On April 15, 2026, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered “Remarks on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.” The talk, sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute, focused on the role the values and principles expressed by the Declaration of Independence played in his own life (even and perhaps especially during Jim Crow segregation), the importance of devotion and courage in spreading those principles and values, and the need for their return. Speaking of how his own illiterate sharecropping grandparents utterly devoted themselves to his care, Thomas exhorts his audience to evince the same type of dedication to the nation: “Similarly, it is the devotion expressed in the final sentence of the Declaration, the willingness to do anything for our principles that has, throughout American history, been most indispensable. It is that devotion that we are missing today, and that we must find in our hearts if this nation is to endure.”

Thomas’s speech is on my mind as I turn to Eddie Glaude’s America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. Glaude, the James S. McDonnell distinguished university professor at Princeton University and a well-known and frequent commentator on MS NOW, offers America, U.S.A. as the follow-up to Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. The latter work, published in 2020, was Glaude’s response to President Donald Trump’s first term. America, U.S.A. uses the nation’s semiquincentennial to wrestle with Trump’s return to power.

The book shares conceptual elements with W.E.B. Du Bois’s work and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, published during the Great Depression. Glaude adapts Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” to explain the gap between how America sees itself and how America is. Du Bois introduces each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with a stanza of poetry and a Negro spiritual; Glaude also begins each chapter with music, in his case bars of a piece composed for the book by Houston Grand Opera composer-in-residence Joel Thompson. The opening chord, Glaude writes, “captures the core idea of the book and sets the stage for the elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew.”

We’ve seen several attempts to commemorate the semiquincentennial, including the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held on the White House lawn and sponsored by, among others, Crypto.com and Ram trucks. The official semiquincentennial was celebrated in July, 19 months after Trump returned to the Oval Office; he has since radically transformed both the presidency and the nation. Comparative politics experts who were concerned about democratic backsliding in the United States after Trump’s first election in 2016 no longer see our nation as a liberal democracy but rather as a competitive authoritarian state—a state that maintains the veneer of free and fair elections but persistently uses them to serve the venal interests of the political party in power. In America, U.S.A., Glaude argues that Trump’s election is the byproduct of American double consciousness. America sees itself simultaneously as a nation of freedom and as a white republic. The contradiction between these dueling ideas generates both sentimentality and a rage that threatens to tear the nation, divided soul and all, apart.

Although we see the consequences of this contradiction every day, for Glaude, the nation’s anniversaries are especially catalytic. “What and how we remember—and what and who we exclude from our stories—matter, because those memories and stories shape how we act today and how we fight for our future,” Glaude writes. “I turn to American anniversary celebrations not simply as a chronicle of the wrongs of our past, but as a resource (as revelation!) to help us imagine a way forward out of this madness.” How the nation chooses to narrate its history, he suggests, determines and reflects its moral capacity.

Beginning with 1776 and continuing through the present, Glaude uses America, U.S.A.’s six chapters and three periodizing interludes to narrate several state-based commemorations and other key historical moments (the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the March on Washington, among others). As one exceptionally important consequence of American double consciousness is the tendency to ignore or dismiss Black attempts to weave themselves into the American ideational tapestry, Glaude notes these attempts: Frederick Douglass’s metaphoric rewrite of the Constitution through his classic July 5, 1852 speech “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”; A. Philip Randolph’s sesquicentennial address; New York Abolition Day; and Carter G. Woodson’s creation of Negro History Week, among others. He uses them to repeatedly return to one point: “No matter what is said about us as the fever dream spikes again, we are not interlopers who need to prove ourselves repeatedly.”

