President’s Day arrives every February with historical aura but then gets swallowed by appliance discounts and mattress commercials, as though civic memory can be replaced by a coupon code. The holiday has become a soft cultural placeholder, a day people “enjoy” while forgetting what it was meant to teach. The irony is almost too easy: a nation built on disciplined self-government treats its political inheritance like background noise and then wonders why its public life sounds like a quarrel in a crowded bar.

The origin story is worthy of our consideration. George Washington’s birthday became a public holiday for federal workers in Washington, D.C., in 1879, then expanded to federal employees more broadly in 1885. Later, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved the federal observance to the third Monday in February, effective in 1971, and the public gradually baptized the day with the looser label “Presidents Day,” while federal law kept the official name as Washington’s Birthday. That detail matters as it exposes a modern habit of flattening history into generalized sentiment, which is how we ended up “honoring all presidents” while remembering very few of them.

To appreciate the novelty of the American founding, we must remember what the world’s political architecture looked like as the 18th century staggered forward. Authority in Europe still tended to move in a downward current, from God as the presumed source of legitimacy, to king, to ministers, to officials, to the people, who were frequently treated as subjects first and citizens later. Into that world, the American experiment did something daring, and it did it with a lawyerly seriousness that still deserves admiration. The Founders placed sovereignty, under God, in the people themselves and then built a constitutional machine designed to keep ambition from turning public office into private possession. In the American structure, the citizen stands as the bearer of rights that government is bound to recognize and protect, and that is why legitimacy rises through representation rather than falling through command. The slogan “government of the people, by the people, for the people” later captured this moral grammar with memorable force, and it remains a succinct description of a revolution that aimed for ordered freedom rather than tribal rule.

This reversal, however, was never meant to be naïve. The framers carried a sober view of human nature, and therefore they designed the federal government with separated powers, checks, balances, and competing centers of authority, and they expected temptation to follow power the way flies follow a picnic. James Madison explained the logic with a clarity modern activists often lack. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote. And then he pressed the point further, saying, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The fixed term of office belongs in this same category. In older imperial and monarchical patterns, tenure tended to be open-ended, and the state’s identity could blur into the ruler’s identity, which is how public power becomes a family heirloom. The American decision to bind offices to fixed terms, and to layer elections across multiple institutions, created a rhythm of accountability that functioned as a guardrail against the drift into permanent rule.

People today complain that the current administration, whichever party holds it at a given moment, represents dictatorship or some cartoon version of fascism, and the claim tends to reveal more about media diet than political literacy. The system can be abused whenever fallen men inhabit it, and therefore vigilance remains necessary, yet the constitutional order still forces power to move through institutions, procedures, and competing branches. The separation of powers, bicameral legislature, judicial review, and federalism remain stubborn obstacles to raw executive will, and that stubbornness is a feature rather than a flaw.

Take it from me: I have lived outside this American inheritance, and I have seen how quickly a society can normalize curtailed liberty while calling it stability. Where bureaucracy functions like a gatekeeper, people learn to seek favors rather than rights. Where speech laws hover over public life, citizens practice self-censorship before the state even needs to act. Where politics concentrates through personality and patronage, institutions bend when enforcement depends on relationships. In such contexts, rulers are treated as superior to the people, and the citizen learns to navigate power rather than participate in it.

Consequently, when an American sneers at constitutional liberties as though they were mere artifacts of privilege, I hear the voice of a person who has spent too long in comfort and too little time in history. One generation is enough to lose what our forebears bled to secure. When a culture forgets how liberty is preserved, it starts treating civic virtue as optional, and then it discovers, too late, that freedom without formation turns into chaos, and chaos invites control, and frightened people always beg for a strong hand.

Patriotism deserves a defense that avoids both sentimental kitsch and ideological sneering. Patriotism is a Christian virtue when it means gratitude, duty, and the pursuit of the common good with courage and sacrifice, since love of neighbor includes love of the place where one’s neighbors live, work, worship, and raise children. Scripture refuses idolatry of nation, yet Scripture also affirms that authority exists to serve justice and peace, and that civic life is a sphere of moral responsibility (cf. Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Pet. 2:13-17). A day that remembers presidents should also remember the deeper idea behind the presidency, which is service under law, bound by oath, constrained by institutions, accountable to citizens, and answerable before God.

Therefore, Washington’s Birthday, President’s Day, or whatever label the culture prefers this year, is an invitation to recover a specific kind of gratitude — gratitude for a constitutional order that assumes human weakness and still aims for human flourishing; gratitude for a framework that treats the citizen as a moral agent rather than a managed subject. The republic requires adults, and adulthood always demands effort.

May we refuse historical ignorance, as such ignorance makes liberty feel disposable. May we teach our children that rights come with duties, that law is a teacher when it is just, and that courage is required when lies dress themselves up as compassion. Most of all, may we remember the Church’s steady position in the midst of every political season: the state is temporal, the Kingdom is eternal, and every nation will answer to the Judge of nations. The biblical/covenantal worldview places the person under God, and then places society under truth; covenant always carries obligation, worship, and moral order. Therefore, we center on Jesus Christ, King of kings, as He alone secures the dignity of the person, purifies the loves of the heart, and teaches a people how to use freedom for holiness rather than for collapse (cf. Col. 1:15-20; Mt. 28:18-20).