Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Savoyard political philosopher Joseph de Maistre — a disdainer of democracy — famously observed that “every nation has the government it deserves.” Whether he was right is beside the point. His observation offers a question worth asking in our semiquincentennial year: if the governments under which people live reflect the societies that sustain them, what does ours reveal about us?

Every nation is both the author and the editor of its own story.

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is being celebrated, we rightly tell stories that make us proud. We remember that a loose collection of colonies became a republic founded on the audacious proposition that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. We remember that we preserved this republic through civil war, abolished slavery, helped defeat fascism, helped rebuild former enemies rather than permanently subjugating them, landed human beings on the Moon, and steadily widened the promise of citizenship to people once denied it.

These stories deserve celebration, but anniversaries should do more than celebrate. They should invite examination. A mature nation tells not only the stories that flatter, but also those that unsettle it. It is tempting to imagine our story as a steady march toward justice, each generation wiser than the last. Our experience is more complicated.

Our story has always contained two competing narratives, both present at the founding itself. We declared that all men are created equal while permitting millions to remain enslaved. Our highest aspiration and our deepest contradiction entered history together.

One narrative widens the circle. It insists that the nation’s promises belong to more people than the previous generation imagined. It is the story that carried immigrants seeking opportunity, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, Freedom Riders, disability-rights advocates, and LGBTQ Americans asking not for special treatment but equal dignity. This first narrative declares that the Declaration of Independence is not a completed achievement but an unfinished assignment.

The other narrative narrows the circle. It has repeatedly sought to preserve existing hierarchies against expanding equality. Progress has always been real, but it has never been permanent. Nearly every expansion of liberty has been followed by a renewed effort to restrict it. Rights once thought secure have proved less permanent than many Americans assumed. Even constitutional understandings that many regarded as settled have proved subject to revision. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. Every widening of the circle has produced renewed efforts to redraw it.

Sometimes this second narrative has spoken openly, as in segregation. More often it has spoken in the language of tradition, law and order, local control, or cultural preservation. The vocabulary changes. The instinct rarely does. Again and again, we have proclaimed liberty in principle while resisting its practical expansion. These narratives compete not only in elections but in classrooms, churches, courtrooms, neighborhoods and families. They compete within us.

The history of the Republican Party illustrates one chapter of this larger American story. Founded to oppose the expansion of slavery, it became the political instrument through which the Union was preserved, slavery abolished, and Reconstruction begun. It gradually became the political home of many white Southern voters whose region’s political culture had long been shaped first by opposition to Reconstruction and later by resistance to the civil rights movement. That transformation did not occur simply because politicians devised successful electoral strategies. Political parties rarely transform unless the electorate does so first. Institutions seldom lead cultures. More often, they reveal them.

This same pattern appears throughout our public life. Institutions that broaden opportunity often become suspect once they begin serving people previously excluded from power. Public schools become battlegrounds over whose history may be taught. Universities are criticized for asking unwelcome questions. Journalism is dismissed when its reporting becomes inconvenient. Elections themselves become objects of confidence or suspicion depending upon whether they affirm our preferred outcomes.

Even the courts, intended to stand apart from ordinary politics, become arenas in which competing visions of citizenship struggle for constitutional legitimacy. Recent rulings concerning voting rights, electoral representation, and birthright citizenship – attempts to resolve important legal questions — also point toward a larger civic one: who belongs fully within the American promise? That continuing debate may be our most persistent story.

The political candidate we choose to lead us is revealing as well. Our present moment demonstrates this. Our current President, rather than the cause of our divisions, is one of their clearest expressions. His elections say less about him than about the nation that elevated him. Presidents do not create nations. Nations create presidents.

Some of us may find comfort in the belief that our shortcomings belong to other Americans, to another party, another region, or another generation. Our history suggest otherwise. It would be a comfort found in a false belief. We are the inheritors of both narratives of the nation’s story. We benefit from the enlargements of liberty won by those who came before us, and we remain capable of resisting further enlargements when they inconvenience us or threaten familiar arrangements. The struggle is not merely between left and right, or coasts and heartland. It is between competing visions of ourselves.

While acknowledging two and a half centuries of the American experiment, we should resist the temptation to edit our national autobiography into a book of triumphs alone. The danger is not that we possess shameful chapters. Every nation does. The danger lies in quietly revising later editions until those chapters become footnotes while the heroic ones become legend. The stories we choose to tell determine not only how we remember ourselves but what we believe ourselves capable of becoming. Future generations will inherit not only the country we leave them, but the story we leave them. They will judge us less by the stories we chose to remember than by the story we chose to continue.

One story that should always be told is that our greatness has never rested upon perfection. It has rested upon our capacity for self-correction — a willingness, however uneven and incomplete, to confront our failures and enlarge the nation’s understanding of freedom.

Whether that remains one of our stories is the question before us.