The New Yorker:

Amid plans to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, many are asking whether or not the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king.

By Jill Lepore

This past June, at a No Kings rally outside a white clapboard church in a little brick town in the lower right-hand corner of Vermont, Green Mountaineers huddled together in raincoats under a pearl-gray sky. Some ironic anti-royalists wore golden paper crowns from Burger King, but the more sartorially, not to say lepidopterously, dedicated came dressed as orange-and-black butterflies, these being the only monarchs allowed in America. “Rejecting Kings Since 1776” read a sign carried by a woman wearing a rainbow bucket hat. In the matter of handmade placards—Magic Marker on cardboard, duct-taped to wooden yardsticks—there was a certain amount of politico-literary one-upmanship. “Cry My Beloved Country” was clever, but was “Make Orwell Fiction Again” cleverer? Abraham Lincoln was there, grim-faced and sepia on a sign that read “Government of the People, by the People, for the People.” A red-white-and-blue printed poster quoted Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”: “In America, the Law Is King!”

With or without the No Kings movement, the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution is, inevitably, an occasion to ask what the Revolution meant, whether the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king. The jubilee began in earnest in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 2025—the anniversary of the shot heard round the world, marking the start of the war—with an early-morning battle reënactment, and very tasty cider doughnuts. It will reach its peak on July 4, 2026, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with fireworks all over the country, plus hot dogs and bicycle races and pompoms and drum majors. Between now and then, there will be exhibits and parades and lectures and picnics and protests and rallies and, one dearly hopes and prays, no more political violence, no more blood on the streets, no more shots fired. But, in a year that has already seen multiple political assassinations, the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, and masked agents of the federal government hauling people off the streets and into unmarked vans, the prospects for a peaceful anniversary appear remote. A revolutionary year seems far likelier, and, politically, that could go either way. Whatever you believe about the state of the Union, you might want to be careful what you wish for.

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