America at 250: A birthday divided
As US prepares to celebrate 250th anniversary of independence, excitement is absent due to polarization and competing versions of patriotism
WASHINGTON (MNTV) – Fifty years ago, America celebrated its 200th birthday with unmatched enthusiasm.
Streets were draped in red, white and blue. More than 200 tall ships from around the world sailed into New York Harbor. President Gerald Ford presided over national celebrations while nearly half a million people lined Constitution Avenue to watch the Bicentennial parade.
Schools spent months preparing projects, neighborhoods painted mailboxes and fire hydrants in patriotic colors, and families collected commemorative coins and stamps. A wave of optimism swept the country despite the lingering scars of Vietnam and Watergate.
This Independence Day, America turns 250. But instead of a nationwide celebration marked by unity, the quarter-millennium anniversary arrives in a country consumed by political polarization, culture wars, and declining faith in its institutions.
Fireworks will still illuminate the skies. The shared excitement that defined 1976 has not followed them.
“The very idea of celebrating has become political and partisan,” says historian Beverly Gage. “What is striking about our moment is how widespread the pessimism seems to be.”
According to a Reuters/Ipsos survey, one in five Americans say they do not intend to celebrate Independence Day this year. Nearly two in five doubt the country will survive another 250 years in its present form.
Those who experienced the Bicentennial recall it with affection. Retired Pennsylvania teacher Betsy Halsey still keeps memorabilia from her childhood, recalling how schools and neighborhoods embraced the anniversary months before July 4 arrived.
Historian Frank Cogliano, who remembers those celebrations, says the country was hardly free from turmoil. “I remember 1976, and the country felt like it was in crisis,” he said.
“But while there was political polarization, we did not see anything like the kind of polarization we’re seeing today.”
The Bicentennial became an exercise in national healing. Ford deliberately kept himself in the background, presenting the anniversary as belonging to the American people rather than to any political party.
The Smithsonian opened the National Air and Space Museum.
Operation Sail brought an armada of international tall ships into New York Harbor. Communities from coast to coast staged reenactments, concerts, festivals and historical exhibitions.
Historian Tammy Gordon, author of The Spirit of 1976, argues the Bicentennial succeeded because it became a grassroots civic celebration rather than a partisan project.
Two celebrations, two Americas
The 250th anniversary tells a different story. Rather than one coordinated national celebration, Americans are witnessing two competing commemorations.
Congress established the bipartisan America250 Commission in 2016 to organize nationwide events.
After returning to office, President Donald Trump created the White House-backed Freedom 250 initiative, producing two parallel organizations that often ignore one another while promoting different visions of America’s birthday.
Trump has placed himself at the center of many official festivities, including the Great American State Fair, patriotic rallies and Fourth of July events in Washington.
Some musicians withdrew from scheduled performances, fearing the celebrations had become overly political.
The bipartisan America250 Commission has focused on community block parties, cultural programs and a 900-pound time capsule buried in Philadelphia to be opened in 2276.
The competing events have become symbolic of a struggle over who gets to define American patriotism. For much of modern American history, displaying the flag or celebrating Independence Day rarely divided Democrats and Republicans.
That consensus has weakened. Questions about race, immigration, religion, policing, education and the teaching of history have become intertwined with debates over national identity. Battles over monuments, school textbooks and the legacy of slavery have turned America’s founding into a political battlefield.
Republic the founders would not recognize
The argument reaches into the country’s constitutional foundations. Many who monitor federal power argue that the United States today is unrecognizable from the republic its founders designed.
James Madison constructed the federal government as a three-sided structure: the House of Representatives for the people, the Senate for the sovereign states, and the presidency for the nation-state.
Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures, not elected by popular vote — a safeguard against unchecked democracy that Woodrow Wilson dismantled through constitutional amendment.
Madison warned in his Bank Speech of 1791 that expanding federal authority beyond what the Constitution explicitly granted would trample the powers of the states and the natural rights of the people.
Thomas Jefferson warned that when the federal treasury becomes a trough, the people will send to Washington only politicians who promise to bring home the most cash. Today the federal government employs close to three million people.
The states, which were meant to serve as laboratories of liberty offering citizens different regulatory and tax environments, have seen their sovereignty steadily absorbed.
Congress routinely bribes states with borrowed or Federal Reserve-created money to regulate areas beyond its constitutional competence — lowering speed limits, setting blood alcohol thresholds — all in exchange for highway funding. The states take whatever cash Congress offers and accept the strings attached.
The loyalist preacher Mather Byles posed the question to a Boston crowd in 1775: does it really matter whether the instrument curtailing liberty is a monarch or a popularly elected legislature?
In a democracy, a faithless majority can take whatever it wants from the minority, including its liberty and property. Reagan reminded Americans in his first inaugural that the states formed the federal government, not the other way around — and that citizens could vote with their feet. But the more state governance is federalized, the fewer meaningful differences remain.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore says quieter commemorations outside Washington reflect a growing discomfort with politicizing the nation’s history. David Blight says he finds little to celebrate.
“I don’t feel celebratory at all,” Blight said, criticizing what he described as highly personalized anniversary events that differ sharply from the national spirit of 1976.
In 1976, despite inflation, Watergate and Vietnam, Americans largely believed their democracy would recover. Today, that confidence has eroded.
Recent surveys show historically low trust in Congress, political parties, the media and other institutions. Many younger Americans are less convinced than previous generations that they will enjoy better opportunities than their parents.
For many conservatives, the anniversary is an opportunity to celebrate liberty, constitutional government and American exceptionalism.
Progressives argue that any honest commemoration must also acknowledge slavery, Indigenous dispossession, racial inequality and the exclusion of women and minorities from early political life.
Cogliano says similar debates existed during the Bicentennial, but never reached today’s intensity.
Country of contradictions
And yet the United States of America remains, as it has always been, an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers.
It is 340 million people, including almost two million prisoners. It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis.
It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill. It is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP. It is Chevron and the Sierra Club. It is its contradictions and its conflicts.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants.
The United States before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists. It is the land itself, from the maple and birch forests of the northeast to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, land that was here in various configurations for billions of years before 1776 and will be here long after the republic has ceased to exist.
One thing about this country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country within a couple of decades, and there is nothing the white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, young Americans kept stepping into the spotlight — Renee Good, shot at 37 while standing up for what she believed in; Zohran Mamdani, who at 34 became the first Muslim mayor of the country’s largest city; Bad Bunny, who took the Super Bowl stage and staged a celebration in Spanish of Puerto Rico and a generous, multilingual vision of America; Alysa Liu, daughter of a Chinese refugee, who won Olympic figure-skating gold with a performance of stunning freedom.
These were not typical Americans. But like the eight million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on March 28 — unprecedented in size, present in every congressional district — they were Americans.
The unfinished work
As Gage notes, moments of crisis have occurred before, but the current pessimism feels unusually broad.
“One thing I’m very aware of is how poor people are at judging their own historical moment,” she says.
“The story of some of the deepest moments of crisis in America was followed by moments of deepest change.”
The 250th anniversary was always expected to be more than another Independence Day. Instead, it has become a mirror reflecting America’s deepest political and cultural divisions — and, perhaps, a reminder that the nation has always been less a settled fact than an unfinished argument.
Abraham Lincoln said it at Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is in one sense an ideal never yet realized, in the other a moral north toward which this country at its best has been pointing for 250 years.
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