Throughout our history, Americans of all stripes have crafted and recrafted the country’s origin story, fervently recommitting themselves to our nationalist mythology—and using it for their own purposes. Anniversaries have long been natural showcases for these narratives of continuity: at the centennial in 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia to celebrate the past but used the event to unveil the futuristic new steam engine; that same year, suffragists revised their Declaration of Sentiments, a radical document advocating women’s rights that was also an homage to the country’s foundational text.
And so it should be astonishing, even to the most jaded or irate Americans, that so many are sitting out our 250th birthday party this July, rejecting both the obligatory ritual and the occasion for devotion or reclamation that the anniversary has represented in the past. In 2026, in the era of Donald Trump, it now seems that the tradition of consecrating our origins is a spent force.
This is in stark contrast with the bicentennial—the country’s last major birthday. 1976 was not an obvious time for patriotic celebration. Richard Nixon’s executive malfeasance and the failed militarism of the Vietnam War were fresh in memory. The generational revolt that dominated the sixties had ebbed, and the country was stuck in an interregnum—between the end of the New Deal order and the start of the neoliberal era. Yet back then, nostalgia seemed capable of meeting the moment: Americans observing the 200th anniversary turned enthusiastically to the founding. As the legal scholar Aziz Rana has noted, there was a “widespread public desire to close the book on the recent past and on critical interrogations of the actual national experience.” In 1976, celebrations of the deeper past were everywhere, from arts and educational programming to pure pageantry; virtually no American could have escaped them. And even many critics of the country seemed to share a hankering for an American consensus grounded in origins. In her censorious bicentennial address, the philosopher Hannah Arendt dwelled on the breakdown of recent years but implored Americans to live up to their “glorious beginnings two hundred years ago.”