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America Retold: 250 years of the United States and the world. Read more from the series.

Welcome to FP Free Week. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, our entire site is completely unlocked this week only. Enjoy the article.

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.

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.

It’s not just that the current U.S. president has, predictably enough, turned what should be a grand national display of unity into the Donald Trump show. In a Truth Social post, the president has promised “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” on July 4.

Nor is the problem only that Trump is attempting to reduce one of the world’s oldest constitutional democracies to a totalitarian-style personality cult, ignoring legal constraints in nearly everything he does—including launching wars. Among many other abuses, the president is seeking to prosecute his political opponents, and he is openly enriching his family with the sort of corruption that the Founders would have considered impeachable many times over.

The more disturbing question is whether the U.S. body politic is seriously ill in a way that far exceeds anything Trump has yet done or might still do. Washington is wracked by mistrust and contempt across party lines, and confidence in public institutions is at or near all-time lows. Neither political party seems capable of addressing that problem—and the gulf between them only grows, as evidenced by recent primary-race results that suggest Democrats are as much in the grip of the far left as Republicans remain enthralled to the MAGA far right.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (third from left) joins progressive congressional candidates Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier at a campaign rally at King’s Theater in New York City on June 18.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

As legal analyst Sarah Isgur points out in her new book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court, the Supreme Court may be the only branch of government left that the Founders would even recognize as their handiwork—yet even the high court has lost the faith of the public as so many of its decisions appear ideologically driven.

The drop-off in public confidence has been precipitous. In January 2000, Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country was a near-record 69 percent, according to Gallup. This January,........

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