Imagine this:

You’re sitting on the porch, a flag hanging limp in the humid air. Someone down the block is lighting firecrackers. You’ve got a cold drink, and maybe—just maybe—a sliver of optimism about the country all our U.S. readers share.

And then you remember: Congress is still Congress –even though its again on recess.

Lately, we’ve been swapping excerpts from Ron Chernow’s colossal new biography of Mark Twain back and forth—quotes, anecdotes, the occasional eye-watering jab at the political class. A thousand-plus pages of Twain’s restless wit, his disgust for hypocrisy, and his strange, undying love for America—flawed, unfinished, and never as pure as we pretend.

If there’s ever been a patron saint of American skepticism, it’s Twain.

He once said:

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

You’d think he wrote that last week, not 150 years ago.

We talk a lot in fundraising circles about trust—about the crisis of faith in institutions, the vanishing credibility of appeals, the disbelief that any of us are telling the truth. It’s tempting to see this as a new problem. It’s not. Twain was watching the same parade of half-truth march by in his own day:

“If we want to know what the human race is really like, observe it at election time. That’s when the parade of half-truth goes marching by.”

But here’s something you might not know: Twain didn’t just snipe from the sidelines. He once campaigned for Republican presidents—Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield—back when the Republican Party was the more liberal party of abolition and reform. But in 1884, when the Republicans nominated James G. Blaine—a man Twain had long considered corrupt—he couldn’t stomach it.

He watched as the same Republican newspapers that had ridiculed Blaine for years turned on a dime and began praising him. Twain called it “the most amazing spectacle of hypocrisy.” So he broke ranks.

He joined a faction of reform-minded Republicans known as the Mugwumps—a word borrowed from Algonquin meaning “big chief.” The Mugwumps refused to support their party’s candidate, insisting that character mattered more than party loyalty. They endorsed Democrat Grover Cleveland instead.

Twain declared that he would never again be a “slave of one party or another.” He wrote:

“Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government when it deserves it.”

That same independent spirit is what makes him feel so contemporary—and so necessary.   When it comes to patriotism, he had no patience for flag-waving that was just cover for self-dealing:

“My country, right or wrong—when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.”

That’s the spirit we’d like to see more of on the Fourth of July. Not just fireworks and hot dogs, but the deeper, harder work of democracy: calling out nonsense, defending irreverence, standing up for decency even when it’s inconvenient.  Twain believed that irreverence was the surest defense of liberty:

“The devil’s dread of holy water is a light matter compared with the despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs.”

Which, for all of us in the business of persuasion and public trust, is a good reminder: if your work doesn’t sometimes make the powerful uncomfortable and the powerless stronger, you might be doing it wrong.

So here’s to the mugwumps—the independent-minded, the unbought and unbossed, the citizens who refuse to trade their conscience for a cheap seat on the bandwagon.

Twain, in his later years, called his trademark white suit his “I don’t give a damn suit.” The younguns today would say IDGAF suit.  Maybe this year, that’s the best uniform for a patriot.

Happy Independence Day.

Roger and Kevin