The first three chapters, plus an interlude, wrestle with the nation’s transition from a slave state to a free one. In the first chapter, Glaude visits Philadelphia’s Congress Hall, the seat of the U.S. Congress from 1790 to 1800, using the occasion to weave together the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, the 1797 suicide of Moses Gordon (a formerly enslaved Black man who killed himself rather than be remitted as a result of the act), the 1619 Project, and Trump’s 1776 Commission. In the second chapter, Glaude plaits early nineteenth-century Abolition Day commemorations together with three other events: Douglass’s 1852 speech; Reverend Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” delivered at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens; and the tragic 2022 mass murder of ten African Americans by white supremacist Payton Gendron at a Buffalo supermarket. The third chapter revisits the nation’s first centennial, coming ten years after one of the bloodiest civil wars in world history ended and one year before the 1877 Tilden-Hayes Compromise, which ended Reconstruction once and for all. Glaude focuses on the 1873 Colfax and 1874 Vicksburg freedmen massacres and President Ulysses S. Grant’s decisions in both. (Grant used state power aggressively in response to Colfax, but after taking a political beating, idled in Vicksburg.) He then returns to Douglass, who in his prophetic July 5, 1875 speech suggested that the forthcoming centennial would see the North and the South come together not for the country’s sake, but for the benefit of the white race.

The first interlude begins with Douglass’s death in 1895. Although the cessation of the Civil War saw Douglass as momentarily hopeful, by the end of his life, with the rise of Jim Crow, voter suppression, and state-sanctioned racial violence, Douglass expressed bone-weary frustration and indignation. Glaude notes that with the beginning of the twentieth century we see the rise of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, but we also see the emergence of influential Black organizations like the National Urban League and leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.

Glaude organizes the second half of the book differently, with major chapters alternating with interludes. Chapter four reckons with the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, where President Woodrow Wilson delivered a forward-looking speech to a group of Union and Confederate veterans in which he glossed over the causes of the Civil War; the 1926 sesquicentennial; the rise of the Klan and state-sanctioned racial violence; attempts to stave off rising anti-immigrant sentiment; and one of the first public speeches delivered by Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who used the opportunity of the sesquicentennial to argue that Black Americans were the quintessential Americans. The second interlude begins in 1939 with fascism’s rise and ends in 1976. Chapter five spends most of its time on the 1976 bicentennial celebration with detours devoted to comparatively robust white and Black attempts to generate counternarratives, such as the 1970 Black Panther-sponsored call for a new constitutional convention and the 1971 People’s Bicentennial Commission. The third interlude deals with the rise of Ronald Reagan, as well as his decision to sign the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. The final chapter brings us to the present.

I found America, U.S.A. to be a difficult read, and not because of the subject matter. It functions as an indictment of where we are right now, but given the 2016 and 2024 elections, writing a book that indicts America isn’t difficult to do—a seemingly thriving cottage industry of anti-Trump jeremiads now exists. Rather, I found it difficult because I find the conceptual backbone of the work problematic.

Glaude’s central argument is that the nation’s character is profoundly shaped by the story it tells about itself. If we somehow change this story, we change the nation’s identity. This idea isn’t new: Glaude made a similar argument about African American identity almost 20 years ago in In a Shade of Blue. But even if we were to assume that Glaude’s assertion applies to African Americans, taking that argument and applying it to the United States as a whole makes Glaude guilty of committing a scaling fallacy. The consequences of committing this fallacy should become obvious by way of a thought experiment.

Think about the nation, its struggles over time, and then the role race plays within both. Now think about the nation in two ways. First, think about it the way Glaude does, as an entity with a divided soul, wracked by double consciousness. Then, alternatively, think about it as a nation-state with a political economy, political institutions, and interests that are comprised of two forces—one democratic and one antidemocratic. The nation moves toward democracy when the pro-democratic force is in power and away from democracy when the antidemocratic force is in power. If you had to choose one, which better describes the nation, its struggles over time, and the role race plays within them? Which one offers a better way of thinking through what should be done?

For me the answer is crystal clear. Thinking of the nation as divided between pro- and antidemocratic forces is far too simplified—but it better describes the past 250 years, as well as the last ten. And it better describes the role race played and continues to play in the nation. Race has served as a particularly powerful technology for dividing the polity. The various and sundry attempts to carve out benefits for populations defined as white and then withhold them from populations defined otherwise have been undertaken to undercut democracy itself. America’s race problem is a democracy problem.

