America Is Suffering an Identity Crisis

People often have mixed feelings about their birthdays, especially as they age. Countries can experience that too. For better or worse, America is due for a big birthday party: July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—our national semiquincentennial, in the awkward Latinate construction, or “semiquin” for short. In an ideal world, it would be a moment of commemoration and celebration as well as a chance to reflect on national history. But so far, the semiquin is shaping up as an embarrassingly accurate reflection of America’s identity crisis.

Until recently, America250, the federal commission charged with planning for 2026, was mired in organizational infighting and countless disputes, including over funding shortages and the distribution of patronage. Authorized while Barack Obama was president, the commission started work under Donald Trump, changed course under Joe Biden, and will spend most of 2025 answering to who knows which chief executive. But the challenges of 2026 extend well beyond logistics, appropriations, and leadership. How do you throw a grand national party when the country seems unable to agree on first principles or basic facts? Should 2026 be a rah-rah festival or a sober history lesson? What should the non-MAGA component of the American populace—that is, at least half of it— bring to such a patriotic occasion? Should it bring anything at all?

[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]

Former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, now the head of America250, still believes that the country can pull off something meaningful. The child of a Mexican-born single mother, she recalls the 1976 bicentennial as a moment when she began to feel “pride in what it means to be American.” She wants 2026 to offer the same sort of experience, tailored to a new generation.

And perhaps it will. As Rios pointed out when we spoke, 1976 was itself hardly a moment of political harmony; the Vietnam War and Watergate had just crashed to a close, right on the heels of the turbulent 1960s. Nor, for that matter, was American society especially peaceable at the time of the sesquicentennial, in 1926, when the Ku Klux Klan was regularly parading through Washington, D.C.; or at the time of the centennial, in 1876, when the country was fighting over the future of Reconstruction; or at the time of the semicentennial, in 1826, when a controversial populist leader, Andrew Jackson, had just lost a close election and vowed to return for a second go-round.

What seems different about the present moment is that the very idea of trying to tell some sort of national story—much less one with patriotic overtones—has itself been called into question. That’s especially true among the people who purport to care most deeply about an honest reckoning with the American past. For generations, liberals leaned into a story of gradual, if uneven, progress toward unfulfilled ideals. But even they no longer believe that the narrative of progress holds the power it once did.

There is, of course, no national narrative that will magically unite America; true national consensus has never existed and won’t suddenly materialize now. But during past celebrations—50, 100, 150 years ago—the people excluded from America’s mythic narrative managed to leverage the nation’s symbols and rhetoric and put alternative stories before the public. They believed that the Declaration of Independence and the flag could be useful and inspirational.

At stake in 2026 is whether a divided country can find common symbols worth embracing. But also at stake is whether those who take a critical view of America’s past will step up proudly and say not only what they stand against, but what they stand for in the American story.

There was once a standard template for how to celebrate a centennial: Declare greatness and throw a big party, preferably in Philadelphia. Over the past two centuries, this model has yielded its fair share of jingoism, along with fireworks and flags and cannon blasts. But it has also provided an opportunity for reexamining American history and for raising questions about the country’s future.

The first attempt at a national party in Philadelphia, during the “jubilee” year of 1826, did not quite come off. As one local newspaper noted, “The apathy of the citizens” seemed to be the defining feature of that particular July 4. The anniversary nonetheless occasioned at least a bit of national self-reflection. In early 1824, anticipating the semicentennial, President James Monroe invited the Marquis de Lafayette, the teenage French hero of the American Revolution, to return to the U.S. and take a look at what he had wrought. With much hoopla, Lafayette visited every state as well as the nation’s capital. But he also expressed horror at certain aspects of American life, especially the South’s ongoing embrace of slavery. During a visit to the Virginia plantation of former President James Madison, Lafayette pointedly reminded him of “the right that all men, without exception, have to liberty.”

Fifty years later, on the other side of the devastating Civil War, Philadelphia tried again. This time, it succeeded. With an eye to the world’s fairs then popular in Europe, the city was determined to put on “the greatest international exposition that the world had ever witnessed,” as the historian Thomas H. Keels writes—albeit an exposition with a distinctly American stamp. The nation was engaged in a fierce debate over race, political partisanship, women’s rights, and the growing concentration of capital. All the more reason, organizers thought, to try to get everyone together to celebrate what there was to like about America.

