Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at the age of 35 — a fact that has prompted many lachrymose musicologists to wonder at what might have been. Were it not for the hand of Providence, the United States of America may well have suffered the same fate. Today, we tend to look back at the sundry threats and crises that have peppered America’s history as inevitable waypoints on a long march toward glory. But this is a luxury that has been accorded to us by the sweat from others’ brows. Had a few of the details changed in December of 1776, or in September of 1814, or in the summer of 1862, this country, as envisioned, could have been relegated to a curiosity of the past. Nor, in the last century, was our survival as a free republic guaranteed. The view from Hooverville was bleak indeed. So, until that auspicious glint of sunlight saved the day, was the outlook at Midway. During the Cold War, we avoided the predations of a millenarian cult that had promised to “bury” us — although, as Wellington had it after Waterloo, it, too, was “the nearest-run thing.”

The old saw holds that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” And boy does God have a stellar HR team. Here, cometh the hour, cometh the man is close to a guarantee. At our birth, we needed a Washington, a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams, a Madison, and a Hamilton — and, remarkably, we got all of them in one crowd. In our most acute crisis, we needed a Lincoln, a Grant, and a Sherman, and they showed up right on cue. Other hours of need have delivered leaders such as Ronald Reagan; military luminaries such as Winfield Scott and Dwight Eisenhower; and the host of dissidents, conciliators, and movement-builders who successfully staved off the extremes. When, from time to time, the siren’s song of mutiny has grown uncomfortably loud, it has been met by Henry Clay, Frederick Douglass, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Antonin Scalia, and (dare we add) William F. Buckley Jr. However one likes to imagine our Shining City on a Hill, one must assume that its gates are magnetic.

This weekend is America’s 250^th birthday. It ought, as John Adams famously proposed, “to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.” But, above all else, it ought to be an occasion for thanksgiving, reflection, and more than a little old-fashioned awe. This country — not in theory, or on some days, or if altered fundamentally by radicals, but as it currently exists, on July 4, 2026 — is a miracle for the ages. A quarter of a millennium after its inception, it boasts a brilliant and enduring constitutional order, a dynamic and industrious people, an unequaled system of free enterprise, and a timeless creed that has attracted the notice of stargazers worldwide. F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that, unlike most nations, America has “about it still that quality of the idea.” And so it does. But it has benefited, too, from millions of Atlases, who, in cutting deep into Appalachia, blazing the Oregon Trail, sculpting skyscrapers in the New York City air, and setting their sights as high as the Moon, sedulously built the comfort and abundance by which we are surrounded.

Ours is a land of wonders. We invented baseball, jazz, Hollywood, the airplane, the telephone, the internet, and air conditioning. We play host to Grand Central Terminal and Monument Valley and New Orleans. We were home to Mark Twain and John Ford and Elvis Presley and Miles Davis. The touchstone companies of this century are here: Google, Apple, SpaceX, Amazon, and more. On the eve of the Revolution, Edmund Burke characterized the 13 colonies as having been subject to a “wise and salutary neglect.” In 2026, such an idea seems astonishing. It is impossible, wherever one resides, to ignore the United States.

That America finds itself in this position is no accident. It is the consequence of a series of conscious choices that have been made throughout our history, and that ought to be remade over and over again. America at 250 is the product of our Declaration, that “great spiritual document,” whose presumptions, per Calvin Coolidge, exhibited “a finality that is exceedingly restful.” America at 250 is the product of our Constitution, which, unlike those that emerged from the rebellions in France, Russia, and China, took human nature to be immutable and ambition to be a force to be harnessed instead of suppressed. America at 250 is the product of our free markets, which reward work and ingenuity and head off the contrived sclerosis that has congested so much of the Old World. America at 250 is the product of a set of stringent protections — of speech, conscience, religion, arms, property, the presumption of innocence, and more — that have held fast even as they atrophied elsewhere. And, above all, America at 250 is the product of that most necessary of all human instincts: gratitude — for what was, for what is, and for what, God willing, will be in the years to come.