Americans, it appears, are in a foul mood.
In a recent Gallup poll, 76% of US respondents said they were dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the United States at this time.” An NBC news poll released on June 14 found that just 38% said they believe the nation’s best years lie ahead, and 64% in a June 15 Reuters/Ipsos poll said American democracy was in danger of failing.
What a shame, you might well feel, that America should mark its 250th birthday, a genuinely august historic occasion, at a moment when so many are dispirited, even disgusted, by the current state of our union. Claims the country has gone to the dogs have taken on a new bitterness, even if Americans of different tribes don’t agree on which dogs they mean.
But we’ve been here before. I’m probably the only member of the GZERO team with vivid memories of 1976, the moment of abject national misery in which we celebrated our bicentennial.
At the time, Americans, facing the reality that we’d just lost a war for the first time, also confronted secret audiotapes that proved our president was a liar. (My father was at least as appalled to learn that Richard Nixon regularly used foul language in the Oval Office). Newly emboldened Middle East oil barons had sent our gasoline prices surging, demonstrating in the process that mighty Washington could do little about it.
If there’s a great difference between then and now, it’s in the White House. Second-term Donald Trump seems more ambitious by the hour. Gerald Ford, the only US chief executive never elected president or vice president, was a pleasant man who would serve just 29 months as Leader of the Free World and forever after as an Accident of History.
But the patterns continually running through America’s political past are more prominent than they might appear. Did you know that future president William McKinley tried to use a tariff to force Canada to become the 45th US state? That Theodore Roosevelt sought to add distant islands to US territory for reasons others found hard to grasp? That both Woodrow Wilson, who created the League of Nations, and Warren Harding, who worked to keep us out of it, ran for president under “America First” banners? That in 1926 Calvin Coolidge marked the nation’s 150th birthday with a steel-cage martial arts bout on the White House lawn? (I may have made that last one up.)
But in 2026, something feels different. Trump has led the American superpower into one form or another of conflict with just about everyone. He has imposed tariffs on allies, enemies, and countries we rarely think about. Friends are called freeloaders. Foes are challenged, then unchallenged, then challenged again.
America has become erratic, and those watching from abroad aren’t sure where to place their bets. Will the upcoming midterms render Trump lame? Who will redesign the presidency next? The isolationist vice president? The more traditionalist lead diplomat? Another compromise(d) Democratic centrist or an eat-the-oligarchs populist of the Left? And if Washington veers abruptly at the next elections, how long before it races yet again down unmapped roads?
These questions can’t yet be answered, of course, which compels allies to hedge and invites rivals to test. That’s a big reason that geopolitics seems to have lost so many of its guardrails.
Yet, America’s changeability remains a crucial strength. The nation survived its bitter bicentennial and the toxically paranoid 1970s. The great Soviet rival collapsed just 15 years later under the crush of its internal contradictions, even as America’s innovative energies and irrepressibly dynamic society kept the nation’s chronic political dysfunction from bringing down a house that sometimes seems divided against itself.
It can happen again. America’s importance lies not in some imagined history as a “Shining City on a Hill,” but in the ever-present possibility that its capacity for change might one day make it better than it is or ever was.
In her 1981 book Practicing History, historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that, “If the great question, whether it is still possible to reconcile democracy with social order and individual liberty, is to find a positive answer, it will be here.” The patriotic part of me believes that promise remains possible.
And that’s reason enough to light a firecracker on Saturday.
