A lot's changed in the last 15 years, but the one thing that doesn't seem to ever change is the fundamental intellectual battle between the individualist classical liberalism of Bastiat/Montesquieu/Voltaire/Locke/Hobbers/etc., and the collectivist proto-socialism of Rousseau.
In the 1800s, I'm sure the divergence of these two worldviews didn't seem to be so extreme, but as societies have grown up around them, we can see that they create wildly different outcomes.
"Life, Liberty, and Property" as a set of guiding values turned out to be quite a bit different than "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity".
And the more America has lost its guiding values and as so many of the people controlling the commanding heights of our culture promote a view of society and government built on the ideas of Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx / Engels, and now Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc., the worse the US has become.
Ideas matter. We can promote the liberating ideas of universal individual rights to speech & conscience, property, and due process; or we can promote divisive collectivism, pitting groups of people against each other based on their race, sex, or class while incoherently asserting that moral principles are conditional on which group you happen to belong to.
I'm very glad to have been born in the one country that was founded on the former, but I'm also as concerned as I have ever been that we're drifting towards the latter.
Wherever the country stands today, to me Independence Day is a celebration of liberty and the ides of individualist classical liberalism. It's not a celebration of the government of the United States, but of the principles that the country was founded on.
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