Glaude’s inability or unwillingness to see this causes some problems. In the first chapter, he asks whether the nation would still “be saddled with the race problem” if Congress had made different choices in 1800 vis-à-vis early free Black responses to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. If he saw America as a divided polity, he’d be more likely to see how race functions—as a politically constructed means of dividing populations to create durable interests, ideas, and institutions devoted to extraction and nondemocratic rule. Almost 200 years after slavery had become part and parcel of the United States, different decisions could have altered the race problem, as they would have given freed Blacks (and their pro-democracy allies) more political capacity to contest the slave regime. But given the signal importance of trade with Caribbean colonies, to say nothing of the growing role cotton played in the Deep South, the “race problem” would still be here.

In the second chapter, Glaude focuses on Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, one of the most important speeches in American history. If Glaude saw the nation as a divided polity, rather than as a nation possessing a divided soul, perhaps he’d have not only told us where Douglass gave his famous speech, but about Douglass’s audience. Douglass delivered the speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, an organization comprised of white female abolitionists. The speech was designed as a means of mobilizing and organizing an increasingly pro-democratic constituency, as well as a means of critiquing the nation-state from below. In other words, it had a political purpose as well as a moral one. Understanding the nation as a divided polity, but one capable of development, would have perhaps made Glaude more attentive to the instances where Blacks used commemorations as a tactic to generate political cooperation if not comity.

In the third chapter, Glaude addresses Douglass’s profoundly pessimistic 1875 speech, in which he described Black freedom as a byproduct of happenstance (“The white people of this country quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party”). Here Douglass was most decidedly wrong. Blacks didn’t just happen to choose the winning side. Rather, Blacks determined the winning side, and the terms and conditions of its victory, by generating a general strike that brought the Confederacy to its knees and forced President Abraham Lincoln to change his calculus. We use the term “Reconstruction” to define this period, but what we’re really looking at is the active construction of one of the most robust democracies the modern world had seen at that point. That robustness did not last, of course. And it’s this non-durability that Glaude suggests emanates from the nation’s double consciousness, but I’d suggest it has another root: politics. The antidemocratic forces in this nation did not simply die out when the Civil War was over. And after a contested presidential election, they took advantage of preexisting institutional elements to re-embed antidemocratic policies into state and national politics.

Glaude lets stand Douglass’s statement that Blacks just so happened to choose the winning side, rather than deciding both the winning side and the nation’s trajectory. And he never picks up on Douglass’s call in the same speech for Blacks to develop their own institutions, institutions with the potential to further sustain and develop Black democratic capacity.

Taking the “divided soul” approach has another consequence. Glaude argues that focusing on commemorations doesn’t just give us resources for understanding America’s condition, but resources for effectively changing America’s condition. He spends far too much time on America’s problematic commemorations—which failed in many key aspects (particularly financially), suggesting that the nation wasn’t as committed to them as one might think—and far too little time on the commemorations that have had a decisive impact on American life. Here I refer to the various and sundry commemorations developed by Black Americans. In Abolition Day (celebrated historically on July 5), Black History Month (originally started as Negro History Week in February 1926 to coincide with Lincoln’s and Douglass’s birthdays and then extended to a month in 1976), Juneteenth, and MLK Jr. Day, we see durable efforts to tell the type of stories Glaude seems to suggest have emancipatory capacity.

Why not spend more time on commemorations like Abolition Day that—although centering on Black populations—actively commemorate freedom writ large through Black freedom? These Black attempts to develop alternative institutions may have had the effect of not just protecting Black life, but creating means whereby even Blacks today are less likely to support backsliding. I suspect that one of the problems with this book is that Glaude has too little faith in the capacity of Black populations themselves to durably shift the course of the nation. African Americans are, like Americans in general, caught in a whipsaw. Yet and still, Black Americans exert and have exerted a disproportionate influence on the nation’s democratic development. It’s this dynamic that America, U.S.A. does not do enough to examine, to the work’s detriment (and our own).

And this brings me to the final problem. In the first sentence of the introduction, Glaude states, “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” He comes back to the issue of love over and over again in the text, connecting it to the issue of worthiness: whether the nation, given its racism, is worthy of love; whether the nation, given its racism, is capable of loving Black people. Indeed, his last sentence (which ends with “[T]hese people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues”) reads as if it were written by a spurned lover. Seeing the nation as an entity capable of loving, as opposed to a nation-state that oscillates between democracy and antidemocracy, renders one far less capable of committing oneself to the realities of long-term political struggle.