(C) Colorado Newsline
This story was originally published by Colorado Newsline and is unaltered.
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Amid threats to liberty, July 4 inspires anew [1]
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Date: 2025-07-04
Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” which helped persuade colonists to fight for independence from the British crown, faulted King George III for qualities that are all too familiar to Americans today.
The king had been “an inveterate enemy to liberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power,” Paine wrote, adding that the king was willing to accept no laws “but such as suit his purpose.”
Within half a year of the pamphlet’s publication, Americans declared, on July 4, 1776, their independence.
Half a year into his second term, President Donald Trump has adopted a king-like style of rule. His administration regularly deprives people of their liberty with little or no cause, and it repeatedly shows disdain for laws it doesn’t like. Trump’s policies are aggressively anti-American, more aligned by far with George III’s tyranny than with any of the country’s previous administrations.
On this Fourth of July, Constitution-abiding Americans might despair over the meaning of the holiday under these circumstances. What’s to celebrate when the president is as unaccountable as a monarch and the national government holds unalienable rights in contempt?
But the idea of the country persists even as the state of the country pains. The soul of the holiday isn’t the occupant of the White House or the manner of his rule or the innumerable ways America in practice failed to live up to its promise, never more so than in its earliest days and the decades that followed. Rather it’s the timeless ideals of equality and liberty that propelled the founding and inspired people around the world. And as they stood up in recent months for the values on which July 4 is a time to reflect, Coloradans have proved themselves worthy of the holiday and exemplars of its spirit.
They have plenty to celebrate.
On the day Trump was first inaugurated in 2017, more than 100,000 people in Denver protested against his presidency during the Women’s March, a worldwide demonstration for “human rights and equality,” and such acts of resistance to fascist encroachment have only expanded in Colorado since Trump’s second inauguration.
Coloradans have turned out in the streets time and again, at scale, to protest administration abuses. Enormous crowds appeared in Denver and elsewhere in the state on President’s Day, twice in April, in early June, and again in June as part of the nationwide No Kings movement, which saw thousands of protesters march even in Republican-leaning Mesa County.
Protesters who decry the lawless mass deportation activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have held a weekly vigil at the ICE detention center in Aurora, where the administration has detained, among many others, Denver immigration rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra.
When in March U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York appeared in Greeley and Denver as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, they drew capacity crowds. The turnout in Denver was estimated at 34,000 people.
“In the hundreds of rallies that I have done, we have never, ever had a rally as large as this,” Sanders told Coloradans. “And Denver, your presence here today is not just significant for Colorado. You are sending a profound message all over the world. The whole world is watching, and they want to know if the people of America are going to stand up to Trumpism, oligarchy and authoritarianism.”
That message, that the fight against authoritarianism matters beyond state or national borders and can stir the political will of liberty-seeking people anywhere they live, is central to the idea of America. The American cause of the 1770s inspired French revolutionaries only a decade later and has been a model for anti-autocracy mobilization ever since.
“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” Paine wrote in 1776. “‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.”
The Fourth of July is an occasion for Coloradans to observe that they are still involved in the contest, still affected, as Paine foresaw, and that the worth of the cause could not be greater.
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[1] Url:
https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/07/04/threats-to-liberty-july-4-inspires/
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