Day: July 2, 2026

As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, many people in the U.S. are deeply concerned about the country’s future.

A recent poll by Elon University found that 69% of respondents “believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would feel more disappointment than pride about modern American democracy.” Confidence in public institutions is historically low, and the most recent Harvard Youth Poll indicates that just a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel hopeful about the future of America.”

Many are also afraid. For the 10th consecutive year, Americans reported corrupt government officials to be their single greatest fear, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, ranking above financial collapse or a loved one becoming seriously ill.

“Americans have come to see threats as not just the possibility of attack by a foreign adversary. The potential for political violence at home is part of it, along with polarization, corruption and a sense of cultural dysfunction,” pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in The New York Times. “Americans increasingly view the survival of the country as being at stake.”

How are people in the U.S. to make sense of these trends? As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, how faithful is the U.S. today to its founding principles? I’m a political philosophy scholar who studies constitutional government. In my view, an especially helpful approach to answering such questions is to revisit the towering but neglected influence of the French philosopher Montesquieu on the founding of this country.

Montesquieu and the American founding

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was an 18th-century philosopher and aristocrat whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” caused a sensation when published in 1748. His ideas shaped the American founders. At the Constitutional Convention, only the Bible was quoted more often.

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

Montesquieu was especially celebrated for his account of how and why political power needs to be separated into branches. But behind this now familiar idea was another that is less remembered: Montesquieu’s theory of liberty inspired the founders’ own understandings of this core concept of American politics.

A theory of liberty

In “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu describes political liberty as a “tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.” To be free is to believe that one is secure. But to believe as much, “it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.”

Liberty cannot be a matter of “doing what one wants,” Montesquieu warns. What if what one person wants threatens others? Then one person’s freedom to act limits everyone else’s. No one can feel secure unless everyone lives under laws that regulate what each may do. Montesquieu understood liberty in terms of this confidence or “tranquility” because it amounts to being free from the arbitrary will of others.

When Montesquieu stresses freedom from fear of other citizens, he doesn’t just mean private individuals. He especially means those acting in a public capacity, like “magistrates” or “rulers.” If public officials’ behavior doesn’t conform to predictable norms set by law, if agents of the government can summarily arrest people, seize their property or revoke their citizenship – say, by denaturalizing and deporting them without due process – it becomes impossible to feel secure.

Even if such actions aren’t directed against me or those like me, such lawlessness is still threatening because it’s unpredictable. I might support the government’s moves against other groups in the moment, but what’s to stop the government from suddenly turning on me when the political winds change?

To prevent public officials from simply doing what they want, Montesquieu famously called for the separation of political power into branches headed by different citizens.

But, he explains, it is not enough that people live under free institutions. They must also believe those institutions to be in the service of their freedom. Liberty, then, is as much a matter of opinion as of fact.

The tyranny of opinion

Montesquieu shows in “The Spirit of the Laws” how the fundamental laws of a country can permit a free way of life even as the country’s cultural norms prevent it. A country might have a free constitution while its citizens believe they hold moral obligations inconsistent with it.

For example, today, Americans might believe that the demands of racial equity or of evangelical Christianity are so pressing that executive power would be justified in ignoring the legislature or the judiciary to serve them.

“In these instances,” Montesquieu writes, “the Constitution will be free by right and not in fact.” The people – or some of them – will experience the law as a hindrance to what they believe they ought or ought not to do.

In such cases, there arises what Montesquieu calls a tyranny “of opinion.” The laws that would otherwise free people from fear of one another and of the government instead inspire a fear all their own. The laws might prevent what some people believe is morally right, or command – in the name of protecting others’ rights or the common good – what others regard as unjust or unholy.

That misalignment between constitutional law and cultural norms makes people feel insecure. It makes the Constitution seem opposed to their will and sense of duty. It can then seem appealing for a leader to promise, in the name of freedom, to ignore the law.

A bracing reminder

In recent years, figures across the political spectrum have called for radical constitutional change – or for ignoring the Constitution outright. There are calls not only to pack the Supreme Court or to ignore its decisions, but also to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College.

From Montesquieu’s perspective, polarization worsens this appetite for disregarding constitutional norms. Each party champions a cultural agenda from which supporters of the other party recoil. Whenever either party is in office, even when it respects constitutional law, its rule can feel to the other side much like the tyranny of opinion Montesquieu describes. The other side’s policies can seem to violate deeply held values, whether it’s banning transgender girls from competing in girls sports or declining to deport immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally.

According to Montesquieu, liberty depends on the kind of civic culture the U.S. seems at risk of losing. No institutions, however well designed, can preserve liberty if citizens believe their preferred cultural norms are so obligatory that political power is needed to enforce them, opposition be damned.

A culture more tolerant of moral disagreements and less quick to reach for political power to force others to accept what they find morally wrong would help ease the distrust many Americans feel toward the government and one another. Until then, Americans will continue drifting away from the liberty that the U.S. was founded to secure.

Robert A. Ballingall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Let’s say you drive over a pothole in front of your house in Denver and call the city. They come fix it within a few days. Problem solved.