They started planning a festival for 1876 that was ultimately attended by some 20 percent of the American population. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, those millions of visitors found an entire mini-city constructed to house and display the marvels of the modern world. At the Main Building, ticket-holders encountered their first telephone, courtesy of the rising young inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Thomas Edison sent his latest inventions too. France contributed the upraised right arm and torch of a proposed Statue of Liberty; visitors could ascend stairs to the top for just a dime. The sheer number of gigantic expo buildings—249 in all—testified to the organizers’ outsize ambitions.

This frenzy of activity and investment sent an unmistakable message: Despite the Civil War, America was full of energy and on the rise. But the scale of the spectacle masked important absences. Although 26 states built their own pavilions, most southern states opted out. Black citizens were banned from the expo altogether. When Frederick Douglass, an invited guest, tried to take his seat on the dais at the opening ceremony, guards blocked him until a U.S. senator intervened. The grim politics of 1876 would soon result in a violent and contested presidential election, and with it the end of Reconstruction in the South.

If the expo did little to renew American commitments to equality, it did provide an occasion for certain excluded groups to restate their claims to full American citizenship, using the Declaration as inspiration. On July 4, Susan B. Anthony showed up uninvited at the Independence Hall ceremonies, flanked by fellow suffragists, to read the Declaration of the Rights of Women. In Washington, a group of Black men produced their own Negro Declaration of Independence.

By 1926, the political terrain looked different. White women could finally vote; most Black men and women in the South could not. The U.S. had been through another war, this time in Europe, and had come out of it disillusioned. At home, during the war, the country had jailed thousands of dissenters. The Ku Klux Klan had built a powerful constituency, especially within the Democratic Party. And the country had slammed its doors shut to most immigrants.

The organizers of the sesquicentennial celebration nonetheless doubled down on the model of a big party in Philadelphia. An estimated 6 million people showed up—not as many as the organizers had hoped for, but still a substantial number. The marvels on display were thoroughly of their moment: on the lowbrow end, Jell-O and Maxwell House coffee; on the high, Kandinsky and Matisse.

The exposition was billed as a “Festival of Peace and Progress,” but like its predecessors, it could not help but reflect the political tensions of its time. When the KKK put in a bid for a special Klan day at the fair, the mayor of Philadelphia said yes before saying no. The fair itself was largely segregated, though Philadelphia’s Black community mobilized to ensure at least modest access and participation. Under pressure, the festival added the future civil-rights icon A. Philip Randolph as a last-minute speaker to represent the Black community and share the platform with government officials at the opening ceremony. Randolph delivered a searing account of how the nation had betrayed its promise of equality for Black citizens.

Philadelphia tried to give it one more go 50 years later—for the bicentennial, in 1976. As the big birthday approached, though, many observers started to question whether the standard model really made sense anymore. “Is a World’s Fair-type Bicentennial festival appropriate for a country wracked with social, racial, and environmental agonies?” the writer Ada Louise Huxtable asked in The New York Times. By 1976, President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the mounting traumas of the 1970s had helped to yield a scaled-back, privatized, and decentralized celebration. There were some old-fashioned touches, such as the American Freedom Train, which conveyed the nation’s founding documents and historical treasures from city to city, and the cheery tall ships that sailed between ports. But corporate promotion rather than civic purpose carried the day. Branded products included a 1776-themed tampon disposal bag marketed with the slogan “200 Years of Freedom.”

Critics pushed back against what they described as the “Buycentennial.” Some of the most theatrical resistance came from an ad hoc group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, organized by the New Left activist (and future social theorist) Jeremy Rifkin. The group held rallies at sites such as Lexington and Concord, all the while claiming to be acting in the true spirit of ’76. Rifkin thought it crucial that the American left engage with rather than reject the narratives and symbols of the nation’s founding. Other groups, including the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, sought to ensure that at least some programming would reflect the Black experience. They advocated for a more diverse and inclusive account of the nation’s history—not one American story, but many.

