America turned two hundred and fifty this fortnight, and I come to it not as an American, which I am not, but as someone who builds things and thinks about why they last, because the anniversary of a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old institution is, properly understood, not a celebration of a founding but a meditation on maintenance, and maintenance is the subject I know. The fireworks honour the beginning. The thing actually worth honouring, and the thing actually in question this hard year, is the far less festive fact that ten generations kept the thing running, and the question the anniversary poses, beneath the pageantry, is whether the present generation understands that keeping it running is a task rather than an inheritance.
There is a story, probably embellished, that as the framers emerged from the constitutional convention a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what they had made, and he answered: a republic, if you can keep it. Whether or not he said it, the conditional is the whole of the wisdom, because it locates the achievement not in the founding but in the keeping, and it frames the republic not as a machine that, once built, runs itself, but as a thing that must be actively kept, maintained, repaired, defended, generation after generation, or it will not last. The founders, whatever their flaws, and they had grave ones, understood this in a way their heirs often do not. They did not think they had built a perpetual motion machine. They thought they had built something fragile that would require constant tending, and they were anxious, in their own writings, about exactly the failure modes, the concentration of power, the decay of virtue, the executive's drift toward war, that this paper has spent the year watching unfold.
Let me put the counterargument, the celebratory one, at its strongest, because it is not empty and I do not want to be the foreigner who lectures a country on its birthday. The American republic, its defenders will say, has proven itself the most durable constitutional order in the modern world precisely because it is robust, not fragile; it has survived a civil war, a great depression, two world wars, and periodic bouts of exactly the strain it faces now, and each time the alarmists predicted its collapse and each time it endured, so that the lesson of two hundred and fifty years is resilience, not fragility, and the hand-wringing about this year's strains is the same hand-wringing that has been wrong every previous time. There is real force in this, and I hold it as a genuine corrective to the catastrophism that mistakes every stress for a terminal one. The republic has been more durable than its worriers feared. That is true, and it is worth celebrating.
But here is the thing the celebratory account gets exactly backward, and it is the thing I know from building. The republic survived those crises not because it was self-sustaining but because, in each of them, people did the hard work of maintaining it, actively, at cost, repairing what the crisis broke and defending what it threatened, and the survival was the product of that labour, not evidence that the labour was unnecessary. To point at two hundred and fifty years of survival as proof of robustness is to make precisely the error that destroys well-built things: to mistake the result of continuous maintenance for a property of the thing itself, and therefore to conclude that the maintenance can be neglected because the thing is inherently durable. It is the error of the heir who inherits a great house, sees that it has stood for centuries, concludes that it stands by its nature, stops maintaining it, and discovers, too late, that the centuries of standing were centuries of upkeep he mistook for permanence. The house did not stand because it was eternal. It stood because someone, in every generation, repaired the roof, and the day the heir stops is the day the standing quietly stops being guaranteed.
This is what I would say to the republic on its birthday, as a builder and not a citizen, with respect and with worry: that the danger at two hundred and fifty is not any particular enemy but the complacency of longevity itself, the way a thing that has lasted a long time persuades its inheritors that it will last forever on its own, and thereby seduces them out of the maintenance that was the actual source of its lasting. An institution is never self-sustaining; it is sustained, continuously, by people who understand that they have inherited a task and not merely a possession, and it fails not usually with a dramatic collapse but with a gradual cessation of upkeep by heirs who mistook the inheritance for a birthright. Franklin's conditional still governs, two hundred and fifty years on. It is a republic, if you can keep it, and the keeping is not a thing done once at the founding but a thing done always, by every generation, including this one, and the anniversary's real question, under all the fireworks, is whether this generation still knows that the keeping is its job, or whether it has come to believe, fatally, that the thing it inherited will keep itself. On the evidence of the year, the question is open, and it is the only question the anniversary actually asks.