On the night the dictator fell, the citizens of Caracas poured into the streets and sang songs from the old city. For a few hours, the city regained its history. La Cuna del Libertador—Birthplace of Simón Bolívar, who led most of South America to independence from Spain.
It was Venezuela on January 23, 1958, when my family lived there. Marcos Perez Jimenez fled. By Independence Day, fireworks were set off from the barrios.
Tyranny has been replaced by democracy, security by freedom, and when fear makes it impossible to maintain peace, anarchy also gives way. In place of the old right-wing order were elections, political parties, conflicts, and weak self-government movements.
Bolívar’s old dilemma has returned. Liberation was a reality, but unity had to be won again. Bolívar eventually dissolved parliament and assumed dictatorial power, but this was a desperate attempt to force unity from the top down.
Almost two centuries after the Bolivarian regime, a new kind of populist emerged to overcome a different kind of turmoil, destroying the economy while claiming to speak for the poor. The downfall of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro ended in January 2026 when the US military removed Maduro, but Venezuela fell into the hands of supporters of the same regime.
America’s founding generation feared this very thing. King George was not Pérez Jiménez, but he was close enough to the colonists. But Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and their generation knew that the monarchy was not the only enemy of freedom. A republic can easily fall apart from within due to sectarian chaos, agitation, corruption, meanness, and lust for power. They overthrew the king. They had not abolished tyranny.
History is the memory of nations, the stories that nations have debated, revised, and told. David Bentley Hart playfully referred to baseball as America’s most redeeming form of memory: a civic ritual where childhood, moral reckoning, and national stories meet. This playfulness has an important point. Nations need a common memory that goes beyond flattery and makes room for consideration of individual excellence within the common game.
Only time will tell which victories included defeats, which disasters led to possibilities, and which small turning points changed the nation. People who forget this are easier to flatter, threaten and control. They will also be more quick to reduce American history to a single master key, be it just slavery: 1619 projector patriotic innocence, like Report of 1776.
As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, a republic bound more by common ideals than ethnicity is struggling to tell a common story. In older stories, slavery and conquest were kept to a minimum. Later scholars corrected these omissions, but divided the story into separate histories of race, class, and identity.
An even more difficult challenge is to hold together universal claims and particular histories. We must affirm our common ideals without erasing our differences, and respect our differences without retreating into rival camps. Common stories that exclude people become propaganda. Separate stories that have lost sight of each other become tribalism.
1776 is an unfinished struggle over power, empire, slavery, and self-government. The revolution became a debate over who should be considered “the people.” It has led to property deprivation, racial nationalism, and untold harm. But the same revolution that compromised with slavery gave later generations the words to condemn it: inalienable rights, higher law, the right to resist power.
Democracy causes a backlash because it means living with great difference, uncertainty, and change. For those seeking order without conflict, this may feel more like waste than freedom. Authoritarianism is a reflexive democracy that can cause itself. When freedom feels like anarchy, people start looking for someone strong enough to end the argument.
Politeness cannot be reduced to manners. It’s not about respect, and it’s not about pretending that disagreements can be resolved by agreeing. Opponents don’t have to like each other, but they must keep the conversation going.
We find ourselves in the same situation as people we distrust, hate, and despise. Listening is not always an act of goodwill. It has long been a tool of the powerless – a way of “listening” to predict the powerful.
Yet, as Teresa Bijan argues, democracy depends on keeping debate going so that disagreements do not escalate into separation, persecution, and violence. The answer to hate speech is more speech. Democracy can mean simply saying, “Let’s talk about this later,” and walking away without slamming the door.
Conversely, tolerance becomes cowardice when we mistakenly believe that avoiding trouble means maintaining peace. Things get even worse when civility squanders essential discussion and treats the conflict itself as a failure. True civility is to politeness what moral courage is to etiquette.
The sound record of 1776 brings together violence and vision, exclusion and ideals, a republic built and a democracy unfinished. Unfinished hopes do not invalidate hard-won progress; they require discussion.
Arguments hurt. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson felt this way more than anyone else. Their intense personal conflict proved that bitter conflicts don’t have to end in permanent estrangement.
Adams insisted on the need for a strong and independent executive, someone with sufficient energy to enforce the laws and check legislative power. Mr. Jefferson feared tyranny disguised as consent, warning that “elective despotism is not the government we fought for.”
Jefferson and Adams never stopped fighting. Even though they eventually developed a friendship, the argument was not resolved.
That, too, is part of the legacy of 1776. That is, freedom as a debate fierce enough to divide a country, and durable enough to sustain it.
notes and reading
jacob lawrence-Artist, strugglepanel 1. The first African American artist to have his work collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I see the story of Black Americans not as a separate experience of American culture, but as part of the entire American tradition and experience.” —MoMA
Venezuela―“Modern History of Venezuela 1900-2025” mediumJanuary 8, 2026.
baseball–Although it is Venezuela’s national pastime, there is also a touch of mercy in this essay. David Bentley Hart calls baseball “America’s most redeeming memory,” but Venezuela has its own deep claim to baseball, from the sandboxes of Caracas to the baseball fields. Luis Aparicioa Hall of Fame shortstop whose name still hangs on the annual award for Venezuela’s best major league player. See “Running in Circles: There’s only one form of memory that is truly redemptive: baseball.” by Hart. plowJune 17, 2026. After all the revolutions, perhaps hope still knows how to return home.
[Note: On March 17, 2026, Venezuela became the first South American team to win the World Baseball Classic, defeating the host United States 3–2 in Miami, a moment of national joy amid continuing political and economic turmoil.]
Friends Divide: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson―Gordon S. Wood, 2017. Jefferson and Adams were very different. Jefferson was an aristocratic Southern slave owner and a democratic optimist. Adams, a New England hard worker, is wary of popular control. Their friendships, rifts, and reconciliations reveal the debates at the heart of America’s founding.
The unfinished business of 1776: Why the revolution never ends―Thomas Richards Jr., 2026. Politics emerged from the revolution as an evolving competition between legal order and popular protest, rather than the easy consensus and entrenched authority later evoked by talk of the “establishment.”
Nothing Separates Us: Healing for Souls and Nations—Howard Thurman, September 22, 2026, Pre-order. Thurman’s message is rooted in his belief that true spirituality can transcend individualism and alleviate injustice and suffering. As a spiritual advisor to civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, Thurman eloquently expressed the bond between faith and action.
Awakening of Democracy: Notes on the American Situation―Heather Cox Richardson, 2023. The current crisis of democracy from a historical perspective. Pay particular attention to false history, weaponized language, and public grievances as a means of consolidating power.
Mere Politeness: Dissent and the Limits of Tolerance—Teresa M. Bijan, 2017. Bijan’s “mere civility” does not require warmth, admiration, or agreement, but the more difficult democratic discipline of enabling discussion. she washington post The March 8, 2017 essay “You don’t need to be nice to your political opponents, but you do need to talk to them” summarizes the current debate.
posthuman parish
Just beauty
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
