On the Fourth of July
This Fourth of July, we have an appointment with our country.
We will keep it in Washington, DC—not as petitioners, not as spectators, not as one constituency among many, but as the American people gathered at the seat of our government to do the work our government has stopped doing on our behalf.
I want to explain why this matters, and why it has must happen in this place, on this day, with all of us in one location for the first time since the awakening began.
When I launched American Opposition, I said that our institutional challenge had become extremely serious—that the levers our democracy was designed to use against tyranny had been studied, mapped, and systematically disabled by a regime that had spent four years preparing to return. I said the fight had to move to the street, because the street, under those conditions, was the only remaining venue in which the American people could exercise the sovereignty their institutions had stopped exercising on their behalf.
We’ve now spent sixteen months proving that argument.
The first National Day of Protest in February of last year. The first No Kings on Presidents’ Day. The Tesla boycott. Hands Off! The second No Kings, and the third, and the fourth—each larger than the one before, until we moved more people into the streets in a single year than any movement in American history. The Unite for Veterans rallies on D-Day. Remove the Regime. The Mass Blackout. Broadview. Mar-a-Lago. Cookeville. “The Awakening.” “The Bridge.” “America Will Rise.”
This wasn't a series of events. It was the execution of a plan. A plan that ran in three phases—mass mobilization, direct action, and electoral campaigning—that has carried us from the founding letter on this website, when no one had heard of us, to the moment we now find ourselves in: A movement that has achieved higher identification with the American people than the Democrats, the Republicans, or MAGA. A movement that produced the immaculate election last November. A movement that has driven Trump to the lowest approval ratings of any president in American history. A movement that has built, in sixteen months, the largest sustained protest and boycott campaign this country has ever seen.
We did this because we showed up. Because we kept showing up. Because we refused the silence.
We are now at the threshold of the next phase of the struggle, and it will require more from us.
The regime has not surrendered. The institutions have not been restored. The work is not finished. And the fragmentation that has carried us this far—the beautiful, chaotic, distributed energy of three thousand actions on a single Saturday—is not going to carry us through what comes next.
What comes next requires unity.
Not unity of belief. Not unity of background. Not unity of method. We've never been a movement of one kind of person, and we never will be. We are Black Panthers and white veterans and Cookeville organizers and Latina mothers and Dominican-born strategists and comedians and judges and teachers and immigrants who chose this country and citizens who inherited it. That diversity is our strength, and it isn't going anywhere.
The unity we need now is unity of presence.
On the Fourth of July, in Washington, D.C., we will gather not in three thousand cities but in one. We will stand not as separate movements but as a single movement that has finally recognized itself. We will look at each other across a single horizon and see, for the first time, what we’ve actually built.
This is the strategic logic of the moment: A regime that has been able to dismiss us as fragmented cannot dismiss us when we are concentrated. A press that has been able to cover us as a series of segmented stories cannot avoid covering us as a single story when we are all in one place.
A coalition that has been able to operate in parallel must now operate in concert. The next phase of the fight requires that we be visible to ourselves as well as to our adversaries.
This is also the moral logic: The Fourth of July is not their holiday. It belongs to a tradition that began with men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their honor to the proposition that no king holds dominion over a free people.
That tradition is ours. The flag is ours. The Constitution is ours. And on the Fourth of July, we are going to take them back—not rhetorically, but physically, by occupying the space where the founders placed the government they intended to be answerable to us.
I have written before about the awakening, the bridge, and the rising. I have written about the two fronts—the political and the economic—on which oligarchy has come at us at once. I have written about why the philanthropic and institutional defenses of democracy were never going to be enough, and why the people themselves have always been the only thing that could save this country.
The Fourth of July is the convergence of those arguments.
It is the awakening made visible in one place. It is the bridge crossed in unison. It is the rising not as metaphor but as physical fact. It is the proof, in a single afternoon, that the two fronts have been recognized and that the people are organizing across both. It is the demonstration that what philanthropy could not save, the American people are saving themselves.
It is also, I will say plainly, the moment our movement will look at itself and decide what it is.
A movement that can converge is a movement that can govern. A movement that can stand together in Washington on the Fourth of July is a movement that can replace ineffective Democrats in the primaries, defeat every possible Republican in the general election, and—after the midterms—begin the much harder work of putting a broken democracy back together. A Democracy Renewal Commission. Truth and accountability work. Reconciliation across the communities this period has riven. The fellowship to train the next generation of organizers. The anti-disinformation infrastructure. The digital archive to prevent the memory loss authoritarian regimes rely on.
None of that is possible without the unity that the Fourth of July will demonstrate.
I am asking you to show up.
I know you’re tired. I am too. Sixteen months of this work has cost me more than I will describe here, and I know it has cost many of you the same or worse. I know the death threats are real. I know the fear is real. I know that some of you have lost jobs, friendships, family relationships, and pieces of yourselves you didn't know could be taken.
I also know what we are capable of when we show up, because I’ve watched you do it, over and over, in cities all across our nation on days that demanded citizenship. I’ve watched ordinary Americans become the most powerful political force in the world through the simple act of showing up.
So I ask you: Please be present on the Fourth of July.
Come to Washington. Bring your families. Bring your neighbors. Bring the people in your life who’ve been wavering, who’ve been afraid, who’ve been waiting for the moment when participation felt absolutely necessary. Tell them this is the moment. Tell them the country we want to live in is going to be built by the people who show up.
On its 250th birthday, we have an appointment with our country that could decide its destiny.
I'll see you in Washington.
Don't forget to be brave.
In solidarity,
Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos
Founder, American Opposition
