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 Vietnam finally settled, the U.S. appeared to be beyond the era of undeclared wars and conflicts with no seeming end. The experience had been just too searing, too divisive. But over the years since Vietnam the U.S. has slid into war after war on flimsy pretexts. Two wars in Iraq, one over a Kuwait invasion that could have been solved diplomatically, the second over weapons of mass destruction that were not there. An Afghanistan war where the Taliban would have handed over Bin Laden if the U.S. had supplied evidence he was connected to 9-11. Instead the U.S. opted for a forever war that ended only to see the Taliban sweep back into power.
The Iran War shredded even those thin boundaries. Unlike those other wars, including Vietnam, there was not even a Congressional authorization that might have provided a fig leaf. It is a war started by presidential decision alone. Though Congress has since by narrow majorities passed a War Powers Act resolution to limit action, it is uncertain how binding this will actually be. Meanwhile a populace opposed to the war from the start is too cynical to take to the streets in mass numbers.
Thus, unlike 1976, when the U.S. still had a functioning constitutional system, today it has broken down in the face of nearly unbridled presidential power in the hands of the most reckless individual to ever occupy the White House, and a Supreme Court intent on feeding the fires. An overwhelming popular majority devoted to fundamental reform and restoration of democracy against the rising power of money could conceivably turn this around. But for the moment the system seems broken beyond repair.
That rising power is the backdrop for all this. It is seen in the Gini Coefficient, a measure of economic inequality. The lower, the more equal. At 35.6 in 1976 it was heading for a historic low for the decades after World War II, to hit an absolute low of 34.7 in 1980. That trend abruptly reversed with the election of Ronald Reagan. Dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy combined with corporate deregulation put the neoliberal era in full gear. By 2024 Gini reached 41.8. The 250th birthday of the U.S. is tremendously more unequal than the 200th, intensifying racial divisions and making the election of a Trump far more possible.
Closing the golden door
Also in the week the U.S. celebrates its 250th, the court issued decisions that make it more difficult for asylum seekers to enter the U.S., and easier to deport those who are here. And in an even more chilling decision, only 6 of 9 justices voted to uphold birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, thus reversing Trump’s executive order denying it. Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch voted the other way, even though the 14thAmendment to the Constitution clearly states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Three justices who are commissioned with interpreting the Constitution were ready to overturn what it clearly says, again expanding presidential power – a travesty.
Nations are held together by common narratives. Emma Lazarus, a Jewish woman who had helped Jews escape from pogroms in Europe, summed one of the keystone U.S. narratives in her poem, “The New Colossus,” written to help raise money to erect the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, now inscribed there.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The door seems to be closing even as the aspirations of a nation Lazarus described as a “New Colossus” seem to shrink. With white people making up a declining share of the population, there is a sense too many coming in the door are just a bit too wretched. That is despite the fact they are reviving communities where many whites have departed, and doing work most citizens are unwilling to do. Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have settled under the protected status just undermined by the court, is a case in point. In decline for years, the new labor force created a boom which may now be reversed.
The U.S. has always had a nativist strain. When one element of my ethnicity, Irish Catholics, started to pour into the U.S. in the middle 1800s, they were regarded as subhuman beasts by the prevailing white Anglo-Saxon population. Italians, another side of my ethnicity, began arriving in mass numbers in the late 1800s. They were seen as not quite white. Even as late as the 1930s, my olive-skinned father was called the N word by his classmates. As with newer groups, Irish and Italians were not going to assimilate, it was charged. Of course, they did, as will newer groups. The U.S. is not a melting pot, but it is a fine mixing bowl. Yet this basic element of our national story seems to be going out the window. Many of us just no longer believe it.
Trust lost while states move apart
If many U.S. of Americans don’t much like the new arrivals, we are losing trust in each other. In a Pew Research Center Survey of 25 countries released in March, the U.S. was the only one in which a majority rated their fellow citizens as bad in terms of ethics and morality, 53% to be precise. Another Pew survey done in 2024 found “only 22% of U.S. adults said they “trust the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time.” People have a sense that it is serving powerful special interests while leaving out those of ordinary people, a more than fair impression.
When more than half the people say their fellows are bad, and only slightly more than one in five trust the institution that is supposed to unite us, we have to ask a basic question. Is the U.S. a “we” anymore? Is there a “we” who can understand ourselves as “the people?” Or is the U.S. simply a set of regions and cultural groups going in strongly divergent directions? When states such as Texas, Florida and Tennessee pass increasingly reactionary legislation – Tennessee for instance bars abortion even in cases of rape and incest – while states such as Washington, Minnesota and New York move more and more progressive, where is the “we” in this?
