The Republic You Are Losing

I confess I did not expect to find myself in good humor at your anniversary. Two hundred and fifty years is a span sufficient to prove a thing either durable or merely lucky, and I have spent too many hours of my life distinguishing between the two to confuse them now. A republic is not a monument. It does not stand because it was once built. It stands because the people, in each successive generation, choose to hold it up — and the moment they set it down, even briefly, even in fatigue, the whole weight shifts to those who would govern without their consent.

That has always been the danger. It was the danger in 1776. It remains the danger now.

I am not a sentimental man. My colleagues occasionally found this inconvenient. "If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." I wrote that in another century, under different skies, not as prophecy but as a warning — the kind one issues when the thing warned against is already in motion.

So let me speak plainly. I have been shown a document: a survey conducted in April of this present year, 2026, by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, its findings published on the eighth of June, scarcely a month before the great anniversary celebration your countrymen are preparing on the Mall. I read it with the same attention I once gave to the proceedings of the Massachusetts General Court, and my considered judgment is this: it is more alarming than a redcoat encampment.

The surveyors posed a simple question — whether a democratically elected government is important to the identity of the United States. Not whether democracy is perfect, mind you. Only whether it is important. In 2021, eighty in every hundred said it was extremely or very important. In 2024, seventy-six. By this April past, sixty-six. Fourteen points surrendered in five years, on a question that requires no expertise to answer, only conviction. And among Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine — the generation that will either preserve or dissolve what we built — only fifty-one in a hundred found democratic government important to their country's identity. One in five said it is not too important, or not important at all.

One in five young Americans, asked whether self-government matters to the nation their predecessors bled to establish, have concluded: not particularly.

I understand despair. I have known it myself. There were months in the 1770s when the cause seemed impossible, when men I respected counseled patience with a government that had proved itself incapable of deserving any. I did not counsel patience. I counseled action — not because I was certain of success, but because the alternative to acting was not peace. It was submission dressed in the language of peace.

What I see in these numbers is not despair. It is something quieter and more corrosive: indifference. Despair at least presupposes that the thing lost had value. But the young Americans in this survey who shrug at democratic government are not despairing. They are disengaging — relinquishing a sovereignty purchased at the cost of blood and treasure, because no one has sufficiently impressed upon them what the alternative looks like.

I will tell you what it looks like. I watched it for years from Boston. It looks like a parliament that passes laws without the consent of the governed and then wonders why the governed resist. It looks like a governor who arrives with his instructions already written, for whom the assembly is not a partner in governance but an obstacle to be managed. It looks exactly like the government you now seem willing to tolerate — not because that government wears a red coat, but because you have forgotten that the color of the coat was never the point.

The point was accountability. The point was that power must answer to the people who grant it, or it will cease to answer to anyone at all.

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks." I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it still. What I did not anticipate was that the hazard would one day arrive not as an army but as a survey, showing that a third of the country's youngest citizens have grown uncertain whether the thing is worth defending at all.

To those citizens I wish to speak directly — not with contempt, but with the urgency I once reserved for men who needed to understand that the hour was later than they imagined.

You are disappointed. I know this. You were told the republic was a system in which your voice would be heard; you have discovered it is a system in which your petition goes unanswered and the men whose salaries you pay conduct themselves as though your opinion is at most an occasional inconvenience. Congress has been conducting itself in precisely this manner for most of American history, with brief intervals of conscience. The disappointment is warranted.

But consider what conclusion you are drawing from it. If a merchant cheats you, the remedy is not to abandon commerce. If your representative does not represent you, the remedy is to make his tenure short and his successor better — which is precisely the mechanism the republic provides, and which functions in direct proportion to the number of citizens willing to use it. When you disengage, you do not punish the government. You empower it. Every citizen who withdraws makes the republic slightly more available to those who wish to own it entirely, and I assure you there is no shortage of men eager for the vacancy.

A republic, I told my countrymen, "is never in greater danger than when such men possess the most power, and have the least virtue." Whatever virtue your government possesses or lacks, it will possess and lack in direct proportion to what you demand of it. A people who have decided that democratic government is not particularly important to their national identity are not a people who demand very much.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small number of men and women decided that self-government was worth more than comfort, more than safety, more than the approval of the most powerful empire on earth. They knew the cost. Several of them paid it in full. They made the calculation anyway, because they had thought carefully about what the alternative was, and they found it intolerable.

I ask only that you make the same calculation — not in a spirit of celebration, but of honest reckoning. Look at what you have. Look at what you are allowing to slip. Decide whether it is worth the effort of holding.

I believe it is. But I am not the one who must do the holding.

You are.

Samuel Adams
Boston, Massachusetts — in the two hundred and fiftieth year of the republic he helped to build
June 13, 2026