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As we prepare for Trump's attempt to turn the 4th of July into a spectacle of personal aggrandizement, I found myself remembering my own best 4th – the one that made me really proud of my country and what it stood for 1/
I spent the summer of 1976, midway through grad school, as part of an MIT team working at the Bank of Portugal. (That's me on the right of this blurry photo) 2/ 
Things were a bit chaotic in Portugal after the fall of the fascist regime, but stabilizing – and it was clear that the fledgling democracy was going to survive, thanks in part to help from civil society groups like German trade unions 3/
So the US embassy threw a 4th of July picnic, but there really weren't many Americans around, so it became a sort of omnibus event for Western democracies in general – Germans, French, Brits, etc. eating hot dogs and listening to a message from Gerald Ford 4/
We were still in a post-Vietnam funk, not to mention with memories of Watergate still fresh. But then and there, it was overwhelmingly clear that America was the leader of the good guys; we were genuinely celebrating freedom, ours and others 5/
That – not tanks or boasting about our power – is what the 4th is supposed to be about 6/