At least some of that vision began to be realized in the years during and after the bicentennial. What 1976 may have lacked in spectacle, it ultimately made up for with quiet investment in the infrastructure of public history, much of it attuned to bringing overdue attention to marginalized groups. According to a study by the American Association of State and Local History, some 40 percent of all historical institutions in existence by 1984—museums, living-history sites, local preservation societies, and the like—were created during the bicentennial era.

In the summer of 2016, while most of the country was transfixed by the presidential race pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, made up of private citizens, members of Congress, and federal officials. The commission was given the job of overseeing a national 2026 initiative.

Its leaders took their time getting started, and Trump’s White House offered little guidance beyond the implicit admonishment to make American history great again. In Philadelphia, a group of local boosters took matters into their own hands. They called themselves USA250, a name barely distinguishable from that of the federal commission, and set out to make the case for a “blockbuster festival.”

USA250 had no shortage of ambitious, expensive ideas. Beginning in 2025, according to one scheme, roving caravans would crisscross the country, showcasing the best of American history, art, food, and music. In 2026, the caravans would converge on Philadelphia. The budget that the organizers imagined was a symbolic $20.26 billion. However, there were no longer many takers for this kind of effort, even in Philadelphia. The arrival of COVID in early 2020—and the fear of super-spreader events it engendered—dealt another blow to the prospect of a big in-person bash.

As for the federal commission, it swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions. In June 2022, Meta pulled out of a $10 million sponsorship deal, reportedly owing to the commission’s “leadership dysfunction.” Around the same time, several female executives quit the commission and filed suit. They described a Gilded Age level of “cronyism, self-dealing, mismanagement of funds, potentially unlawful contracting practices and wasteful spending”—not to mention sex discrimination and a toxic work environment. In the midst of the meltdown, the Biden White House stepped in to appoint Rosie Rios as the new commission chair. By then, the clock was down to less than four years.

One of the federal commission’s signature initiatives, America’s Stories, is radically decentralized—less a top-down master plan than a national Instagram feed. Its website encourages Americans to send in personal reflections about the country’s past, present, and future in the form of songs, poems, personal essays, photographs, audio recordings, and videos. The stated goal is to create “the most inclusive commemoration in our history,” one in which “no story is too small” to matter. Rios views the emphasis on social media, as well as on diversity of experience, as a way to attract constituencies that might otherwise look elsewhere—notably young people, who often seem to think that the past has little to offer.

R. Scott Stephenson, the CEO of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, describes the federal strategy as a “StoryCorps model” of historic commemoration. He worries that such a decentralized approach won’t rise to the moment. “If it’s just about everybody telling their story,” he asks, what’s to bring everybody together? His concerns are echoed by many in the public-history sphere. At the moment, though, almost nobody sees any prospect for a single big in-person celebration reminiscent of the extravaganzas of the past.

Nobody, that is, except for Donald Trump. Alone among major political figures, Trump has seized the early momentum to offer a grand, centralized semiquincentennial vision. In May 2023, he released a campaign video introducing the idea of a Salute to America 250, the “most spectacular birthday party” the country has ever known. Though billed as a serious celebration of the world’s oldest democracy, the plan contains no shortage of reality-TV touches. One proposal is a Patriot Games, in which high-school athletes would be pitted against one another in interstate Olympics-style competition. Another is the National Garden of American Heroes, a long-standing pet project in which Trump hopes to select “the greatest Americans of all time” to be honored in a Washington statuary park. The centerpiece of the celebration would be the Great American State Fair, an 1876 expo-style gathering to be held in Iowa. “It’ll be something!” he promised.

The video’s release produced plenty of critical commentary from MAGA skeptics. But, to paraphrase Trump, the Great American State Fair would at least be something: a focused, national, in-person commemoration with a clear message about where the country has been and where it is going. Whatever its other virtues may be, the individualized, localized, “invitation” approach evades any such nation-defining mission.

