Thursday, October 1, 2026
I was lucky enough to celebrate our nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, and for those of us who remember that celebration, America 250 feels a little different.
Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I remember a year-long excitement that captured the imagination of the entire country. The commercials on TV, the products in the stores, sports teams — even our local grocer was in on the action. And it wasn’t just the tall ships in the harbor or the red, white and blue decorations that adorned every inch of our neighborhoods. There was genuine excitement about our country and its story.
Schools devoted months to the Revolution. Families planned vacations at historic sites. Our town even hosted a North Hempstead Ball, complete with colonial costumes and powdered wigs.
By comparison, this year’s America 250 seemed a bit more subdued, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Anniversaries aren’t just celebrations; they’re opportunities to reflect on what we’ve inherited, what we’ve preserved, and what responsibilities now rest with us. Two hundred fifty years after 13 colonies declared that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” America’s greatest accomplishment is not economic or technological — it’s the ongoing existence of a free people governing themselves.
Benjamin Franklin captured that idea perfectly. As he emerged from the Constitutional Convention, someone asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The genius of his response is that it shifted the burden from the founders to us, the people. The Constitution didn’t guarantee a self-sustaining democracy that would somehow last forever. Instead it created self-government that depends on each generation’s willingness to participate and to preserve what those who came before worked so hard to create.
I know that every era in American history has its divisions and disappointments. But I can’t seem to shake the feeling that many Americans approached the Bicentennial in 1976 with a civic optimism that feels less common today.
Somewhere along the way, many of us started treating democracy less as an extraordinary inheritance and more as a permanent fixture in our everyday lives. We’ve become more skeptical, and more detached from the civic life that actually holds us together. The most frightening consequence of that is our voter participation. Millions of Americans who have a right that generations struggled to secure choose not to exercise it.
And that apathy, I believe, is the greatest danger to our democracy.
You see, some of our most important elections today aren’t being decided in November, but in low-turnout primary contests. In those races, a small number of highly motivated fringe voters are determining who holds office, while the vast majority of everyday voters stay home. When only a small fraction of voters cast ballots, the groups that are more organized naturally wield greater power.
Understand that these candidates don’t in any way represent the positions or the outlook of the majority, but they get to call the shots because their voters showed up on primary day. And in cities and states dominated by one party, the primary winner is often the overwhelming winner in November.
It happened just recently in New York City, where three socialist candidates unexpectedly won on primary day with super-low turnouts. In one case, a candidates unseated a longtime moderate incumbent despite receiving just 33,000 votes in a congressional district with over 760,000 people. That means that just 5 percent of that district made an unusual decision that probably doesn’t sit well with the rest of the district. But the result underscores my point, that low turnout gives an outsized role to a small number of people.
It’s not illegal. Nor is it a flaw in our democracy. That’s just how the system works, and radical groups have discovered how to take advantage of the majority’s apathy. In fact, they’re using that same playbook all over the United States. The lesson here is to recognize that political power doesn’t disappear — it’s simply awarded to those who vote.
But let’s get back to Ben Franklin’s sobering warning: the republic is ours, but we have to keep it. And that’s best done by voting — as often as we can. Or we will live to regret our indifference.
Jack Martins represents the 7th State Senate District.
