US at 250

I’m not a huge celebrator of birthdays. The first birthday that felt significant for me was my 19th: my last teenage year. That felt like a milestone. Then 21, and after that, those birthdays divisible-by-five: 25, 30, 35, 40. After 40, I switched to divisible-by-10. In truth, I think any excuse for a little joy and the bringing together of friends is worthwhile, so by all means, enjoy every birthday you have.

Now that we are here at our nation’s 250th birthday, our Semi-quincentennial, joy seems to be elusive. Our last big national celebration was in 1976 – a divisible-by-50 birthday – the Bicentennial. I was in middle school and while I was not following economic stats just yet, everyone was generally aware of what was going on. Here are some of the specifics:

• The US economy was coming out of a brutal recession brought about by an energy crisis;
• Inflation was declining, but only after averaging more than 12% in 1974 and 7% in 1975;
• Auto manufacturing and major oil companies dominated the US economy, their stocks were some the strongest stocks on Wall Street;
• A peanut farmer from Georgia was challenging the incumbent for the presidency – that incumbent was the only president unelected to office, who transitioned into the top job after his predecessor resigned to avoid impeachment.
• The anticipation for Alex Haley’s book, Roots, was building over the summer. The book explored America’s early days, from the base of slavery on which the colonial economy was built through to modern times; six months after the Bicentennial the television series premiered, to unprecedentedly high ratings. Between 130 and 140 million Americans would tune in, about half the US TV viewing population at the time.
• By 1976, 35 of the 38 states needed had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

High inflation, energy issues, economic precarity, expanding the historical narrative, challenges to presidential authority. Sounds remarkably similar to our current circumstances.

And yet I remember the excitement leading up to July 4, 1976: Excited to be celebrating the nation’s birthday, to be collecting Bicentennial quarters, to be going to see a spectacular fireworks display. Americans were coming to terms with Watergate, managing through an energy crisis, unemployment, high interest rates and inflation, and yet, we found reasons to feel good about America at 200 years.

And today?

It may have helped that we had fewer news outlets 50 years ago, and fewer ways to share our angst. Today we’re told things are worse and we’re more divided than ever.

But is that right?

We know that the more you tell someone something, the more likely they will begin to believe it. The more we are told we are “more divided than ever” the easier that is to believe. It’s fair enough to say that at the extremes, there is vast disagreement. But in the wide middle?

Americans have always had differing views (that’s the point of democracy, after all). You could argue that our feelings about the direction of the country would not be as stark if we didn’t collectively care deeply about our country.

A recent poll says that the majority of our fellow citizens are proud to be American (65%). The same poll also says that 83% of us feel we have drifted from the original ideals of our Constitution. That’s true in part, and for good reason: we have brought Black men, First Nations peoples, and women – all left out by the Framers – into the fold. That’s a good and just “drift” from the original. We have amended those original ideals 27 times, most recently in 1992. It was never going to be easy to build consensus, and the Founding Fathers themselves did not agree on everything at the time. Even as they signed the Declaration of Independence, you have to believe that more than one of the Founders were crossing their fingers as they did.

Democracy isn’t a passive endeavor. One of the reasons I think we are collectively so unhappy at this time is based in fear and uncertainty, and it’s hard to take action under those circumstances. The future, and the unrelenting pace of change, is freaking us out. It’s easy to complain about what we don’t like. It’s harder to be clear about what we want instead, and particularly when there are so many alternatives.

It was the same in the beginning. Benjamin Franklin famously expressed his doubts about this new type of government that had been adopted in 1787 in Philadelphia: a republic would replace a monarchy, “if you can keep it.” At the time, no one unanimously agreed on anything, yet most agreed on the foundations.

Today I think these foundational elements look like this:

• We invest in Americans, meaning in their health and well-being. Preventative medicine, through universal basic health care. The investment reaps rewards in better health outcomes, higher productivity, lower absenteeism, and the long-term decline in the need for long-term care from chronic disease.
• We invest in making participation in the American economy easier. Affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, new savings vehicles that would allow us to invest in ourselves, to finance our retraining as the way we work continues to evolve. More people in the economy means greater economic growth.
• We invest in our national infrastructure. Repairing our bridges, building resilient housing, building out our new energy system, repairing the social fabric that encourages neighbors to look out for and help one another. Everyone benefits from this investment.
• We challenge business models built on theft and sub-living wages. This includes the AI ecosystem, built on stolen materials from authors, libraries, and YOU; paying for use of this material needs to be built into the regulation of this new technology. You own your data, your creations, your ideas — and you decide who uses them and how.

The promise of America isn’t a guarantee. While a democracy puts decision-making in each citizen’s hands, most early democracies, from ancient Athens to the newly independent United States of America, were also highly limited in who could participate. The smaller, more exclusive and more similar the group making the decisions is, the easier it likely is to find consensus. Easier, but not better.

I’m not going to gloss over the massive setbacks our country has experienced over recent years, in science funding, in domestic investment, in a staggering and growing deficit, and in the decline of social norms. But these should not be the thoughts for today.

For today, our messy democracy, such that it is, still stands. It might be wobbly, but we are still here. We have many to thank for this: from motley crews of citizens showing up to exercise their rights; to small, specific groups like that of ex-NOAA employees who have recreated the data site needed to continue to track climate change [1] ; to countless members of the legal community, from judges, law clerks and lawyers who poured over volumes of legal filings to sort out and rule on so many challenges to our institutions and laws, to law firms who stood their ground against unconstitutional action by the government [2], and defended others in doing the same.

For today, celebrate the “American Experiment” making it to 250. Many never thought that would happen. So enjoy the weekend, celebrate by saying whatever you think about the state of the nation out loud, and have a good time. Next week we’ll need to get back to work on what we want democracy to look like over the next 250 years.

Happy Independence Day.

[1] Ex-NOAA employees re-create a valuable climate data site shut down by Trump, NPR, 26 June 2026; retrieved 04 July 2026.

[2] A constitutional law professor once corrected me on the famous quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2: “First, let’s kill all the lawyers.” As Judge Beryl Howell explains in her ruling in Perkins Coie v. Department of Justice after noting the context of the quote in the play’s dialogue, the quote is a warning: “Eliminating lawyers as guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power.”