Many Americans are going through the motions, pretending all is well. On Saturday, they will again celebrate Independence Day with “Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other,” as John Adams predicted would happen 250 years ago upon the new country’s declaration of freedom from British rule.
And much is still going right on the 250th anniversary of what the nation’s first president, George Washington, called the “great experiment” of the United States of America. The country is still the dominant power on Earth. It enjoys a world-beating economy led by tech and financial sectors that continue to eclipse the rest of the planet, though they have also contributed mightily to the worst income inequality since the Gilded Age and a polarized population fed by social media-driven misinformation.
But there are much grimmer overtones to this year’s semiquincentennial. The United States feels less united than it has for many decades, perhaps since the Civil War. Some Americans wonder whether the nation’s cultural and civilizational ties are so strained—and its constitutional restraints so broken—that it won’t see many more big birthdays, at least not as a functioning constitutional republic.
