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On a Subdued 250th Birthday, Is There a U.S.”We the People” Anymore?

Photograph Source: G. Edward Johnson – CC BY 4.0

Why 2026 feels so different from 1976

Not all birthdays are welcome. They can signify aspirations unachieved even as the window to reach them is closing. For those of us getting up in years, they can call out how old, creaky bodies are not functioning quite as well as they used to. That our departure is closer than our arrival, and the clock seems to be speeding up. Here I’m speaking from personal experience.

The 250th birthday of the United States seems to have many of the same attributes. High hopes for a society built on justice for all are retreating in the face of advancing oligarchy, surging racism and widening divisions over what, after all, are our aspirations. The institutions that were supposed to provide a balance that stemmed tendencies to tyranny – courts, the Congress, a free press – are sputtering ineffectively like an engine that needs an overhaul. The constitutional order is showing its age. While nations transcend the lifetime of a single individual, they too have lifespans, and a sense of mortality hangs over the U.S., with talk of civil war and breakup prominent in a way that would have been inconceivable a couple of decades ago.

It is a subdued, even melancholy birthday, despite reaching the milestone of a quarter millennium since independence was declared in Philadelphia July 4, 1776. A pathetically attended and poorly conceived “Great American State Fair” on the D.C. Mall, a slimy Reflecting Pool, a White House with one wing demolished, and another area torn up to host a cage match in scenes that even Mike Judge would have had trouble imagining when he made Idiocracy in the early 2000s. Life is not only imitating art – It is exceeding it. Ironically, in a nation going backwards on climate, July 4 parades in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia are cancelled due to extreme heat fed by climate-twisting pollution.

It is quite a contrast with the bicentennial 50 years ago. I recall it well. Having just graduated from college, I returned to the family home near Philadelphia, the hearth of the republic. The mood was celebratory and upbeat. The U.S. had just seen the first presidential resignation, that of Richard Nixon in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal. The system seemed to be functioning against overbearing executive power. It had also finally extricated itself from Vietnam, the war that tore the country apart, albeit only ending with the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. That a massive protest movement had helped force U.S. withdrawal gave a sense democracy was still working. To this day wars involving mass casualties of U.S. soldiers are seen as unacceptable. After a tumultuous decade, things seemed to be working out.

Fifty years later, the situation is almost diametrically opposite. The Trump Administration is boldly exerting executive power in a way that would cause Nixon to shudder. It has dismembered and gutted agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Centers for Disease Control, refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. The Supreme Court has largely allowed this, undermining the most fundamental power of Congress, that of the purse, while the Republican-controlled Congress has basically rolled over. A balance among the three branches of government, long drifting toward the executive, has tilted toward presidential tyranny in a way that will be hard to reverse.

Meanwhile, a Supreme Court ruled by a fallacious doctrine of the unitary executive, in which all executive branch power vests in the president, started off the week leading up the the birthday by giving the presidency king-like powers. It is perhaps the most radical increase in presidential power in a century. In Trump v. Slaughter issued June 29, the court upheld Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter despite having no grounds under law. The court thus undermined the independence of regulatory agencies, giving the president power that will undermine their ability to counter corporate crime. Slaughter was a strong voice for regulating AI and keeping data private.

In terms of war, in 1976 with........

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