My favorite thing about America is that I do not have a single favorite thing. We have the NBA (with a Toronto team too), the world’s best AI models, Alexander Calder sculptures, a few wonderful R.E.M. albums, southern Utah, the world’s best Constitution, lots of air-conditioning, sausage in southwest Louisiana, the infield fly rule in baseball, Winslow Homer, Sioux Plains drawings and Navajo blankets, the music of Chuck Berry and Brian Wilson, cheeseburgers, deep capital markets, the world’s best universities, the Museum of Modern Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, lots of big airports, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, red cardinals and blue jays, about two dozen cities and towns named Paris, self-driving vehicles, not just one but two Dakotas, three branches of government (I hope not four), and the best set of immigrants in the world. And that is just scratching the surface.

– Tyler Cowen

And

However bad the problems are—and they are bad—the same spirit that animated the founding is still alive today. Get out your flags and cook some hot dogs. This country is still the world’s last best hope. If there is work to be done to rebuild America, to repair the damage and to renew the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution in the coming years, that work will be done best in the spirit of belief in this vast country. Renewal starts with America loving itself again.

– Henry Oliver

And

“Finally, there is the frontier that every American can reach out toward, which is the future itself. Open to everyone who resists the false sense of human obsolescence, America began in revolution. And today, the most basic human actions can be revolutionary.
Everyone who builds, who plants, who marries, who has a child, who makes a new beginning, reaches for the next American frontier. Since the 1600s, my own ancestors have begun again as Mainers, as Virginians, as Arkansans, as Montanans, as Californians. They have begun again as pig farmers and bicycle salesmen, as lobster fishermen and lawyers, as artists and poets, and now God help us as newspaper columnists.

And I hope that my own children, all five of them, and their children, unto generations in the distant future, will always have the same chance to start afresh. This is the promise of America, and it’s the reason that the future is still ours, the next 250 years, and more than that, if God so wills it. And so, my fellow Americans, let us begin again.”

– Ross Douthat

At 250, we’re not perfect, but blessed, enthusiastic, and hopeful.

LETS. GO!

Henry Oliver, “America Should Love Itself Again,” The Common Reader (Substack newsletter), July 3, 2026, https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/america-should-love-itself-again.

Tyler Cowen, contribution to “Why We Love This Country,” The Free Press, July 3, 2026, https://www.thefp.com/p/why-we-love-this-country.

From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The Unifying Speech We Won’t Get This Independence Day, Jul 2, 2026
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interesting-times-with-ross-douthat/id1438024613?i=1000775142352&r=337