We’ve Given You a Democracy, If You Can Keep It: What the 250th anniversary asks of the work we do for families

Each summer the Fourth of July sneaks up on us — fireworks, flags, cookouts on top of something much larger and older we keep circling back to whether we mean to or not. This year that something is sharper. Two hundred and fifty years. Not a distant milestone anymore. Right there in front of us.

Looking ahead to 2026, I keep landing back in 1976. The bicentennial. I was a kid then, and what I remember most isn’t the parades. It’s the sense that everybody was tuned into the same moment at the same time. That feels remote now. The tone is sharper, the edges are louder, and the institutional patience for compromise has thinned at every level — public discourse, marriages, family wealth transfers, partnership agreements. The same dynamic shows up at every scale.

When you zoom out far enough, something does shift. The United States is young. About 60 years of its 250 has happened inside my own life — roughly a fifth of the whole arc. That alone is worth holding onto. The country and the household and the law firm and the advisory practice are all closer to their founding than to whatever the long historical view will eventually say about them. We’re early.

The founders knew the system was fragile. They studied history. They understood the gravity that pulls a republic toward chaos on one side and toward total control on the other, and they wrote the architecture knowing humans would have to figure out coexistence in practice, not just in theory. Their insight wasn’t optimistic. It was diagnostic. Balance is unstable by default. The work is what keeps it standing. This tension was reflected in Ben Franklin’s pointed statement when asked what type of government was delivered: “We’ve Given You a Democracy, If You Can Keep It.”

That’s the part I want to sit with this month, because it’s the same work we do.

Almost every household we serve is its own version of the founders’ problem. The wealth has to outlive the earners. The plan has to keep functioning when the people who built it are gone. The trust has to govern relationships among heirs who didn’t draft it. The business has to survive a transition the founder won’t be there to manage. Different scale, same architecture — explicit choice, documented intent, sustained attention, and stewardship for people we may never meet. Sound familiar?

The plans that hold together across three generations don’t hold because the documents were clever. They hold because someone — usually one of us — built coexistence into them on purpose. The trust language anticipated the disagreement that wasn’t yet visible. The buy-sell agreement priced the exit no one wanted to think about. The succession plan named who decides when the founder no longer can. The estate plan didn’t assume harmony; it made room for the absence of it.

The plans that fail across three generations fail for the same reason republics struggle. Someone assumed the balance would hold itself.

Ben Franklin’s line still hangs over the whole thing. A Democracy, if you can keep it. That sentence isn’t historical. It’s operational. Keeping it depends on the choices a country makes every day about whether to divide or to coexist — and, scaled down to the households on our case lists, on the choices a family makes about whether to write down the hard parts now or leave them for the next generation to inherit unwritten. Most of the failures we see at second and third generations aren’t financial failures. They’re stewardship failures masquerading as financial ones.

That’s where our work earns its keep. The estate plan, the financial plan, the trust structure, the integrated household architecture — these are the household-scale versions of the founders’ design problem. They are the documents the next generation reads as instructions for how to keep what was built. They either embed coexistence into the structure or they don’t.

Looking ahead, the families we are writing plans for this month will hand off through the 300th, and some of them through the 350th. The kids being born into the trusts we are drafting now won’t meet most of us. The structure has to carry, regardless. That’s the standard, and it’s not theoretical — it’s the actual job description.

Two hundred and fifty years in, the question the founders left us with is the same question every client asks us, even when they ask it differently. Can what I’ve built actually last?

Our answer, on both scales, is the same. Yes — but only if we keep it on purpose.