinterested and virtuous choices necessary for a free society to be properly governed.
Yet this “aristocracy of virtue and talent,” as Jefferson called it, would swiftly prove unstable. Early America, marked by massive immigration and westward migration, became too large to be controlled by a small group of widely trusted elites. Economic affairs became dominated not by a handful of landowners trained to be virtuous republicans, but the growing ranks of merchants, bankers, and other such early-stage capitalists. Individual Americans, taking the idea of government by the people seriously, demanded a real role in determining their leaders.
Within 50 years of the Declaration, the republican dreams of the revolutionaries had been shattered.
Politics was not the province of an enlightened elite attempting to govern based on an ethos of disinterested neutrality, but rather a mass pastime in which different parties and factions competed to advance their own interests. The ideal of the landowning gentleman was now seen as archaic, an embarrassment in a country where working with one’s hands and building one’s own fortune were seen as the true marks of virtue. Traditional Christianity, viewed by many Founders as a form of passe superstition, was experiencing another Great Awakening. Even women and slaves had begun demanding equality. (Wood believes that it was not an accident that the first American abolitionist society was founded in 1775, on the Revolution’s eve.)
In effect, America had become something recognizably (if not fully) democratic: a society which abolished traditional aristocratic ideals of rank, and replaced them with the notion of equal citizens who rule themselves. This idea of America, that “all men are created equal,” was so powerful that even its creators could not contain it.
Indeed, Wood shows that many leading founders had, by the end of their lives, become downright pessimistic about the country they created.
“This American world was not meant for me,” Alexander Hamilton wrote his fellow founder Gouverneur Morris in 1802.
The bipartisanship of Wood’s America
The Radicalism of the American Revolution turned Wood into a superstar — one whose influence was felt in politics and popular culture.
In 1995, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich handed out copies to his Republican colleagues. In 1997, the title character in Good Will Hunting uses his knowledge of Wood’s oeuvre to mock an obnoxious Harvard graduate student. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Wood the National Humanities Medal for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation.”
It’s easy to see why Wood’s vision of the American founding had such mass appeal. It is an unusually persuasive vindication of America’s national mythology: treating the Revolution as not just a petty squabble between colonists and the crown, but the single most important event in creating democracy as we know it. The book’s narrative is patriotic and capitalist in ways that appealed to the Republican right; its vision of the founding containing the seeds of social liberation for oppressed groups appealed to a left that believed in MLK Jr.’s arc of history.
Nowadays, it may seem that ascendant radicals on both the right and left have moved past Wood.
On the right, there is a growing view that Wood’s “creedal” vision of American identity — the notion that American identity is about adherence to the country’s core ideas and values — is too weak, too permissive, too woke. This view treats Americanness as a kind of ethnicity: a status gained by the historical linkages between one’s family and the land. Vice President JD Vance is the most vigorous advocate for this blood-and-soil vision of American identity, which he sees as a decisive case for the administration’s attempts to lower migration numbers.
“America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” Vance said in a 2025 speech at the far-right Claremont Institute. “You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged.”
On the left, there is an idea that the United States is an essentially reactionary nation — that its original sin of slavery gives the lie to the pretty words of the founders, and in fact speaks to the nation’s truest essence. Commonly (though largely unfairly) associated with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this view is most typically found among radical social justice activists, leftist professors, and Third Worldist socialists — people like soon-to-be Representative Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-NY), who bragged about wiping her hands on an American flag, and popular podcaster Hasan Piker.
These views are picking up on real things: the very long record of America betraying its egalitarian ideals, and the perennial discomfort many native-born Americans feel about cultural change inherent to a nation that has always been defined by immigration. Yet both depend on exaggerations and factual distortions to arrive at their dour vision of America — a point that Wood spent quite a bit of effort trying to prove in recent years.
He bitterly contested a claim in the 1619 Project’s opening essay that the Revolution was motivated in large part by a desire to protect slavery (a passage the Times ultimately toned down). One of his final published works, a December 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, was an extended attack on Vance’s view of American identity.
“The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776,” Wood writes. “As Lincoln grasped better than anyone ever has, the Revolution and the Declaration offered us a set of beliefs that through the generations has supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation history has ever known.”
One might see Wood as a relic: a believer in an antiquated patriotic vision that millennials like Vance and Chevalier have moved beyond. Data, however, tells a different story: that the overwhelming majority of Americans see their country in Wood’s creedal terms.
A recent Pell Center survey asked Americans whether they believed their country was “built on the character of the Anglo-Saxon people” or “the idea that everyone is born with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The latter view prevailed by a massive 85–15 margin. (The ideological group most likely to pick Anglo-Saxon were, ironically enough, progressives.)
Another recent poll, from PRRI, asked respondents to rank which qualities were important to being an American. Creedal ideas, like tolerance of diversity and believing in individual freedom or the Constitution, were ranked as important by roughly 90 percent of respondents. By contrast, “being of Western Heritage” received the lowest levels of support of any listed quality (with the highest agreement this time around among Republicans).
I cannot stress enough how rare it is to get 90 percent of Americans to agree on anything political nowadays. For so many to agree on a concept that’s quite divisive among the political elite suggests that there’s something powerful about the American idea as Wood understood it— something that transcends even the bitter divisions of our moment, and speaks to the deepest essence of who most Americans believe themselves to be.
Ordinary Americans seem, in principle, committed to the core values of the founding documents: freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty. The trouble comes in how to apply them. Does freedom require a larger state or a smaller one? Does equality require race-consciousness or race-blindness? And who, exactly, is threatening democracy and how?
These are the sorts of disagreements that fuel increasingly bitter polarization. But any effort to reconstruct a sense of national purpose, of a polity engaged in a cooperative enterprise rather than partisan warfare, will require the creedal patriotism behind the disagreements as a building block. Gordon Wood helped reveal what those founding ideals really were and why they mattered; it is up to the generations following him to make them agents of American unity once again.
Source: Vox.
