America at 250: Are We Really That Special?

I was out of the country on July 4, 2026, the day the United States officially commemorated its 250th birthday.  In the weeks leading up to the 4th, I felt a little disappointed about this.  I was born a year after the 1976 bicentennial and would be nearly 99 years old if I survive long enough for the tricentennial, so this month would likely be the closest I'll get to inaugurating a benchmark national birthday.  Still, I always got the sense that national polarization, cynicism, and apathy was gonna snuff out any sense of collective patriotic enthusiasm for this 250th birthday, so I didn't sense I would be missing anything iconic in the way that I would have if I'd fled the continent on July 4, 1976.

It sure seems as though I made the right call.  Between the intense heat canceling events, poorly timed thunderstorms disrupting timelines for fireworks shows across the country, and Donald Trump doing his thing and making the festivities all about himself, the postmortem on the nation's 250th birthday is that it was a bit of a bust.  Everybody I've talked to across the political spectrum said it felt no more electric than a typically July 4, if not a bit less so.

As I said, I wasn't yet alive for the 1976 bicentennial, but the secondhand accounts I've come across point strongly in the direction of it being a momentous national gathering above and beyond the traditional July 4 festivities.  This seems particularly impressive when recalling that 1976 was only a few years removed from the massively divisive Vietnam War and a couple of years removed from the demoralizing resignation and near-impeachment of Richard Nixon.  Add in high inflation, high interest rates, soaring crime rates, and rising unemployment, and Americans had a lot of reasons to be in a bad mood in July 1976,  And yet every indication is that they came together for a national event and didn't let politics get in the way of it.

I suppose I should feel a sense of disappointment that the country couldn't find its pulse heading into an iconic birthday, but I can't say that I do.  I've never been a particularly patriotic person.  While I don't begrudge those who are patriotic from proudly showing off their colors to some degree, there's a cult of narrative that can easily grow out of blind patriotism that I don't think is healthy.  There's gotta be a respectable middle ground between systemically denigrating our national history for imperfections in our past, as is often done in contemporary institutions of higher education, and stifling dissent from engagement in idiotic wars based on "supporting the troops" or circling the flag.  We can never consistently find that middle ground though, and tribal politics stands poised to make it worse.

Does that mean Americans were right to largely sit this national celebration out to the shocking degree that they did? A fairly good case can be made that we should be more focused on reflection than celebration this July.  And it may be a cliche to lead with this, but President Donald J. Trump stands alone at the top of the list on why this republic has less reason to celebrate itself than nearly any other time in its 250 years.  For as much credit as is rightfully given to our founding fathers for putting together a thoughtful constitutional framework, it isn't exactly working as the bulwark against corruption and authoritarianism that we were always assured it would.

At the doorstep of our 250th birthday, it was revealed that the Trump family grifted fully $2.2 billion in 2025 by directly turning the White House into an ATM machine for personal gain.  The founding fathers had anticipated that a con man, career criminal, and/or populist huckster could at one point attain office, but we were told the other branches of government would effectively counter that poison with the needed medicine to redeem the republic in good faith.  It hasn't worked that way because tribalism has led the legislative branch to defer its responsibilities to the executive branch en masse while the judicial branch has, for the most part, run interference for the executive branch in truly astonishing ways.

The result:  A President leads an insurrection to have an agitated mob of his own supporters attempt to execute his own Vice-President, an insufficiently onerous threshold is not crossed in the legislative branch to oust said insurrectionist President through a broken impeachment process, and the judicial branch carves out an exemption for all future Presidential criminal prosecution just in time for the insurrectionist and career criminal to begin his second term.  It's not a formula for a country whose government is healthy enough to have its national birthday celebrated with any kind of earned legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the corrupted judicial branch's unfitness was reinforced only days before the nation's 250th birthday.  I've always thought the concept of birthright citizenship was highly questionable and probably something the founding fathers got wrong when they put into the constitution.  With that said, the language is very clearly and unambiguously in the U.S. Constitution.  Any attempt to change that needed to be done through legislative process.  The Trump administration's efforts to weaponize the Supreme Court to circumvent birthright citizenship would have constituted a historically unprecedented threshold of judicial activism and triggered the clearest constitutional crisis in my lifetime.

Nonetheless, less than two weeks ago, three of nine Supreme Court justices did just that.  Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, who long bemoaned the Blackmun Court for inventing a constitutional right to abortion in the 1970s, not only invented a prohibition to birthright citizenship in the 2020s, they ignored existing language explicitly granting birthright citizenship.  If there's any precedent for judicial activism this overt, I'm not aware of it. Fully one-third of the United States Supreme Court ignored direct constitutional language over something they personally didn't like, prepared to remove the legislative branch's role in amending that language entirely.  One-third of the Supreme Court wasn't enough to get the job done, but the close call reinforces how close we are to not only having a dysfunctional government 250 years into our national experiment, but having no constitution at all.

