My son and I had a wonderful time exploring the shops and exhibits of the old colonial city and celebrating our nation. As we walked the historic streets, I couldn’t stop thinking about the huge crowd around the Capitol during the reading. Thousands of strangers stood together in the sun, most of them in red, white, and blue, and, aside from a few hats and shirts, I had no way of knowing who among them voted for whom. That morning, nobody was arguing. Individual political choices and attitudes did not matter, for we were all listening to the same words.

That feeling I had listening to the Declaration of Independence aloud should not have felt so remarkable, but it did, and I want to name it here. As a professor of politics for almost two decades, one of the deepest problems I see in American life is not that we disagree — free people always disagree — but it is the fact that disagreement has become the only register in which we speak to one another.

Regrettably, we are fluent in the vocabulary of difference. Cable news, social media, campaign consultants, and, I regret to share, much of the academy are all organized to name what divides us, and they do it with seemingly tireless energy. Ask Americans what separates them from their neighbors, and they can answer immediately, but ask what they share, and you get a shrug, ignorance, and few answers.

Fortunately, the data have long told a different story than the shouting suggests. Twenty years ago, my colleagues and I made the case that America’s culture war was largely a myth — that the polarization filling our screens belonged to a political class, not to the public. The shouting has only grown louder since, but the basic finding holds: new national data show a polity that is not at war with itself but deeply estranged from the parties that claim to speak for it. Americans agree on far more than partisan platforms suggest.

We agree on the dignity of the individual, that legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed, and on the right to speak, express ourselves, and live our lives on our own terms. What has changed is not agreement on these ideas; it is the occasions for affirming them. We have not stopped sharing ideals; we have stopped saying them together, out loud, and in front of one another. We have become very good at proclaiming and parading our disagreements and much less practiced at declaring what binds us.

The consequences of failing to declare our shared ideals are becoming harder to ignore. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently found that 57% of American college students would choose to flee the country rather than stay and fight if the United States were invaded the way Ukraine has been. That number should stop us cold, but it should not surprise us. People defend what they love, and they love what they have been given the chance to know and to claim as their own. A generation that has heard America described only as a catalog of harms is drawing the reasonable conclusion from the only evidence it has been offered.

This is what gives the Declaration of Independence its enduring power. It is the rare American text that belongs to no party, to no faction. Its opening claims — that all are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, governed only by consent — are the inheritance of Left and Right alike, which is precisely why every reform movement in our history reached for ideas in the document. The Declaration is no party’s property and is the standard that the critics and the celebrants share. While our nation has occasionally failed to live up to the ideals of the Declaration, it does not change the fact that there is almost nothing else in our public life about which that can be said.

The answer is surprisingly simple: Create more occasions when Americans publicly affirm what they hold in common. This is hardly a new idea. Religious congregations have done it for centuries. Schools do it through opening ceremonies and convocations. The military does it. So do naturalization ceremonies for new citizens. In fact, for much of the 19th century, the Fourth of July served exactly that purpose nationwide. Communities regularly gathered to read the Declaration aloud in full, and then reflected on what it demanded of them. That practice gradually disappeared, and we should not be surprised that a people who rarely hear their founding creed spoken together have a harder time remembering what they share.

This fix is simple, and communities have to decide to step forward: Town centers, county fairs and community gatherings, ballparks before the first pitch, congregational gatherings, veterans’ posts, and state capitols could all host readings on the Fourth, on Constitution Day, or any day for that matter. Every word, grievances and all, read by many voices.

I realized that morning that the power of the Declaration is not the pageantry of the occasion, though that doesn’t hurt. What matters is the discovery that the person standing next to you — someone who votes differently, worships differently, and lives differently — is listening to the same words and receiving the same inheritance. This cannot be transmitted from a social media post or a livestream; it has to be experienced in person, shoulder to shoulder.

As my son and I drove home, exhausted but happy, we talked about what we had heard in the morning. He is still young and did not understand every sentence, but he understood enough. He understood the ideas of equality and a Creator. That was enough for one day.

ARE YOU A BAD CITIZEN?

We spend so much of our civic life talking about what divides us. We need to hear and regularly reaffirm what unites us too; for a nation that only names its harms will eventually forget its creed.

So, let’s read the Declaration aloud every year, for citizens do not defend a country they have never heard affirmed.