Douglas Murray moved to America from Great Britain, and immediately immersed himself in his adopted country’s history and culture. Below he writes about the importance of the United States, its history, and his hopes for the future. It is a particularly perfect read on the eve of our nation’s 250th birthday.
Rediscover American pride and gratitude on the 250th anniversary
By: Douglas Murray, The New York Post (May 28, 2026)
When I first moved to America, I made a determined effort to read up on American history. The need to do this — for someone educated in Britain — cannot be overstressed.
Most people outside this country are entirely ignorant of American history. Even the War of Independence is a mystery to most people. Jessica Mitford once observed that British schoolchildren leave their education with the sense that America did something bad in the late 18th century and it isn’t polite to mention it.
But if you are going to live in a country, you should make an effort to learn its history. Or so I think. Though I have discovered how unpopular this view is.
One of the books I started before moving here was Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People”. It seized me from its opening lines: “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.”
Johnson’s book was published in 1997, before the latest round of historians got to work.
Today most fashionable historians would dismiss Johnson’s opening lines as hopelessly gauche and unsophisticated.
That is because sometime from the 1990s onward, this country’s story started getting retold in another light. There was a greater emphasis on the way in which Native Americans were treated. A trend grew for pulling down all those American leaders who had literally been put on pedestals. And there was a concerted effort to center the trans-Atlantic slave trade as being at the heart — if not the foundation — of the American story.
All of these things are perfectly fine things to do. History is forever being rewritten, added to and put in a fresh context.
But sometimes you just end up with things slanted in a new direction. That is where things are now.
Recent decades have been a confusing time for anyone wanting to take part in the American story.
It may be wrong to present a view of a country that ignores its flaws.
But it is even more destructive to paint a picture of your country that shows everything in a negative light.
Today I see people on both sides of the political divide intent on pushing a story about this country that is not only unjust but deeply destructive.
On the radical left, we have people we might call the Mamdani-ites. People who have been brought up in a stew of post-colonialism, Third Worldism and anti-capitalism. These people (who sit in City Hall, don’t forget) talk about America as an illegitimate country.
They talk about America’s past and present as though it is one long history of rapacious seizure, dispossession and capitalistic greed. In their estimation, nothing has been earned in this country or by this country that has not been stolen.
These are people who — as Ronald Reagan said back in the 1960s — cannot look at a thin man and a fat man without thinking the fat man must have taken something from the thin man.
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On the radical right (further from power, but no less noisy) there is a similar movement. Popular podcasters and others also wish to pretend that there is nothing good about this country.
Some of them argue that America has been in decline since its heroic interventions in the two world wars. Others try, just as assiduously as their left-wing counterparts, to strip America’s achievements one by one. For example, only in America do you have whole swaths of people intent on believing that American astronauts never landed on the moon — making one of the great chapters in the American adventure into a fraud. And to what end?
Anyhow — why do I mention all this?
Because if a country is going to make even the most basic effort at integrating and cohering its people, it must have a story that people want to join. For that you have to have a history that is accurate — of course. But you must also have a story that is noble and aspirational.
Happily, there truly are few stories in human history as noble and aspirational as the American story. And as this country comes up to celebrating its 250th anniversary, you can feel the need to reaffirm that fact once again.
Because Donald Trump happens to be the president on this anniversary, you can already hear some people gearing up for an act of rebellion or repudiation. A date that should unite the country — whoever the president of the time happens to be — may yet divide people afresh.
Artists and pop stars whose names some of us had long forgotten have already started lining up to say that they will not participate in any anniversary events because those events are linked to President Trump. Well, it wouldn’t be the first party spoiled by Milli Vanilli.
But what should be a unifying event risks being yet another round of the divisive culture wars.
Such a thing can and should be avoided. And it can be avoided by remembering the things that actually do unite us. Not the least of which should be a justified, deserved and earned form of pride in this nation.
As it happens, my latest reading has been a book by William F. Buckley, published in 1990, called “Gratitude: Reflections on what we owe to our country.” It is a wonderful, short book, but it reminds me that there are always two principal attitudes that can dominate our lives.
The first is resentment: resentment that we haven’t got everything we want or feel we deserve.
The second attitude is gratitude: gratitude for the inheritance we have got, the grace we can all experience and the opportunities that sit before us.
For a person, as for a country, the second attitude is infinitely more attractive. And — in the end — it is the only one that creates anything productive.
That is why I hope on this 250th, we can remind ourselves of the great human adventure that this country is still on, and the tremendous lessons that our national story will hold for generations to come.
GFK
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