This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s birthday ought to be one of those rare occasions capable of rising above party politics. Americans disagree about almost everything else; surely they can agree to celebrate the country itself. Instead, even America’s birthday has become another casualty of polarization.
The Trump administration’s Freedom 250 celebrations have been practically boycotted by the Left as critics accuse the White House of transforming a once-in-a-generation civic anniversary into a partisan spectacle. Meanwhile, TikTokers moan into their iPhones about living in the “worst country ever” as this anniversary approaches, having never looked overseas to check in on how the North Koreans are getting on.
Where the blame lies in this culture clash not the point. The country simply no longer possesses many institutions that everyone instinctively feels belong to everyone.
Except, perhaps, one.
While politicians argue over who gets to define America, millions of Americans from left to right have been captivated by another national event altogether: Taylor Swift’s wedding, rumored to take place on the very same weekend.
It is easy to dismiss the frenzy surrounding America’s biggest pop star as celebrity obsession. But the sheer excitement surrounding her marriage shows that in an age when so much of public life feels fragmented, people are still drawn to one institution that transcends politics — the happy ending to a great American love story.
This happens just as marriage itself has become increasingly rare. Half a century ago, roughly seven in 10 American adults were married. Today, only about half are. For the first time in the nation’s history, fewer than half of American households are headed by married couples. Marriage has become increasingly concentrated among wealthier, better-educated Americans while declining sharply elsewhere.
That class-bound marriage inequality should concern us all, no matter our politics. Married men and women consistently report higher levels of life satisfaction than their unmarried peers. They are generally less likely to experience chronic loneliness, more likely to enjoy long-term financial stability and better health, and more likely to raise children who flourish educationally and economically. Of course, no statistic guarantees an individual’s future, and no marriage is immune from hardship, but the pattern is remarkably strong. The decline of marriage is impossible to separate from many of America’s other challenges.
Headlines frequently warn us about collapsing birth rates, an epidemic of loneliness, declining trust between the sexes, and widening inequality. These are often treated as separate crises requiring separate policy solutions, yet they all intersect with one of America’s saddest social revolutions: Fewer people are marrying, and fewer children are growing up with married parents.
For decades, popular culture encouraged a generation to believe that personal freedom and self-realization should come before permanent commitment. Marriage was something to postpone, or even eschew, while focusing on more individualistic ambitions.
Few people embodied that cultural moment more than Taylor Swift.
Swift abandoned dreams of Romeo-and-Juliet-style love to her teenage works, and her mid-career music (1989, Reputation) became the soundtrack for millennials navigating fierce feminist independence, ambition, heartbreak and self-discovery. She represented a generation told that careers and glamour and personal growth were life’s highest priorities. Relationships weren’t expected to last (“We are too busy dancing to get knocked off our feet,” she proclaims in “New Romantics”). But the heartbreak recounted in her “Tortured Poets Department” exposed the truth: Beneath the confident sheen of individualism, she was eventually angered by the men who never committed to her. (“You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for proof,” from “So Long, London” )
So her traditional wedding — literally, America’s sweetheart marrying the boy on the football team — carries cultural significance beyond celebrity gossip.
Of course, liberal-leaning Swift is hardly one to shout about traditional marriage values. But that’s what makes her story all the more compelling as it mirrors a broader generational shift. Millennial women who swore they didn’t need a man 10 years ago are no longer simply chasing a corner office or a strut down Fifth Avenue. Increasingly, they are finding the culture of hedonism wanting and looking for permanence: for homes, children, and lifelong commitments. The institution once portrayed as restrictive is becoming aspirational again.
Of course, celebrity comes with privileges that ordinary Americans do not enjoy. Finding a spouse generally becomes more difficult with age, particularly for women, and many people who delayed family life discover that reality too late. Our culture has often been reluctant to acknowledge those trade-offs honestly, preferring to assure young adults that every milestone can be postponed indefinitely without consequence.
Survey after survey finds that young Americans still hope to marry someday. They still dream of building families. They still long for the security of belonging completely to another person. The aspiration hasn’t been killed off; it just became shamefully hidden.
Trump is right about one thing: America needs renewal. But while governments can organize pomp and pageantry, it takes much more work to rebuild habits of trust, sacrifice, and mutual obligation that sustain a free society. The strongest nations are built around family dinner tables, in neighborhoods, in churches, in civic associations, and, above all, in marriages.
Perhaps that is why the country’s biggest cultural event this Independence Day is not another political rally or even a state fair. If America wants its next 250 years to be stronger than its last few decades, it won’t need fireworks, but more weddings.
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Lois McLatchie Miller (@loismclatch) is a writer and social commentator from Great Britain, focusing on the state of free speech, faith, and family across the globe.
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