The problem is, many Americans don’t know what they’d be celebrating. On the left, rejecting traditional patriotism has become de rigueur: by kneeling for the national anthem, dismissing the Founders as enslavers, and expressing unease at the prospect of flying an American flag. Seeing left or liberal activists deploying the images and ideas of the revolution for their own purposes is far less common than it used to be. One consequence may be that many people who care about a critical, nuanced view of the American past will simply opt out of 2026. If that happens, who will be left in charge of defining what founding-era ideals such as “independence,” “revolution,” “We the People,” and “the general Welfare” are supposed to mean in the 21st century?

The task of identifying a usable past is of course much easier for Trump and his MAGA coalition than for those who seek a true reckoning with the country’s history of injustice. Trump has a clear view and a simple message: that only certain people count, that the past was better than the present, and that U.S. history was a tale of triumph until roughly the 1960s.

Trump’s views are embodied in the work of a group called the 1776 Commission, appointed near the end of his presidency. Its creation (and name) was partly a reaction to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, with its emphasis on slavery and the Black experience. It was also a bid to put the Trump stamp on the founding legacy. “As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again,” the commission’s report stated—at the same time promoting its own exclusionary and distorted vision of the past, one in which the Founders would obviously have opposed progressive social policy, affirmative action, and all forms of identity politics.

Professional historians have scorned The 1776 Report as right-wing propaganda rather than anything resembling actual history. But scholars have often hesitated to offer an alternative national narrative in its place. By and large, they do not view themselves as being in the business of nationalism or patriotism; their mission is mostly to tell the truth as they see it. Within academia, the nation-state is itself often seen as a suspect form of social organization and power with a dubious track record.

But in this moment of democratic crisis—and democratic possibility—there is something dissatisfying about sidestepping the challenge of 2026, with its implicit call to create a usable but thoughtful national narrative. During Trump’s term in office, the historian Jill Lepore chastised fellow academics for abandoning the project of a national story just when it was needed most. “Writing national history creates plenty of problems,” she argued. “But not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse.”

Coming up with an honest but coherent vision for 2026 is a genuine challenge. For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths. As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.  

[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]

The fact is, Americans have a pretty good origin story, as such things go: centrally, a revolution on behalf of human equality, despite all of its flaws and blind spots and limits. “On the subject of equality,” the political theorist Danielle Allen has argued, “no more important sentence has ever been written” than Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” For its moment—and even for ours—it was a bold and revolutionary statement.

Movements for equality, racial justice, and human rights have long taken advantage of that legacy. The abolitionists of the 1830s invented the Liberty Bell as a symbol of human freedom, seeing in its inscription to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” a useful link to both the past and the future. The labor radicals of the late 19th century claimed Jefferson and Thomas Paine along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Finding a stake in the American story has always been more difficult for those deliberately excluded from the Declaration’s vision: women and sexual minorities, Black communities, Indigenous nations. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous address asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer was that it marked a day of mourning, not celebration. Still, Douglass seized the moment to pressure white citizens to live up to their “saving principles,” noting that the Founding Fathers understood that “there is always a remedy for oppression,” even if they did not follow that insight to its logical conclusion.

What we are witnessing now, with respect to America’s 250th, is thus a strange turn of events. To varying degrees, abolitionists, suffragists, labor leaders, and civil-rights activists were willing and able to harness America’s mythic rhetoric and stated principles to advance their causes. They embraced and invented cherished national symbols. And yet today, many who profess to believe in human equality and social justice seem to have little use for the American origin story and its most venerable words and figures.

Why not reclaim them? The American revolution was, after all, a revolution—not in every respect the one you or I might have wanted, but an enormous stride toward equality. And revolution itself is an inherently malleable concept, made to be renewed and redefined with each generation. One need not wear a tricorne hat or fly the stars and stripes in order to celebrate the unlikely moment when a group of private citizens organized, dreamed big, and defeated the world’s most powerful empire.

Though, now that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag? Despite today’s political optics, neither one actually belongs to the devotees of MAGA rallies. Perhaps those on the left can at least seize the moment to open up the conversation over what, if anything, really makes America great—and to teach some actual history. If they don’t, the meaning of 2026—and of American patriotism—will be decided for them.