Is this the worst 4th since Rizzo ruined the Bicentennial?

I wasn't in Philly yet for the notorious Bicentennial non-celebration in 1976. A teenager then, I had only a vague understanding then that a beyond-Nixon paranoid Mayor Frank Rizzo had warned citizens that the Manson Family was planning to spike the Schuylkill River with LSD or some such thing. Everybody here stayed home (or so legend has it), and New York -- with its tall ships and fireworks back in the day when people still actually liked fireworks -- stole the day from Philadelphia. Again. Like DiMaggio in Game 2 of the '50 World Series all over again. It's hard to imagine how July 4 could be such a bummer, man.

At least it was...before today.

Oh sure, I saw lots of shiny happy people -- tiny American flags jutting from their heads, somehow -- on the Market-Frankford El, oblivious to the dark storm clouds billowing in from the Heartland. They were probably so joyful because they'd been too busy adorning themselves in red, white and blue this morning to check out the vast wasteland of the internet. Because in cyberspace, America was getting a whupping for its 240th birthday of the kind it hadn't received since the days when "The Cisco Kid" finally laid down his nightstick. Welcome America...to the land of the slave and the home of the Japanese interment camps. At least according to social media.

For much of the gloomy holiday, the hashtag #AmericaIsNotGreat was a trending topic on Twitter. (In rebuttal, one user replied, perhaps facetiously: "No country on Earth has a history free from genocide, war crimes, or enslavement. Get over it"...something to hang your red-white-and-blue beer-can hat on, right?) The nerdy, contrarian website Vox headlined a piece: "3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake" (such as, slavery ending a lot sooner under Great Britain than the 1860s"); the tonier New York Times had roughly the same idea as it published, "Did Fear of a Slave Revolt Drive American Independence?" In movie theaters this weekend, the lone slice of U.S. history -- The Free State of Jones -- treats the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation not so much as the climactic liberation but as the prelude to even worse terror, the night riders of Reconstruction's Ku Klux Klan.

Many online users took the holiday as an occasion to recycle the famous July 4 address in 1852 by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said (among other things): "To (the slave), your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

Ouch.

Yet the modern joys of July 4 also offered no escape. Another Twitter user said, "Food eating contests in a world with so much hunger is disgusting." Oh, and the news on fireworks can be pretty grim, too.

Look, on the issue of American exceptionalism,  I've always been in the camp of what I would call Sorkinism: That America isn't the greatest nation on earth -- but it could be. Even if the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were too often about protecting the property rights, etc., of well-off white males, the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- free speech and a free press, freedom of assembly and worship (and who can forget our "well-regulated militia"?) -- gave the United States a leg up on the rest of the world. Over 240 years, we've made good on some of that promise...and squandered some of it as well. But July 4 is a great day to remember the best of what we've been -- and what we can still be.

It's just that the unfortunate events of 2016 had made that kind of optimism so damn hard. It's easy to blame Donald Trump, but...yeah, let's give him some of the blame. The Pandora's box of racism and xenophobia that The Donald opened up to pander his way to the GOP presidential nomination -- attacking Hillary Clinton with a Star of David on a sea of money that was lifted from a white supremacist website is just the latest in a never-ending bread-and-salad-bar of outrages -- has stirred up a storm of anger and resentment that's engulfed just about everybody. Is it any wonder that by Summer of Trump II ("Just when you thought it was safe..."), everyone is putting the worst possible spin on American History 101.

Meanwhile, the shocking vote in Great Britain to leave the European Union is getting lumped with Trump's odyssey as the vanguard of a global revolt of the abused middle classes, the folks (predominantly white) who've lost out as the so-called Industrialized West became industrialized no more, thanks to globalization, automation, and a bunch of other -ations. That's a simplistic analysis, but it's also a mostly correct one.

So you'll be shocked to learn that an elite class of intellectuals  -- having correctly diagnosed what's caused the malaise of modern society -- has come up with a cure that's sort of a 21st Century version of treating the patient with leeches. They think America's problem is not the elites of the 1 Percent sucking the other 99 percent dry. No, it's that there's TOO MUCH democracy. When leaders picked their candidates in smoke-filled rooms and not in these primaries where the hoi polloi can vote, that's when we picked sane moderates and not a madman like Donald Trump.

"These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population," the journalist Matt Taibi wrote in Rolling Stone recently. "Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending."

I couldn't agree more. Every day we see how global elites enrich themselves and wall themselves off from the rest of the worst. Just today, the New York Times looked at how municipal zoning codes -- meant to make urban and suburban communities more attractive and inviting -- have instead priced out the middle class from any community with good jobs. Look at how the wonderful "sharing economy" has created a handful of new billionaires, while putting thousands of working-class hotel cleaners and taxi drivers out of work. I could go on, but you get the picture.

On July 4, it's important to remember that America's bad year, not to mention the bad things in our past, won't get any better by taking democratic power from the masses. It will only get better when we have real democracy. When your single vote means as much as billionaire campaign donors like Sheldon Adelson or Marc Lasry. When we get rid of gerrymandering and get some real representatives in Congress. And when we make the Voting Rights Act better instead of gutting it. Trump's vote total in the primaries was nearly matched by millions of Americans who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders and new way forward on things like a living wage and affordable college for the middle class. It's a people's revolution that's just getting started -- a way forward that rejects racism, xenophobia, AND elitism.

Is this the worst July 4 since Rizzo ruined Philly's Bicentennial? It doesn't have to be. Not if July 4, 2016, goes down as the Independence Day that we turned things around and started living up to the dream.