And as is usually the case when poison is injected into the national nervous system, everybody gets sick.  The normalization of Trump's thuggery has primarily transformed the flag-waving masses of the political right into something no longer recognizable, but last week's Graham Platner embarrassment was a good reminder that when one side makes excuses for bad people, the other side is gonna surrender its aspirations for decency as well.  In no way am I putting Graham Platner or his supporters on even footing with Trump and his supporters, but the left's refusal to disavow the unfit Platner earlier than was absolutely necessary was a black eye for their judgment and, worse yet, a sign that they'll make excuses every step of the way for their own version of Trump if, or more likely when, he arises.  That's the price of tribalism, and it's a price no healthy republic can sustain.

Of course, the easy part is to criticize your own neighborhood but the harder part is identifying how your neighborhood compares with everybody else's.  In other words, is anyplace on the globe better than the U.S.?  That's a tougher call having never lived anywhere but here and only having spent a substantial amount of time in a couple of other places.  There's no doubt that most people who tried living abroad would be able to relatively quickly compile a list of pros and cons of what makes life in America better or worse than elsewhere on the globe, and it would almost certainly be a list divided.

Having taken multiple visits to Uruguay in the last few years, I can attest to the fact that even a small country with an economy a fraction of the size of America can, at least on the surface, make us look not so special. As the U.S. willfully outsources its commerce sector to Jeff Bezos, small downtowns and suburban malls alike continue to thrive in Uruguay.  As the U.S. spends twice as much money on health care as any other country in the world while still closing a quarter of its rural hospitals and clinics, Uruguay manages to have universal coverage with private insurance supplements that cost pennies on the dollar and serve every small city with Urgent Care equivalents that are now two-hour drives for Americans in comparably sized towns.  And you can buy a new car in Uruguay for what it costs to replace your air conditioning unit in the United States.

A long-time online contact of mine who currently lives in Japan but grew up in Louisiana have served up a similar diagnosis after a decade in the land of the rising sun.  He's not at all dismissive about his adopted country's challenges and drawbacks, but has concluded that average-income Japanese from every income demographic are able to live with much more stability there than in the U.S.  He frequently brings up with his working-class brother in Lafayette, Louisiana, earning a healthy $22 an hour at a blue-collar job but still coming up short of financial stability or convention "American dream" aspirations on every metric.

It's reasonable for people to dismiss these anecdotes as whitewashing the downsides of life in the other countries, but it's likewise reasonable to dismiss the unconditional supremacy of America based on footage of European visitors in awe over the size of frozen pizzas available at our Costco stores.  We've been subjected to some of that with the documentation of foreign visitors arriving here for the World Cup these last few weeks, but it's a good bet that the visitors wealthy enough to fly overseas and buy tickets for World Cup games will return to their country or origin when the World Cup is over, prioritizing their pensions and universal health care over larger frozen pizzas.

Without question, however, most countries overseas have their own challenges, both superficial and systemic.  If I was stuck in a 400-year-old stone house without air conditioning during Paris and Berlin's heat wave last month, I'd probably surrender my narrative questioning American greatness somewhere around 2 a.m. lying on my sweat-soaked mattress pad.  Similarly, the demographic cliffs coupled with unsustainable welfare states in most of our economic competitors in Europe and East Asia present no good solutions.  When your options are either enduring rapid aging and depopulation with no strategy for rising birth rates and a coolness toward immigration or cultural change, as is the case with Japan, or willfully importing millions of violent African Muslims with the hopes of assimilation and sustained economic competitiveness, as is the case in most of western Europe, it becomes clear that the global community's pending challenges are at least as intimidating as those of the United States, if not more so.

Still, if there's a tiebreaker in regards to where in the world will offer the highest quality of life in the next 50 years as opposed to the last 250 years, it's hard to ignore the pending artificial intelligence revolution and the tea leaves available for reading in the revolution's early stages.  As discussed before, it's impossible to know the magnitude of disruption awaiting the global economy as we turn this page, but the warning signs about the devaluing of human capital are stark and imposing.  Or I should say, they're stark and imposing if you're not part of the American investor class....the same people who brought us private equity and NAFTA, and now stand poised to consolidate an even more dangerous share of the economy's value into their own accounts while passing along the higher electric bills to the very people being displaced and financially destroyed.

To be sure, the "creative destruction" brought upon by AI will be felt across the globe, but everything about the current trajectory of technology and our nation's history of embracing short-term disruption for alleged long-term benefits suggests America will be at the tip of the spear.  It'll be our tech barons who become the first five trillionaires in global history.  It'll be the same 10% of our investor class population already responsible for more than half of all consumer spending who will see that share rise to 75% in a generation.  And it'll be our income-earning population who will face pink slips and home foreclosures earlier and much more aggressively and without apology than our NATO and trans-Pacific allies.  As most of our competitors are likely to scramble to avoid incurring wrecking on their people, it's quite easy to imagine their governments offering helping hands and not difficult at all imagining the American government offering nothing but a middle finger.

To be sure, this has long been a point of distinction between the U.S. and other advanced economies.  You can say it stems from endemic greed or an outsized willingness to accept risk for higher long-term reward, but the bottom line is that the United States has long been okay with shafting the very people most likely to wave its flag in commemoration of the 250th birthday.  Our national track record of shrugging off a notion of responsibility for the well-being of our people will really be put to the test if the AI revolution materializes to even a fraction of the extent many are predicting.  If we don't pass this test as a country, it's a pretty safe bet there will be even less enthusiasm for widespread national celebration on July 4, 2076, when the nation turns 300.