It would appear that our liberal friend Matthew Yglesias expressed “mixed feelings” over America’s birthday the other day. He says the U.S. is “awesome” but only wishes we could’ve held the empire together with Britain.

My sense every July 4 is that I could get more jazzed up about independence if it were more plausible for Americans to work ourselves up into a fury of anti-British sentiment. In the real world, however, America’s two closest allies are the former colonial power and the segments of British North America that didn’t join in our rebellion. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.

What am I missing here? He sees the Fourth of July as a Britain-bashing day and wishes the U.S. could’ve remained part of the British empire? It’s a great country but would’ve been, in his words, “awesomer” if it hadn’t become an independent country?

Several commenters make excellent points, such as this, er, profanity-laced one:

Um, no, not plausible at all. We’d still be a fucking colony, like DC.

If the colonies and Britain had remained one, the colonies would have become the crazy, infantile Id and Britain would have remained the legalistic, monarchical Ego that it was in the eighteenth century.

By separating, both societies became more balanced: the US was forced to grow up and in process created those most beautiful of documents, the Declaration and the Constitution.

Conversely, Britain was forced to loosen up, and the result was the Romantic movement: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and the rest.

To take that a step further, what would’ve been of France and other nations that looked towards the Declaration of Independence when crafting their future? I’m not following Yglesias’ logic, but that’s not exactly a new development, is it?