Now let’s say the problem is the sidewalk in front of your house. You call the city again.

Until recently, city staff would have pointed you to their “Homeowner’s Do-It Yourself Guide for Hazardous Sidewalks,” where it clearly states that “sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.” This online document then suggests that if you need to remove a tripping hazard from your sidewalk, you could rent a “Masonry Rotary Grinder” from your local rental center.

Be sure to also get yourself some eye protection.

In most U.S. cities, a pothole is treated as a public problem, but a broken sidewalk – even one that blocks access – is treated as the homeowner’s problem.

It is not this way everywhere. In some older U.S. cities such as Boston and Washington, sidewalks have long been a public responsibility – the same as streets, water lines and sewers. But cities that grew up in a different era – or cities eager to offload maintenance and legal responsibility – treated sidewalks not as fundamental infrastructure but as an amenity tied to adjacent property.

More than three-quarters of the 30 most-populous U.S. cities take that same approach.

But not Denver – at least, not anymore. In 2022, the city changed its rules, not because city leaders suddenly changed course, but because advocates such as Jill Locantore and the Denver Streets Partnership got tired of waiting, organized and took the issue to the ballot. Denver allows citizens to initiate legislation, and the measure won handily, making sidewalks a public responsibility.

Denver’s sidewalk data

Denver ended up with a citywide sidewalk program funded through a fee on property owners, typically $150 per household per year, and managed by the city. Instead of trying to get individual homeowners to fix bad sidewalks one segment at a time, Denver now has a system – and funding it can bond against – to repair, build and maintain sidewalks as a connected public network.

Los Angeles underscores the contradiction. The law there still says adjacent property owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance; yet, the city also runs a public repair program for larger sidewalk projects after years of ADA litigation made clear that this is not just a private matter.

But most cities don’t even know which sidewalks need fixing.

When I first took my job at the University of Colorado Denver in 2009, I taught an Introduction to GIS course, where students learned how to use digital maps to understand real-world problems. In prepping for that class, I dug into the city’s data and came away impressed by the fact that they had a sidewalk layer, basically a digital map of the city’s sidewalks. However, unlike nearly every other GIS dataset the city provided, the sidewalk one hadn’t been updated since 2004. The logic seemed to be that not seeing the problem protects you from liability. But sticking your head in the sand is not much of a long-term strategy.

Sidewalk safety, a tale of two cities

There is no such hesitancy with cities collecting roadway data. In one study, my colleagues and I interviewed staff from 16 U.S. cities about the information they track on their roads. One city told us that they had “no gaps in data and don’t need anything else.” Most others likely would’ve agreed with that sentiment.

We then asked the same questions about their sidewalk data. The tone of the responses shifted quickly. Audible frustration and an early disclaimer of “it’s complicated” were common. They told us that sidewalks just weren’t given the same priority as roads.

Why would they be? Or better yet, why should they be?

One reason is road safety.

Hoboken, New Jersey, has become the U.S. poster child for safe streets. Experts point to the success of interventions like curb extensions, high-visibility crosswalks, protected bike lanes and lowering the citywide speed limit.

But before all of that, Hoboken undertook a systematic effort to catalog its sidewalks and their condition. The city runs an annual sidewalk inspection program where trained volunteers walk the sidewalks and record problems. Hoboken also developed a smartphone app so the inventory could be digitized instantly, including not just sidewalk defects but also things like burned-out pedestrian lights and damaged pedestrian signals.

Hoboken remains one of the many cities that put the onus to fix sidewalks onto adjacent property owners. But you can probably get away with that when your nickname is the “Mile Square City” and your median income is more than twice the national average.

But nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality? In a city of nearly 60,000 residents and a daytime population of over 90,000? Hoboken must be doing something right, and focusing on sidewalks first may be part of it.

Springfield, Ohio, also has nearly 60,000 residents. Yet the city suffered more than 50 road fatalities over the past nine years. The list of contributing factors is long, but sidewalks matter.

In fact, in Springfield’s 2024 community survey, residents cited the condition of sidewalks and streets as the city’s worst problem. Over 90% of residents said they were dissatisfied with them.

To its credit, Springfield is looking to fix its sidewalks. And to be fair, doing so is much harder when your city is spread across 26 square miles (67 square kilometers) of land instead of one.

But giving property owners just 30 days to fix their own sidewalks? And adding the repair costs to their property tax bill if they don’t? There has to be a better way. I’m guessing that the residents along the 22 streets that recently received such notices would agree.

I live in Denver. The sidewalk in front of my house had some lips and dips that could’ve compelled me to rent heavy equipment and get to work. But the city came out and replaced it. Without my even asking.

So if you want to take a lesson from Denver, making sidewalks a public responsibility is possible. It can even be popular. And if you want to take a lesson from Hoboken and make your city safer, start with the humble sidewalk. Figure out where they are, and where they are not. Where they need to be repaired, and where they need to be replaced.

In other words, sidewalks come first.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Wes Marshall, PhD, PE, receives funding from entities such as the Colorado Department of Transportation and the University Transportation Center program.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation