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It should surprise no one that democracy isn’t very popular these days. Watching Congress cough up a budget bill like an asthmatic house cat with a hairball doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence.

A recent Pew Research survey looked at how satisfied residents of nations around the globe were with “the way democracy is working in their country.”

Notably, among the residents of 12 mostly wealthy, mostly stable nations — Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States — 64 percent of adults said they were dissatisfied, compared to 35 percent who were satisfied.

On the one hand, so what? As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” People don’t like the way democratic government works, but they’re not really supposed to. Democracy is like a lot of good things in life: more valuable for what it prevents rather than what it delivers. If the alternative to self-government is tyranny, then imperfect democracy is a gift to be cherished.

That’s why Americans should feel more than a little superior on this, the 249th birthday of our democracy — the oldest unbroken one in the world. And yet, compared with the residents of other wealthy nations, Americans are feeling pretty lousy about government by “We the people.”

The same survey found that 64 percent of Americans were dissatisfied, dramatically worse than the countries with which we share the most in common: 23 points worse than Canada, 11 points worse than the United Kingdom, 23 points worse than Germany and 23 points worse than Australia.

The trend in the U.S. and among other wealthy nations generally, though, has been downward. In 2017, the average for America’s cohort was 49 percent satisfied, 49 percent dissatisfied. Eight years later, it’s a spread of almost 30 points.

Every country has its own reasons for its frustrations with democracy, including those places like Hungary and South Korea, which of late have been struggling mightily to maintain some kind system that is both functional and democratic. But in the United States, the richest, freest, safest nation in the history of the world, it doesn’t seem right. Why does the apex nation feel so crummy about its system of government?

Part of it is no doubt a version of affluenza in which Americans have come to see self-government in a Madisonian democracy based on equal rights and equal protections as the default. While we may be the stark exception to the great powers of history, it is normal to us. Like all good things in great supply, we take liberty for granted.

But it may also be a misunderstanding of cause and effect. The temptation for Americans for more than a century has been to think that we have freedom and self-government because we are rich and powerful. The truth is that we are rich and powerful because we have freedom and self-government.

America is now in its 250th year. One year from today in Philadelphia, we will celebrate that grand achievement: truly the envy of the world. And when we do, one suspects Americans will still be unhappy with their system of government.

And again, how could you blame them? Our politics are rotten and our government can barely perform its basic duties. National elections have turned into battles royale in which winners get to spend two or four years trying to punish the other side only for the other side to then get its turn with the shillelagh. Back and forth we go, each time a little meaner and a little more dysfunctional.

It should be remembered that this is a perversion of our system, not the system itself. Unlike the residents of other nations that built their systems out of local custom grafted with American-style democracy, this is our own birthright. The declaration made in Philadelphia 249 years ago today that all men are created equal is the inheritance of every American citizen, wherever she or he was born.

When we are dissatisfied with our democracy, we don’t need a different sort of government, we have to go back to what made us great in the first place. We have the source code if we are willing to reclaim it.

To that end, I’d ask that you take a moment in today’s celebration to remember the gift that we have been given.

What President Calvin Coolidge said in speech celebrating the 150th anniversary of the founding is just as true today:

“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

Amen, amen.

Happy Independence Day. May your barbecues, like this newsletter, be whole hog.

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