The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney houses one of the largest programs of American Studies outside of the United States with courses and scholarship ranging from American constitutional law to the history of race, gender, and popular culture. Understanding the historical context of the alliance has never been more relevant than today as America commemorates 250 years independence amidst seemingly unprecedented polarisation at home and geopolitical peril abroad.
Understanding the historical context of the alliance has never been more relevant than today as America commemorates 250 years independence amidst seemingly unprecedented polarisation at home and geopolitical peril abroad.
Our newest polling at USSC indicates that while most Australians view the United States as a fellow democracy and seek to maintain the alliance, 71% say they are concerned about the state of American democracy and 58% say the policies of the current US administration have on balance been bad for Australia.
For Australia as for much of the world, the state of American democracy is directly related to the credibility of America as an ally. So what do some of the keenest observers of the United States in Australia make of the state of America’s democratic journey at the 250-year mark?
We asked our professors in American studies to reflect on the 250th in the context of their own research. Their views are as diverse as the American experience itself. Ben Reilly notes that “the place of American democracy in Australian political consciousness is like that of the United States itself. Sometimes revered. Sometimes reviled. Always influential.” Brendon O’Connor unpacks the intellectual roots on the far right of politics to explain the counterforces to progressive visions of America’s future. Aaron Nyerges highlights the similarities in the indigenous peoples’ experiences with colonisation and state-building in America and Australia. Kathryn Robison traces the Declaration's impact on inspiring the United States to go to outer space for pursuits that Americans and Australians remain engrossed by. Rodney Taveira introduces how the Declaration of Independence animates class discussion in Australia about America. Katy Schumaker explains how the still incomplete success of movements for gender and racial equality reflect the enduring power of the concepts of human liberty and equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence. And David Smith reveals that more Australians are familiar with the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution as “sacred texts” than are familiar with Australia’s own more staid founding documents.
The 250th anniversary of American independence serves as a reminder that our current debates and divisions are neither unprecedented nor necessarily predictive of the future.
For my part as a student of history and practitioner of policy, the 250th anniversary of American independence serves as a reminder that our current debates and divisions are neither unprecedented nor necessarily predictive of the future. The reality is that American political and social life has always been vastly complicated, diverse and contested with periodic convulsions -- yet always bending in the end towards greater national cohesion, justice, and liberty -- however imperfect. The Declaration of Independence we now commemorate was itself a jumble of contradictions. In the musical Hamilton Aaron Burr refuses Alexander Hamilton’s request for help drafting the Federalist Papers. “No way,” says Burr to Hamilton’s pleading, “…the Constitution is full of contradictions.” “So is independence!!” replies Hamilton before singing his way to drafting the Federalist Papers with James Madison and John Jay.
The Declaration of Independence drew on the highest ideals of the Enlightenment with the radical proposition that “all men are created equal” thus lighting a fuse that would transform definitions of political legitimacy in every continent of the world. Yet the Declaration also contained jarring points of injustice, including a defence of slavery implicit in the complaints that King George was exciting “servile insurrection.” The contradictions inherent in the Declaration led eventually to bloody Civil War, the struggle for Civil rights, and debates that continue to this day about how to balance the tensions between achieving “freedom” and “justice” for all (the right’s definition of “freedom” often threatens the left’s definition of “justice” and the left’s pursuit of “justice” triggers the right’s defence of freedom.”)
History itself has been a central battlefield. In 2017, The New York Times “1619 Project” asserted that slavery and racism were the foundational pillars of the United States and the first Trump administration responded with the “1776 Project” which seemed to whitewash slavery from America’s founding story. Today the battlelines have been drawn over the 250th commemoration of independence as the Congressionally-mandated “America 250” celebration clashes with President Trump’s own “Freedom 250” events, complete with UFC cage-matches and partisan political rallies on the National Mall.
In the end most Americans will not let any of these top-down narratives define who they are on the nation’s 250th anniversary.
In the end most Americans will not let any of these top-down narratives define who they are on the nation’s 250th anniversary. What the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville discovered in his exploration of American democracy in the 1830s is still true. Before visiting America, de Tocqueville worried that the pursuit of democracy would lead to tyranny and the destruction of liberty as it had in ancient Athens. But after visiting the United States, he concluded that the American peoples’ embrace of political and social empowerment through church, local government, media, and myriad other civil organisations would serve as a buttress against the kind of popular tyranny that undid ancient Greek democracy. That part of the story rarely makes the headlines of international newspapers the way a Trump rally does, but in towns, cities, churches, and civic groups across the country citizens will celebrate in their own way, just as they did when the original Declaration was read out across the colonies in July 1776.
The “1619 Project” and the “1776 Project” represented polar-opposite definitions of the American democratic project. In the end, mainstream historians accepted neither. The Pulitzer Prize for History in 2026 went to Jill Lapore’s We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution -a straightforward and well researched account of the debates over America’s foundational document with no political agenda other than educating the people on the positions taken by both sides over two centuries of legal and political battles that defined the nation. The best-sellers in American history today remain down-the-middle accounts that embrace complexity and contradiction: books like Doris Kearn Goodwin’s Team of Rivals about the Lincoln administration and Erik Larsen’s Demons of Unrest about the beginning of the Civil War.
I was a boy during the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. I vaguely remember parades, fireworks, hotdogs, the Bicentennial patch I proudly war on my Scout uniform and travelling to London with my family, where I was disappointed that the British were not more upset. Looking back at newspaper columns from the times fifty years later, I am struck by how much ferment there was in American politics at the time. A year after the withdrawal from Indochina, the US public was plagued with doubt and still traumatised over the political divisions at home from the Vietnam War. Inflation was higher than it is today and anti-elite populism propelled Jimmy Carter into office in the presidential election that year. In Japan, the cabinet of Takeo Miki sought more independence from the United States and a greater connectivity to Asia (including with Australia through the Nara Treaty). Australia was deeply polarised over the alliance after Watergate and Vietnam, with the left accusing the CIA of masterminding the dismissal of the Whitlam government. In public opinion polls in 1976, about 65% of Australians believed the alliance was important to Australia’s security – a healthy number but lower than the Lowy Institute’s most recent June 2026 poll in which 73% of Australians said the same (a decrease from 80% earlier this year).
The persistently high level of anxiety about American democracy among Australians in our polling at USSC is understandable…our polls show that a majority of Americans agree. But the 250th anniversary of American independence is a reminder that the arc of history has always been uneven in pursuit of the ideals scratched on parchment with quill and ink by Thomas Jefferson and his visionary but imperfect colleagues in the summer heat of Philadelphia.
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