Fighting back is America's great tradition

I told my son recently that we’re descendants of the youngest combatant in the battle of Lexington and Concord. Our ancestor’s teenage ears were among the first to hear “the shot heard ‘round the world.”

Then I reminded him of something he already knew — that on the other side of his family tree are men and women who were enslaved, who risked everything to get free and to free others, who fought for their own rights and those of their communities after emancipation.

“You see,” I told him, “we come from freedom fighters. On both sides. Black and white. We fought back against monarchy. We fought back against slavery. And now we are being called to fight back against oligarchy. And just like before, we will win.”

This is our story. It is also America’s.

There is nothing as definitively American as fighting back — against injustice, the denial of fundamental rights and the exclusion of vast swaths of people from the American promise.

This country has never been perfect. But it has always been capable of profound change. It has risen time and again to advance the cause of freedom and human dignity — because people stood up and demanded it. That is what we celebrate on the Fourth of July — not just our independence from a king, but our ongoing willingness to push this nation toward liberty and justice for all.

It is not a straight line. Progress has always been followed by backlash. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. The civil rights era gave way to mass incarceration. Each new expansion of democracy has been met by those determined to hoard power for themselves.

Today, the threat is oligarchy — a government run for the rich and powerful, by the rich and powerful, at the expense of everyone else.

You do not need a Ph.D. in political science to see what is happening. The same politicians trying to gut voting rights are pushing laws that make billionaires richer and the rest of us poorer.

The same leaders who talk about “freedom” are taking away basic rights from workers, women and families. The fossil fuel industry is being handed billions in subsidies and incentives to pollute the air our children breathe. Public lands are under threat. So are public schools, public libraries, and even public information and history.

When the Trump administration took down the government website hosting congressionally mandated research and data about climate change and its impact on the U.S. could it really be seen as anything other than a gift to fossil fuel oligarchs?

Climate scientist Peter Gleick, who co-authored the first national climate assessment in 2000, called it "scientific censorship at its worst" and "the modern version of book burning."

And what about Senate Republicans’ attempts to give massive handouts to fossil fuel interests — including the forced sale of millions of acres of our cherished public lands while trying to deal a death blow to the clean energy transition with new taxes on wind and solar projects? All of that hurts everyday Americans in so many ways: the health impact of all the added pollution; the cost of that health impact on working families; the higher energy bills; the end of the good green economy manufacturing jobs boom; and the ceding of global economic leadership for the next century to the Chinese government — just to name a few.

That was a gift to fossil fuel oligarchs so egregious it even helped reignite the public tiff between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who lamented the "utterly insane and destructive handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future."

And now, they are trying to rewrite the very idea of America.

This Orwellian-named “America First” agenda is not patriotic. It is predatory. It is not about preserving American greatness. It is about protecting corporate greed. It is about shielding the few from accountability. It is about persuading us to turn on each other while they loot the country.

But the good news is Americans are fighting back. As we always have.

The public backlash to attempts to sell off our public lands was swift and fierce, from Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. And we got it pulled from the Senate's massive budget bill.

The resistance to smash-and-grab policies that enrich oligarchs and harm the rest of us will only continue to grow. That is because — and it is crucial that we remember this on Independence Day — we are a country built not on fear, but on hope. Not on exclusion, but on inclusion. Not on silence, but on speech. We are the America of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. Of Harriet Tubman, who led people to freedom through forests and fields that are now public lands. And of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who fought on a battlefield that 250 years later is also now a national park.

We are the America that keeps fighting, even when the odds seem long.

As I told my son, we are part of that tradition. And this Fourth of July, we recommit to it. That is what it means to be American.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.