Chatham House, Britain’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2024 asked, “Could the United States be headed for a national divorce?.” And along the lines of the 1860s conflict. It gave the following evidence:
“Of the 15 US states with the most restrictive abortion laws, all voted for Trump in 2020 and seven were originally in the Confederacy.
“Of the 21 states with the most permissive gun laws in 2023, 19 voted for Trump, and six were in the Confederacy.
“Of the 19 states that enacted laws in 2022 making it harder to vote, 14 voted for Trump and seven were in the Confederacy.
“And of the 23 states that enacted legislation in 2023 imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care, transgender participation in school sports, school instruction touching on LBGTQ issues and related matters, 22 voted for Trump and nine were in the Confederacy.”
Chatham went on to report, “Half (54 pecent) of self-described strong Republicans in America now think it is very or somewhat likely there will be a US civil war within the next decade. Four in ten (40 per cent) strong Democrats agree.” It accurately forecast, “The outcome of the 2024 US election is unlikely to resolve these differences. In fact, it may deepen them, whoever becomes president.”
This voice of the British establishment concluded, “America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States. There are effectively two Americas – and they are at war. They are fighting over social, political and constitutional issues, and over what role the US should play in the world.”
The drift apart began around 60 years ago when trust in national institutions began to crumble. Before the mid-1960s most people believed the federal government and leaders would generally do the right thing. But by around 1965 that was breached. Increasing skepticism and distrust were evident in polls. That was two years after the assassination of John Kennedy, in the wake of a Warren Commission report that many already regarded as a coverup for a conspiracy. Rioting broke out in L.A.’s Black Watts neighborhood. Johnson was ramping up U.S. troop deployments in Vietnam he had promised not to make in the previous year’s election. Since then, U.S. people have increasingly moved to communities and states where they feel more ideologically at home. Bill Bishop told the story in his 2009 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.
The last major U.S. societal reform wave came in the 1960s, the Great Society programs that gave us Medicare, fundamental civil rights guarantees, and public broadcasting, among others. The early 1970s followed with a surge of basic environmental laws that remain the fundamental framework of environmental protection in the U.S. Massive grassroots movements made these waves possible. Today all those gains are under pressure, in some cases such as the Voting Rights Act, reversed. Since that time, major national reform efforts have been sparse and partial. Jimmy Carter undertook a significant energy program largely torn up by Reagan. A similar energy program passed under Biden has likewise been mostly pushed back under Trump. Obamacare, one of the few social program expansions of recent decades, passed as a strongly partisan measure and is now being defunded. The conclusion that clearly emerges is that the U.S. is too divided to do big things together anymore. The system is too broken to do what governing orders are supposed to do, ensure the common good.
Where we can reclaim “we the people”
In discussions about the U.S., the word “we” is often misused. When it becomes a broad generalization about what the U.S. does as a whole, it is often not an accurate description. I know, for instance, “we” did not bomb Iran. That was the choice of a small group of militarists driven by interest group politics. “We” is valid when talking about how people need to come together to make change and further the common good. But is there a U.S. of American “we the people” capable of that? Or are “we”simply too divided into culturally clashing groups and regions to ever see that happen? The evidence on this sad and subdued quarter-millennium birthday tilts toward the latter.
That leaves our states and cities as the places to rebuild our sense of “we the people.” Closer to home, we can more readily understand and come to agreement on what constitutes the common good. It is where we can be enough of a people to join together and achieve it. Across the U.S., even as politics stagnates and divides at the national level, local communities and progressive state governments are forwarding initiatives to address some of our most difficult problems. Enacting just taxation. Creating affordable housing. Building up mass transit. Expanding social services for the most vulnerable. Ramping up renewable energy. Through public policies and civic action, communities are revitalizing themselves.
I return to this thought often, which I characterize as building the future in place. It is the strategy for all seasons, the best route to prepare for all outcomes. If the U.S. is to come back together, heal its divisions and renew itself at a national level, the process will grow from the grassroots. If it continues to prove impossible to move toward needed changes at the national level, we can nonetheless pursue significant reforms in localities and states. Under the federal system, they possess significant powers across many fields. If the U.S. goes into breakdown or breakup mode, strong communities and state governments will be best positioned to absorb the blows and carry on.
I honestly don’t know, here at year 250 of the United States, whether it will survive to year 300. I do know the only conceivable route to achieve the common good, to be a “we the people,” begins in our home places, our communities and bioregions, our states and cities, whatever is coming.
This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.
